earthwork by Jill Khoury
Jill Khoury's 'Metonymical Vessel'
a review by Alina Stefanescu
Poetry as emanation. Poetry as carrying the burden of mysteries left by others, by the voices in our blood, by the reverence and heresy of mixing them. Poetry as lyrical inconclusiveness and excavation. Jill Khoury's new collection, earthworks, touches the most challenging silences without pretending it can resolve them. Dedicated to the poet's mother, Kathleen Rose Khoury, who died in 2012, the book commits itself to working through the soil that shaped us, the dirt that makes us. Like Peter Gabriel's song, "Digging in the Dirt," the poet digs to find and open the places she got hurt. Unlike the song, Khoury's digging process is shaped from elegant textures and the lyrical eloquence with which silences are handled in text.
" i tell / my mother the fractured clay dirt flowered against a red moon," Khoury writes, in a prefatory poem titled "night cultivars." We overhear the daughter speaking to her mother in the darkness, in the chasm between memory and presence:
all thorns
and dolor
moaned from out
a low stump
when I put my ear
to it
oh
she says
that’s just
a weed
the wind
Khoury's poems work the gaps and fissures of what is sayable. Rosmarie Waldrop's "gap gardening" prose poems cultivate the semantic cracks and fissures within the idea of completeness. Waldrop said she borrowed from Friedrich Holderlin the idea that "the gap of the caesura, metrical poetry's additional locus of disjunction, blocks the hypnotic enchantment of rhythm and images." But where Waldrop parses the sentence, Khoury focuses on lineation and enjambment as means of mining the gaps, as seen in "through ether and static":
o mom o
metonymical vessel
the second miracle
you’re hoping for:
an ashman will pour
you into a shape
that holds
As in Paul Celan's later poems, Khoury's use of repetition and metaphor resists the consoling effect that comes from chanting—rendering the world familiar in the shape of a lullaby or nursery rhyme or chorus—choosing instead to rely on neologism and a new constellation of meaning among words (as well as metonymy) to serve as the poem's relation to the world. Celan and Khoury's gaps don't moor us in meaning so much as the sound of things being broken, revisited, and returned—in the sibilance of waves on an ocean where poets meet at particular meridians. Here, the emptiness of the page doesn't designate a contained area so much as an encounter between multi-faceted surfaces.
The surfaces of Khoury's poems are not immune to seeping and bleeding. "we never quite reach the topic" makes use of the bleeding title to open with a single-line stanza: "of her impending funeral and it looms in me". The daughter watches her mother disappear, growing smaller due to anorexia. The poet enacts these silent ruptures through a series of bracketed images and thoughts: "[glade of tepid petals]"; "[tics trips traces]"; "[relapsing repulsion]". As the unbracketed lines describe the mother's frailty, the lanugo symptomatic of severe anorexia, the brackets carry the unassimilable feelings.
Seeking shapes to carry the multi-faceted, Khoury turns a geometric figure into a poetic form with "failure to thrive," subtitled "a heptahedron". The heptahedron, a solid figure with seven plane faces that can take on many different topological forms, is used to display seven faces of the diagnoses known as "failure to thrive," or inability to nurture or nourish the self. It is a brilliant and painful poem, a geometry of quiet agony that pairs the speaker's thoughts ("ratio of earth to other") with italicized symptomatology ("loss of willingness"). The numerated planes display a wholeness that is antagonistic to itself.
In a different heptahedron titled "critical tension", the grieving daughter is the subject. The world of her grief renders nothing stable or "secure", and each numerated portion of the figure offers another face of grief.
Security and stability continue evading the speaker. There are four poems titled "litany / fixation" in the first section of this collection. Reading them, I was struck by the futility of reorientation in relation to the frozenness of being fixated, forced to witness a mother's decline. As a form that indicates repetition church services, the litany relies on a certain repeat-after-me feeling to subvert the religious overcoming this form inscribes. The Oxford Dictionary provides two definitions of litany that Khoury invokes and complicates in these poems. One definition focuses on the call-and-response in religious services, where a litany is "a series of petitions for use in church services or processions, usually recited by the clergy and responded to in a recurring formula by the people." Here, the litany entreats God for mercy. But a second definition of litany is simpler, namely, "a tedious recital or repetitive series," and this tedium pierces the invocation in the first "litany / fixation" (quoted in full below):
i attend as if given an unstable flame
whoever thought goodbye would be a glowing irony
i put the reasons for a mother aside
i put the reasons for a motive aside
In the book's second section, Khoury's speaker palpates the soil of her childhood, opening with an image of a baby in an incubator. "there is only an image / through mottled glass / of a blue baby," Khoury writes in "before she can give me her voice." The speaker watches the mother and baby, divided from each other by glass; she notes the mother attempting to comfort her infant: "love-talk like a play / without sound". Silence acquires echoes. The woman recollects the infant she must have been, as described by her mother.
In "curtain colic bassinet calf," an overwhelmed mother is alone in a house with an infant, trying and failing to provide the comfort that women are socialized to hold as a metric of competence. "the infant’s howl strafes / the mother’s earthwork," Khoury says, comparing the baby's cries to machine-gun fire from a low-flying aircraft. Contrasted with the mother's handmade clay pots, the infant is the creature that cannot be quietly shelved and admired. For, unlike the pots, a human being is never finished, never set but continuously changing and developing.
The child goes to school, where teachers label her "special"; the mother appears in scents of Coppertone sun oil. In "sicker," a diabetes diagnosis intrudes on the mother's caregiving role. The child is faced with a sick mother, one who needs insulin to survive, one whose lap has grown too small to hold the adolescent. A cloudscape of self-blame hovers above the two, which the poet depicts in excruciating quotation:
and your eyes
those are my fault
i’m sorry
Perhaps we inherit our mothers' self-punishment as a facet of the social landscape which encourages mothers to blame themselves for the structural insufficiency of the nuclear family. The juxtaposing surfaces in this section thicken the continuous sense of failure that the mother holds against herself. In "she teaches me the christmas baking", Khoury inhabits the child and recites the motions involved in the recipe. Even here, in this act that is traditional to home-making, self-hatred is baked into the process:
when the cookies burn
or spread another batch
goes in
hating herself a little until
they are perfect
fold / fold / fold
Tonal irreverence is an auspice of intimacy in Khoury: she intimates through it. My favorite poem, "hey mama let's start over," works by playing with the conditional in an imaginative game-like repetition addressed to the speaker's mother. "I'll be the fire / You be the gravity", she writes, emphasizing the fixed form to which life consigns us while simultaneously pressing against the boundaries of that fixedness.
Religion is not innocent of harm in these poems. There is a God in the childhood's small town background, a God of limits and fences, a God that oversees the property lines that keep the sacred from touching the profane. This God is deployed to silence the mother and the daughter who would speak of abuse. Khoury's use of form to open these gaps—her constant probing and touching of the dirt—does not forsake the "pile of ashes" (as she references in "the psychic channels my mother") or render grief, itself, dirty. In a culture that commits mourning to planned obsolescence, the poet refuses. By centering a loss that occurred over a decade ago, Khoury’s poems resist the brief timelines of American grief. The book closes with an "antiblessing" repeated in the speaker's head: "mother // which world do I belong to". But there is no question mark to punctuate the inquiry; there is, Khoury suggests, no definitive answer. One lives in the gaps of the garden. Her stunning caesuras and lyrical gestures touch the most unsayable and irresolvable dirt in us.
a review by Alina Stefanescu
Poetry as emanation. Poetry as carrying the burden of mysteries left by others, by the voices in our blood, by the reverence and heresy of mixing them. Poetry as lyrical inconclusiveness and excavation. Jill Khoury's new collection, earthworks, touches the most challenging silences without pretending it can resolve them. Dedicated to the poet's mother, Kathleen Rose Khoury, who died in 2012, the book commits itself to working through the soil that shaped us, the dirt that makes us. Like Peter Gabriel's song, "Digging in the Dirt," the poet digs to find and open the places she got hurt. Unlike the song, Khoury's digging process is shaped from elegant textures and the lyrical eloquence with which silences are handled in text.
" i tell / my mother the fractured clay dirt flowered against a red moon," Khoury writes, in a prefatory poem titled "night cultivars." We overhear the daughter speaking to her mother in the darkness, in the chasm between memory and presence:
all thorns
and dolor
moaned from out
a low stump
when I put my ear
to it
oh
she says
that’s just
a weed
the wind
Khoury's poems work the gaps and fissures of what is sayable. Rosmarie Waldrop's "gap gardening" prose poems cultivate the semantic cracks and fissures within the idea of completeness. Waldrop said she borrowed from Friedrich Holderlin the idea that "the gap of the caesura, metrical poetry's additional locus of disjunction, blocks the hypnotic enchantment of rhythm and images." But where Waldrop parses the sentence, Khoury focuses on lineation and enjambment as means of mining the gaps, as seen in "through ether and static":
o mom o
metonymical vessel
the second miracle
you’re hoping for:
an ashman will pour
you into a shape
that holds
As in Paul Celan's later poems, Khoury's use of repetition and metaphor resists the consoling effect that comes from chanting—rendering the world familiar in the shape of a lullaby or nursery rhyme or chorus—choosing instead to rely on neologism and a new constellation of meaning among words (as well as metonymy) to serve as the poem's relation to the world. Celan and Khoury's gaps don't moor us in meaning so much as the sound of things being broken, revisited, and returned—in the sibilance of waves on an ocean where poets meet at particular meridians. Here, the emptiness of the page doesn't designate a contained area so much as an encounter between multi-faceted surfaces.
The surfaces of Khoury's poems are not immune to seeping and bleeding. "we never quite reach the topic" makes use of the bleeding title to open with a single-line stanza: "of her impending funeral and it looms in me". The daughter watches her mother disappear, growing smaller due to anorexia. The poet enacts these silent ruptures through a series of bracketed images and thoughts: "[glade of tepid petals]"; "[tics trips traces]"; "[relapsing repulsion]". As the unbracketed lines describe the mother's frailty, the lanugo symptomatic of severe anorexia, the brackets carry the unassimilable feelings.
Seeking shapes to carry the multi-faceted, Khoury turns a geometric figure into a poetic form with "failure to thrive," subtitled "a heptahedron". The heptahedron, a solid figure with seven plane faces that can take on many different topological forms, is used to display seven faces of the diagnoses known as "failure to thrive," or inability to nurture or nourish the self. It is a brilliant and painful poem, a geometry of quiet agony that pairs the speaker's thoughts ("ratio of earth to other") with italicized symptomatology ("loss of willingness"). The numerated planes display a wholeness that is antagonistic to itself.
In a different heptahedron titled "critical tension", the grieving daughter is the subject. The world of her grief renders nothing stable or "secure", and each numerated portion of the figure offers another face of grief.
Security and stability continue evading the speaker. There are four poems titled "litany / fixation" in the first section of this collection. Reading them, I was struck by the futility of reorientation in relation to the frozenness of being fixated, forced to witness a mother's decline. As a form that indicates repetition church services, the litany relies on a certain repeat-after-me feeling to subvert the religious overcoming this form inscribes. The Oxford Dictionary provides two definitions of litany that Khoury invokes and complicates in these poems. One definition focuses on the call-and-response in religious services, where a litany is "a series of petitions for use in church services or processions, usually recited by the clergy and responded to in a recurring formula by the people." Here, the litany entreats God for mercy. But a second definition of litany is simpler, namely, "a tedious recital or repetitive series," and this tedium pierces the invocation in the first "litany / fixation" (quoted in full below):
i attend as if given an unstable flame
whoever thought goodbye would be a glowing irony
i put the reasons for a mother aside
i put the reasons for a motive aside
In the book's second section, Khoury's speaker palpates the soil of her childhood, opening with an image of a baby in an incubator. "there is only an image / through mottled glass / of a blue baby," Khoury writes in "before she can give me her voice." The speaker watches the mother and baby, divided from each other by glass; she notes the mother attempting to comfort her infant: "love-talk like a play / without sound". Silence acquires echoes. The woman recollects the infant she must have been, as described by her mother.
In "curtain colic bassinet calf," an overwhelmed mother is alone in a house with an infant, trying and failing to provide the comfort that women are socialized to hold as a metric of competence. "the infant’s howl strafes / the mother’s earthwork," Khoury says, comparing the baby's cries to machine-gun fire from a low-flying aircraft. Contrasted with the mother's handmade clay pots, the infant is the creature that cannot be quietly shelved and admired. For, unlike the pots, a human being is never finished, never set but continuously changing and developing.
The child goes to school, where teachers label her "special"; the mother appears in scents of Coppertone sun oil. In "sicker," a diabetes diagnosis intrudes on the mother's caregiving role. The child is faced with a sick mother, one who needs insulin to survive, one whose lap has grown too small to hold the adolescent. A cloudscape of self-blame hovers above the two, which the poet depicts in excruciating quotation:
and your eyes
those are my fault
i’m sorry
Perhaps we inherit our mothers' self-punishment as a facet of the social landscape which encourages mothers to blame themselves for the structural insufficiency of the nuclear family. The juxtaposing surfaces in this section thicken the continuous sense of failure that the mother holds against herself. In "she teaches me the christmas baking", Khoury inhabits the child and recites the motions involved in the recipe. Even here, in this act that is traditional to home-making, self-hatred is baked into the process:
when the cookies burn
or spread another batch
goes in
hating herself a little until
they are perfect
fold / fold / fold
Tonal irreverence is an auspice of intimacy in Khoury: she intimates through it. My favorite poem, "hey mama let's start over," works by playing with the conditional in an imaginative game-like repetition addressed to the speaker's mother. "I'll be the fire / You be the gravity", she writes, emphasizing the fixed form to which life consigns us while simultaneously pressing against the boundaries of that fixedness.
Religion is not innocent of harm in these poems. There is a God in the childhood's small town background, a God of limits and fences, a God that oversees the property lines that keep the sacred from touching the profane. This God is deployed to silence the mother and the daughter who would speak of abuse. Khoury's use of form to open these gaps—her constant probing and touching of the dirt—does not forsake the "pile of ashes" (as she references in "the psychic channels my mother") or render grief, itself, dirty. In a culture that commits mourning to planned obsolescence, the poet refuses. By centering a loss that occurred over a decade ago, Khoury’s poems resist the brief timelines of American grief. The book closes with an "antiblessing" repeated in the speaker's head: "mother // which world do I belong to". But there is no question mark to punctuate the inquiry; there is, Khoury suggests, no definitive answer. One lives in the gaps of the garden. Her stunning caesuras and lyrical gestures touch the most unsayable and irresolvable dirt in us.
Jill Khoury (she/her) is a disabled poet and author of the collection Suites for the Modern Dancer (Sundress Publications) as well as the chapbooks Borrowed Bodies (Pudding House) and Chance Operations (Paper Nautilus). She is a Western Pennsylvania Writing Project fellow and has taught poetry in high school, university, and enrichment settings. Khoury holds an MFA from The Ohio State University and edits Rogue Agent, a journal of embodied poetry and art. Her poems have appeared in numerous journals, including Copper Nickel, CALYX, diode, and The Shore. Winner of the Gatewood Prize from Switchback books, earthwork, is her second full-length poetry collection. Connect with her at jillkhoury.com.
Alina Stefanescu was born in Romania and lives in Birmingham, Alabama with her partner and several intense mammals. Recent books include a creative nonfiction chapbook, Ribald (Bull City Press Inch Series, Nov. 2020) and Dor, which won the Wandering Aengus Press Prize (September, 2021). Her debut fiction collection, Every Mask I Tried On, won the Brighthorse Books Prize (April 2018). Alina's poems, essays, and fiction can be found in Prairie Schooner, North American Review, World Literature Today, Pleiades, Poetry, BOMB, Crab Creek Review, and others. She serves as editor, reviewer, and critic for various journals and is currently working on a novel-like creature. Her new poetry collection will be published by Sarabande in 2025. More online at www.alinastefanescuwriter.com.
