Godshots Wanted: Apply Within by Emily Perkovich
Godshots Wanted: Apply Within by Emily Perkovich
Publisher: Sunday Mornings at the River Poetry Press, 2021
Purchase @ Sunday Mornings at the River Poetry Press
Publisher: Sunday Mornings at the River Poetry Press, 2021
Purchase @ Sunday Mornings at the River Poetry Press
Review by Elsa Valmidiano.
NOT EVERYONE IS EASILY HEALED
A Book Review of Godshots Wanted: Apply Within
In Emily Perkovich’s stunning and raw poetry collection, Godshots Wanted: Apply Within, Perkovich defines a godshot as “a term used in recovery to reference something profound or sometimes an intuitive thought that provides motivation to continue in or start the recovery process.” She breaks down this seemingly simple religious notion to reveal a far more complex examination of Woman remembering the Child, who, after growing up in a home filled with turmoil, recounts a nightmarish phantasmagoria of a childhood wrought with pain, where a godshot for the nonbeliever seeking recovery and healing is simply an irrelevance at best.
In “Interview With the Eulogy,” I consider what ancient pain looks like with Perkovich’s lines: “We’re trying to find the root. The onslaught. What caused the affliction. What is your first painful memory?” (13). Here, I go beyond the scene she creates in a childhood home filled with violence, fear, and instability, and instead question who among Perkovich’s lineage did trauma first occur that it would pass from ancestor to descendant, from parent to child? As seen throughout Perkovich’s collection, the examination of childhood memories and their origin is instrumental in the narrator’s understanding of how the intergenerational cycle of violence can perpetuate itself as later seen in the poem, “I Control,” where trauma can leave an epigenetic mark on our DNA, which can then be passed down to future generations:
"It’s not quite cattle, but more of a holocaust. Permanent hemorrhages from all the times I let the injuries internalize. The bones never healed right, I know it. Brain must be liquid. Heart must be liquid. In fact, organs must be liquid. All bile and blood, with no muscle or tissue (38)."
It is in Perkovich’s process of introspection that her poetry meanders in a chameleon-like way between poetry and lyrical prose as well as between fact and fiction, which to me is reminiscent of acclaimed Chilean poet and essayist Roberto Bolaño’s “Beach.” As seen in “Beach,” we aren’t exactly sure if the heroin addiction he writes of is memoir or fiction, but in the stolid craft of his poetic prose, he captures the manic state, paranoia, and restlessness of a person going through recovery, where in that process, he might harshly judge others while also coming to terms with being judged himself, thus seeming to comment on or criticize society’s longstanding view of drug addiction as a moral failing versus a treatable disease.
Similarly seen throughout Godshots, we might ask ourselves the same question of whether each of Perkovich’s poems is memoir or fiction. It’s in the stolid craft of her poetry that she brings us to the many possible origins of where trauma might have first occurred that would lead to the narrator’s eventual drug addiction as a form of self-medicating. In her efforts to pinpoint the exact collision of trauma in her child body, Perkovich more significantly maps out a psychological geography to the woman she becomes, not by way of exposition, but by visceral scene, so that we feel each scene as if we were there ourselves. The result then is trying to make sense of it all as we are shaken to the core by images that we can only conclude as the consistent perpetuation of violence in the narrator’s life.
As seen in the opening lines of “This Is Performance-Art,” Perkovich immediately paints an unsettling snapshot: “Wake without baby. Where is baby? Remember darkness. Remember nurses. Remember doctors. Remember baby. Where is baby?” (24). It is as if we are shifting in and out of consciousness within the confines of a fraught medical institution, as if we were put under general anesthesia against our will, the autonomy over our bodies completely taken away from us, where the total inability to have agency over own bodies extends to the powerlessness we equally face in the total inability to protect our children.
In “They Shut Off The Electric, Again,” Perkovich crafts the image of plants as metaphor to represent the root and result of childhood trauma where the narrator now finds herself mired in drug addiction as an adult:
Sun, no longer touches my edges because the tree coverage grew in dense with the way I have been filled with the things I never wanted. And weeds don’t leave. They spread. They tangle. But they are weeds, nonetheless. And I will only die by fire. Scorched-earth. Smoke-filled. And it all lays heavy. My body is
transmission-failure immobile. Anchor-down, stationary. Respite is a peppermint spotted sun, bite-size and quick to slip down my throat (43).
The collection does not operate in linear fashion but jumps back and forth through time, operating in such a way to reflect how trauma may trigger us at any given moment. In “Hi, Dad Soup,” Perkovich paints a visceral microcosm as seen through the eyes of a small child as if we the readers are revisiting grainy polaroid shots. There is no explanation except that we come face-to-face with raw events that only children remember and understand without the words:
Remember the clammy wet that your feet left in the veneer top. Remember the hands over mouth. Remember the head in the knees. Remember the balcony. Remember to look down. Remember the face on the ledge below. Remember the pot on the stove. Remember the clammy wet. This is what smoke smells like.
This is how you’ll remember blood. This is how you’ll remember sound. This is how you remember bottles and Sunday cartoons. This is where you’ll remember how the colors can all turn red (61).
What Perkovich effectuates in the lines above is a juxtaposition of the harrowing and disparate through little to no exposition. The conclusion of the poem leads us to the narrator’s inability to exactly recall or decipher whether blood or soup is on the walls, when the greater question is why does the child remember that the walls are the color red in the first place to make her question whether it is indeed blood or soup? And is this memory metaphor or real? Like many of Perkovich’s poems in this collection, the poems are chilling without definitive answers except that their images embed themselves into one’s bones with something akin to a primal terror that many of us might have felt during early childhood, trailing behind us like phantoms well into adulthood.
As the collection concludes, Perkovich doesn’t follow a cliché trite ending of redemption or recovery. Rather, she ends with the possibility that we as readers have hopefully come as close to understanding the experience of someone who has gone through an abused childhood and a history of substance abuse, where a godshot isn’t as easy to attain as simply a sign from God, especially for those having been reared in an environment where the notion of God isn’t relevant. As society continues to hold onto its views to center addiction by blaming the individual’s own poor choices, lack of discipline, and a refusal to better their lives, it is in fact society’s own failure to critically understand addiction’s complex and formidable roots within trauma—whether that trauma has taken root historically, systemically, familially, and personally. It is this very failure that can prohibit us from properly supporting and meaningfully engaging with those suffering from drug addiction.
Perkovich makes clear throughout her collection that brokenness and healing are not a binary. One isn’t just healed and then moves on. Addiction and recovery are an ongoing, fragile coexistence. There is no return to a pure state as a white western society would have us otherwise believe. As Perkovich states in Sphinx-like poetic riddle, “This is where you’ll learn how the hurt gets in. How it leaks. How you’re all built from cracks. How breaking is hereditary.” How can there be a return to a pure state when for Perkovich’s narrator, it never existed; when trauma itself had always been rooted in the seeds of a precarious childhood and the epigenetics of our own DNA, making it uncertain just how far back our traumas can be traced in our lineage, except to experience all that we are capable of in our present-day lives. Ultimately, Perkovich asks us to embrace what simply is as she cannot stress enough: “And what I mean to say is that not everyone has wounds that are easily healed, and I need you to be OK if sometimes I bleed on the carpet."
NOT EVERYONE IS EASILY HEALED
A Book Review of Godshots Wanted: Apply Within
In Emily Perkovich’s stunning and raw poetry collection, Godshots Wanted: Apply Within, Perkovich defines a godshot as “a term used in recovery to reference something profound or sometimes an intuitive thought that provides motivation to continue in or start the recovery process.” She breaks down this seemingly simple religious notion to reveal a far more complex examination of Woman remembering the Child, who, after growing up in a home filled with turmoil, recounts a nightmarish phantasmagoria of a childhood wrought with pain, where a godshot for the nonbeliever seeking recovery and healing is simply an irrelevance at best.
In “Interview With the Eulogy,” I consider what ancient pain looks like with Perkovich’s lines: “We’re trying to find the root. The onslaught. What caused the affliction. What is your first painful memory?” (13). Here, I go beyond the scene she creates in a childhood home filled with violence, fear, and instability, and instead question who among Perkovich’s lineage did trauma first occur that it would pass from ancestor to descendant, from parent to child? As seen throughout Perkovich’s collection, the examination of childhood memories and their origin is instrumental in the narrator’s understanding of how the intergenerational cycle of violence can perpetuate itself as later seen in the poem, “I Control,” where trauma can leave an epigenetic mark on our DNA, which can then be passed down to future generations:
"It’s not quite cattle, but more of a holocaust. Permanent hemorrhages from all the times I let the injuries internalize. The bones never healed right, I know it. Brain must be liquid. Heart must be liquid. In fact, organs must be liquid. All bile and blood, with no muscle or tissue (38)."
It is in Perkovich’s process of introspection that her poetry meanders in a chameleon-like way between poetry and lyrical prose as well as between fact and fiction, which to me is reminiscent of acclaimed Chilean poet and essayist Roberto Bolaño’s “Beach.” As seen in “Beach,” we aren’t exactly sure if the heroin addiction he writes of is memoir or fiction, but in the stolid craft of his poetic prose, he captures the manic state, paranoia, and restlessness of a person going through recovery, where in that process, he might harshly judge others while also coming to terms with being judged himself, thus seeming to comment on or criticize society’s longstanding view of drug addiction as a moral failing versus a treatable disease.
Similarly seen throughout Godshots, we might ask ourselves the same question of whether each of Perkovich’s poems is memoir or fiction. It’s in the stolid craft of her poetry that she brings us to the many possible origins of where trauma might have first occurred that would lead to the narrator’s eventual drug addiction as a form of self-medicating. In her efforts to pinpoint the exact collision of trauma in her child body, Perkovich more significantly maps out a psychological geography to the woman she becomes, not by way of exposition, but by visceral scene, so that we feel each scene as if we were there ourselves. The result then is trying to make sense of it all as we are shaken to the core by images that we can only conclude as the consistent perpetuation of violence in the narrator’s life.
As seen in the opening lines of “This Is Performance-Art,” Perkovich immediately paints an unsettling snapshot: “Wake without baby. Where is baby? Remember darkness. Remember nurses. Remember doctors. Remember baby. Where is baby?” (24). It is as if we are shifting in and out of consciousness within the confines of a fraught medical institution, as if we were put under general anesthesia against our will, the autonomy over our bodies completely taken away from us, where the total inability to have agency over own bodies extends to the powerlessness we equally face in the total inability to protect our children.
In “They Shut Off The Electric, Again,” Perkovich crafts the image of plants as metaphor to represent the root and result of childhood trauma where the narrator now finds herself mired in drug addiction as an adult:
Sun, no longer touches my edges because the tree coverage grew in dense with the way I have been filled with the things I never wanted. And weeds don’t leave. They spread. They tangle. But they are weeds, nonetheless. And I will only die by fire. Scorched-earth. Smoke-filled. And it all lays heavy. My body is
transmission-failure immobile. Anchor-down, stationary. Respite is a peppermint spotted sun, bite-size and quick to slip down my throat (43).
The collection does not operate in linear fashion but jumps back and forth through time, operating in such a way to reflect how trauma may trigger us at any given moment. In “Hi, Dad Soup,” Perkovich paints a visceral microcosm as seen through the eyes of a small child as if we the readers are revisiting grainy polaroid shots. There is no explanation except that we come face-to-face with raw events that only children remember and understand without the words:
Remember the clammy wet that your feet left in the veneer top. Remember the hands over mouth. Remember the head in the knees. Remember the balcony. Remember to look down. Remember the face on the ledge below. Remember the pot on the stove. Remember the clammy wet. This is what smoke smells like.
This is how you’ll remember blood. This is how you’ll remember sound. This is how you remember bottles and Sunday cartoons. This is where you’ll remember how the colors can all turn red (61).
What Perkovich effectuates in the lines above is a juxtaposition of the harrowing and disparate through little to no exposition. The conclusion of the poem leads us to the narrator’s inability to exactly recall or decipher whether blood or soup is on the walls, when the greater question is why does the child remember that the walls are the color red in the first place to make her question whether it is indeed blood or soup? And is this memory metaphor or real? Like many of Perkovich’s poems in this collection, the poems are chilling without definitive answers except that their images embed themselves into one’s bones with something akin to a primal terror that many of us might have felt during early childhood, trailing behind us like phantoms well into adulthood.
As the collection concludes, Perkovich doesn’t follow a cliché trite ending of redemption or recovery. Rather, she ends with the possibility that we as readers have hopefully come as close to understanding the experience of someone who has gone through an abused childhood and a history of substance abuse, where a godshot isn’t as easy to attain as simply a sign from God, especially for those having been reared in an environment where the notion of God isn’t relevant. As society continues to hold onto its views to center addiction by blaming the individual’s own poor choices, lack of discipline, and a refusal to better their lives, it is in fact society’s own failure to critically understand addiction’s complex and formidable roots within trauma—whether that trauma has taken root historically, systemically, familially, and personally. It is this very failure that can prohibit us from properly supporting and meaningfully engaging with those suffering from drug addiction.
Perkovich makes clear throughout her collection that brokenness and healing are not a binary. One isn’t just healed and then moves on. Addiction and recovery are an ongoing, fragile coexistence. There is no return to a pure state as a white western society would have us otherwise believe. As Perkovich states in Sphinx-like poetic riddle, “This is where you’ll learn how the hurt gets in. How it leaks. How you’re all built from cracks. How breaking is hereditary.” How can there be a return to a pure state when for Perkovich’s narrator, it never existed; when trauma itself had always been rooted in the seeds of a precarious childhood and the epigenetics of our own DNA, making it uncertain just how far back our traumas can be traced in our lineage, except to experience all that we are capable of in our present-day lives. Ultimately, Perkovich asks us to embrace what simply is as she cannot stress enough: “And what I mean to say is that not everyone has wounds that are easily healed, and I need you to be OK if sometimes I bleed on the carpet."
Elsa Valmidiano, an Ilocana-American essayist and poet, is the author of We Are No Longer Babaylan, her award-winning debut essay collection from New Rivers Press. Her book reviews appear in Poetry Northwest, The Collidescope, Bridge Eight, Up the Staircase Quarterly, Atticus Review, South 85, and Honey Literary. Her poetry and prose are widely published in literary journals and anthologies where her work most recently appears in Anomaly, Cherry Tree, Canthius, Hairstreak Butterfly Review, MUTHA, Mythos, and NiftyLit. On her website, slicingtomatoes.com, Elsa curates a directory of Pinay visual artists from the Philippines and Diaspora whose work she features alongside her poetry and prose.
