Everwhen by Anne Barngrover
Everwhen by Anne Barngrover
Publisher: University of Akron Press, 2023
Purchase @ University of Akron Press
Publisher: University of Akron Press, 2023
Purchase @ University of Akron Press
Review by Emily Rose Miller.
A third of the way through Anne Barngrover’s second collection of poetry, Everwhen, she writes in the poem “I Always Wanted to Save the Rainforest”,
“but now I live in a rainforest
and the thing I can’t save
is me.”
This reckoning between eco-destruction (and who is responsible, who benefits, who suffers) and internal suffering is characteristic of the book as a whole. Everwhen is a force of tropical nature that encapsulates external ideas of place and internal musings of self expertly and openly. Barngrover guides us through planet-wide destruction, internal anxieties, and praise of her own backyard through an ecofeminist lens and utilizes a series of persona poems as the goddess Ceres, herself, to grapple with the violence humanity continually commits to Earth and to women, and the ways those types of violence often intersect.
Everwhen (the inverse of whenever), Barngrover tells us in “If I Misread a Word That Scares Me”, “Elegy for Fallen Palms”, and her notes at the end of the collection, is her own misreading of the word “everywhen,” a concept coined by Aboriginal Australians that is synonymous with dreamtime, in which the past and present happen all at once. To her, this misreading was her brain “misread[ing] this word on purpose, working all the while to invent my own sense of time-out-of-time.” In this way, the work in this collection grapples with the past, present, and future of our planet and of humanity, especially womanhood. It works to understand the idea that so much beauty, love, and wonder can coexist with such destruction, evil, and abuse of power. In one of the last poems in the book, Barngrover asks us: “Does anything ever end?” We are left wondering where we end and another person, or something else entirely, begins.
Barngrover’s poetry is full of vibrant imagery, especially evident in “The Crying Bird” when she writes:
“Secrets
bloat the wetland—hidden grotto
behind golf course
tavern, empty
Gatorade notched like a sconce
into cabbage palm.”
Her ability to capture such a vivid and truly “Florida” scene is beautifully and deceivingly simplistic. Throughout this collection, Barngrover’s poetic observations of the natural world and the man-made elements juxtaposed within it remind us to appreciate — and more importantly protect — the nature in our own backyards. After all, she writes in “Ceres in the Red Tide,” as she conflates women’s bodies and eco consciousness,
“The ocean remembers.
The planets remember. My body remembers everything you’ve done.”
Everwhen is more than just a collection of eco-critical poems, though. In multiple instances throughout the book, Barngrover writes about physical and mental illness and how those illnesses intersect with the speaker’s identity as a woman. In “Pelvic Ultrasound” she writes,
“Any woman knows how
many colors can present themselves
in blood”
and in “The Night My Number Tripled,”
“…as an animal would,
I must have believed
I could hide from my own leaking math. Pregnancy
or tumor—those were the options
and I wasn’t sure which one I wanted
less.”
Time and time again, the author conflates nature, especially birds and plants, with women in danger. Continually, she combines Florida’s flora and fauna with women in her poems and creates a tethered sense of place, as well as a desire to escape her body, to screech and not be admonished, to change and not be questioned why. She expresses her desire, reflected in so many women, to embrace something animalistic in a world that necessitates perfection in femininity to uphold the patriarchy.
What Barngrover brings to the table with this collection is a critical and timely call to action and uncovering of truths that affect not only our planet and all of its wonder, not only women and the worlds our bodies make, but the core of our humanity as people and as residents — or even stewards — of Earth and our own individual and collective wellbeing. She knows as well as Ceres that this change is not possible in the systems we inhabit today. After all,
“Extinction
can’t escape a gold rush”
by which the author means institutions like capitalism, patriarchy, etc. Still, she encourages us to
“rewrite this story from the ground up,
invent a new beginning
no one’s heard before…”
and to be the change for the past and present we need and the future we desire.
A third of the way through Anne Barngrover’s second collection of poetry, Everwhen, she writes in the poem “I Always Wanted to Save the Rainforest”,
“but now I live in a rainforest
and the thing I can’t save
is me.”
This reckoning between eco-destruction (and who is responsible, who benefits, who suffers) and internal suffering is characteristic of the book as a whole. Everwhen is a force of tropical nature that encapsulates external ideas of place and internal musings of self expertly and openly. Barngrover guides us through planet-wide destruction, internal anxieties, and praise of her own backyard through an ecofeminist lens and utilizes a series of persona poems as the goddess Ceres, herself, to grapple with the violence humanity continually commits to Earth and to women, and the ways those types of violence often intersect.
Everwhen (the inverse of whenever), Barngrover tells us in “If I Misread a Word That Scares Me”, “Elegy for Fallen Palms”, and her notes at the end of the collection, is her own misreading of the word “everywhen,” a concept coined by Aboriginal Australians that is synonymous with dreamtime, in which the past and present happen all at once. To her, this misreading was her brain “misread[ing] this word on purpose, working all the while to invent my own sense of time-out-of-time.” In this way, the work in this collection grapples with the past, present, and future of our planet and of humanity, especially womanhood. It works to understand the idea that so much beauty, love, and wonder can coexist with such destruction, evil, and abuse of power. In one of the last poems in the book, Barngrover asks us: “Does anything ever end?” We are left wondering where we end and another person, or something else entirely, begins.
Barngrover’s poetry is full of vibrant imagery, especially evident in “The Crying Bird” when she writes:
“Secrets
bloat the wetland—hidden grotto
behind golf course
tavern, empty
Gatorade notched like a sconce
into cabbage palm.”
Her ability to capture such a vivid and truly “Florida” scene is beautifully and deceivingly simplistic. Throughout this collection, Barngrover’s poetic observations of the natural world and the man-made elements juxtaposed within it remind us to appreciate — and more importantly protect — the nature in our own backyards. After all, she writes in “Ceres in the Red Tide,” as she conflates women’s bodies and eco consciousness,
“The ocean remembers.
The planets remember. My body remembers everything you’ve done.”
Everwhen is more than just a collection of eco-critical poems, though. In multiple instances throughout the book, Barngrover writes about physical and mental illness and how those illnesses intersect with the speaker’s identity as a woman. In “Pelvic Ultrasound” she writes,
“Any woman knows how
many colors can present themselves
in blood”
and in “The Night My Number Tripled,”
“…as an animal would,
I must have believed
I could hide from my own leaking math. Pregnancy
or tumor—those were the options
and I wasn’t sure which one I wanted
less.”
Time and time again, the author conflates nature, especially birds and plants, with women in danger. Continually, she combines Florida’s flora and fauna with women in her poems and creates a tethered sense of place, as well as a desire to escape her body, to screech and not be admonished, to change and not be questioned why. She expresses her desire, reflected in so many women, to embrace something animalistic in a world that necessitates perfection in femininity to uphold the patriarchy.
What Barngrover brings to the table with this collection is a critical and timely call to action and uncovering of truths that affect not only our planet and all of its wonder, not only women and the worlds our bodies make, but the core of our humanity as people and as residents — or even stewards — of Earth and our own individual and collective wellbeing. She knows as well as Ceres that this change is not possible in the systems we inhabit today. After all,
“Extinction
can’t escape a gold rush”
by which the author means institutions like capitalism, patriarchy, etc. Still, she encourages us to
“rewrite this story from the ground up,
invent a new beginning
no one’s heard before…”
and to be the change for the past and present we need and the future we desire.
Emily Rose Miller is a graduate of Saint Leo University where she received a BA in English with a specialization in creative writing. Her work has been published in The Thing Itself Journal, Pinky Thinker Press, Herstry Blog, Backlash Press Journal, and other places. Emily is currently working towards her MFA in creative writing at the University of Central Florida. She can be found on her website at emilyrosemiller.com and on Instagram at @emily.rose.miller.
