Review: “absolute animal” by Rachel DeWoskin
absolute animal by Rachel DeWoskin
The University of Chicago Press
80 pp.; $19.00
In Rachel DeWoskin’s newest collection, absolute animal, trees snap in half and leave behind a “quiet intense enough to make us listen, slow down.” DeWoskin’s range is wide and multivalent, and her poems listen across form, language, and place. I have returned to them again and again during my first semester at divinity school, and among future chaplains, ministers, and mediators, DeWoskin has helped me listen across registers. absolute animal is filled with sestinas, split sonnets, and translations of ancient Chinese poets; the variations are apt for a collection whose references span “tick atari basement aliens” and Li Bai’s “waving moon.” DeWoskin's gaze is one that listens. She brings each of her subjects into a "moment of closeness" with the body, with beloveds, and with the often violent world.
This collection takes up motherhood, passing time, and environmental devastation, all while refusing to forgo beauty (though “beauty is dangerous: whales, spiders, stars—”). In these poems, there are moments where even the foxes cry out for their mothers, where the speaker dresses carefully for the oncologist in a pearl choker, where a lullaby sings: “whoever tells you not to cry / is sleeping with an open eye.” Illness (covid, cancer, heart disease) intersects with pleasure; this intersection occurs not just within the speaker’s body, but within the bodies of the poems themselves. There is the brutality of disease, yes, but also a 1980’s Heathkit TV, lipstick, and hot lasagna. When the speaker’s father has heart surgery, the poem asks us to imagine “a heart / rebuilt, bionic, powerful, / mom on the screen now, blowing him a kiss.” There is still joy; there is the gentle command to “measure something like love” amidst “a stanza,” “a wound.”
There are certain experiences (of illness, of grief, of love) so vastly rearranging and disorienting that we must search for new modes of writing and speaking. In the middle of the collection, DeWoskin translates Tang dynasty poet Wang Zhihuan: “to view the end of infinity, / climb one more level and see.” And then, Li Bai: “follow me—this moment / of closeness brings joy.” This set serves as a bridge from poems about earth, animal, and father, to poems about the speaker’s body. They’re also preceded by the line: “Burn this translation,” a command DeWoskin both writes and circumvents.
With DeWoskin, I often thought of Cole Swenson’s essay, “Translating Writing / Writing Translation” which speaks of translation creating a “third entity,” one that holds “the deep rhythms of other languages.” DeWoskin’s collection itself is “third” — it seeks to translate the body, and ultimately unites many kinds of languages. Chinese and English, yes, but also “hospital language,” “scientific study language,” and the language of “glowing voles” at cocktail hour.
In one of the most humorous poems of the collection, the speaker describes those glowing voles as “slutty antisocial cousins.” Throughout her work, DeWoskin allows us to laugh while never forgetting how the Anthropocene haunts, how women are caught in traps, then implored to “turn animal”:
women
live brutal moments woven
into patterns we’d unweave if not for
all we’re in
DeWoskin’s epistolary poem “some girls,” remarks on the “skinny misery” of women in their twenties — “dear faint girls, i drove that highway / too.” This poem haunted me with its precise description of all those years I ran cross-country, hoping for smallness, distilled into two lines: “blue panic / air-popped popcorn, water, track.” The poem instructs on how to make the body into a home, understanding the enormity of that project, finding kinship with the animals. In this collection, black bears and turkey vultures “itch and circle,” the deer "move in circles of their own.” So the speaker’s questions also circle, asking:
“who needs what’s real?”
“how did that get there anyway?”
“do prairie voles love?”
“will my babies’ babies’ babies remember one syllable / of my babies’ names?”
I thought of these questions as I walked across a footbridge, sky splitting open with light. I thought of them in classrooms, discussing death care. I thought, walking in the woods, watching a red-tailed hawk fly overhead: “what makes me human anyway?” The question echoed. DeWoskin often asks the reader to linger in what is uncertain, unanswerable. In that space, there is “nightmare vulnerability”; “cells turned strange”; “heart surgery.” If intellectually I know that “no one is spared,” this collection made it real: visceral, embodied, and uncomfortable. DeWoskin asks the reader to stay with fear, to “try to hear / time {each fish} leap, flip, glimmer, disappear.”
absolute animal begins with the trees snapping in half, and like the split trees, these poems leave behind an intense quiet that helps me attend to the unspoken world. With them, I encounter “the heat of being / alive.” Inside of DeWoskin’s sometimes frightening, often joyous poetic landscape, I can hear across epochs, language, and species. I am left feeling animal: vulnerable, “crazed with light,” listening and full of song.
***
absolute animal is DeWoskin’s second collection of poems. She is also the author of five award-winning novels, and the memoir Foreign Babes in Beijing, which centers on her years living in Beijing where she became the star of a Chinese nighttime soap opera. Currently, DeWoskin is an associate professor at the University of Chicago, and an affiliated faculty member in Jewish and East Asian Studies.
Raisa Tolchinsky's debut book Glass Jaw is forthcoming from Persea Books in 2024. She is a recipient of the Henfield Prize for Fiction and a 2x Pushcart Prize nominee. Raisa earned her MFA in poetry from the University of Virginia and her B.A. from Bowdoin College. She has previously lived in Chicago, Italy, and New York, where she trained as an amateur boxer. Currently, Raisa is a candidate at Harvard Divinity School.