Even Shorn

Early in her debut collection, Isabel Duarte-Gray wields a drawknife―but it could just as well be her pen:

I grip my drawknife all my life
was pink as hatchlings or
a child born just a little 
dead already tied and then I
waked to watch his afterbirth
be buried in a hole
in Tennessee

Pressing together these two fraught symbols of creation―the menacing woodworker’s tool and the ghastly birth―via an eliding syntax, the poet establishes the mode ofher craft,combining idioms of the rural American South with the energy of contemporary poetic experimentation to depict small-town life via mythology and lore. Interwoven throughout are images from and encounters with the natural world, and the complexities of a family history marred by drunkenness and abuse: “Wint come drunk he / struck her with the pan as flour / flown to the roof holes and / snowed on me.” 

Most of the poems in the collection are stamped with a town name―Dycusburg, Dresden, Eddyville, Kuttawa―drawing a cartographic network that echoes fabled geographies like William Faulkner’s Yoknapatawpha County, while evincing the sense of a poet traveling among friends and kin, listening to their stories. Duarte-Gray shares in the awe and dangers of children’s imagined worlds, gossips about townsfolk, and documents the hardships of impoverished rural life. The stories her poems capture animate her own exploration of traditional Southern literary themes, such as the dynamic between religious fervor and violent human impulses. 

At the center of this collection is grief, especially over the deaths of family members, whose absences are often evoked via animal presences, sometimes to devastating effect: “his name what moths see / in the windowglass.” In Duarte-Gray’s poems, both malady and cure elicit an almost rapturous trauma: “Rejoice with toothache, and the pick / I culled to cure it from the poplar lightning / struck.”

With its familiar vernacular, Even Shorn could easily fall into caricature, but it never does. Instead, Duarte-Gray provides a spirited, stimulating advancement of Southern literary traditions.