Pattie McCarthy Reviews Sasha Steensen's House of Deer at Jacket 2
At Jacket 2 we are eagerly starting to read Pattie McCarthy's new column, "Subdomestictexts." Each post explores the relationship between the domestic and the text. Her newest entry is all about Sasha Steensen's book, House of Deer. Why not start here with the freshest of prose and verse, with Pattie McCarthy:
The family is the history of the species. The family is the history of love & place & force & naming. The family is a history of home— & if home is both "a site and an event," then the family is a history of what happens. In physics, an "event" is a single occurence of a process, a point in spacetime. When & where, & also how the family moves through, how it is moved by history & how it moves history. The family is expansive— if "at home" is not a container, then the family need not (can not) be contained. In the poem "Election Day" in Sasha Steensen's new book House of Deer she writes, "There are children to clothe and dishes to do, and it's just not / the kind of poem where everything belongs." What kind of poem is the kind of poem where everything— including the clothing of children & the doing of dishes— belongs? I think House of Deer is exactly the kind of capacious poem where this everything belongs.
In "Fragments," which immediately follows "Election Day," Steensen writes :
who has my hat
but the little life giggling in the cornershe's so dear to me my daughter tho she fits
barely in the poembut I force it
so that she might have a small place among youdamn sentimental [...]
The daughter enters the poem with noise. "I force it," Steensen writes, but the daughter (& her sound, her space) is already in the poem— entered the poem totally organically. The speaker questions what belongs, but the daughter "fits" because she is already part of the process. I'm interested in notions of risk in House of Deer. A specific example : In (the brilliant, scorching, tender) "Personal Poem Including Opium's History" she writes (apparently quoting a friend), "Risk sentimentality or who will care about your damn poem?" There is nothing sentimental about or in House of Deer— so I can't stop thinking about these lines. Like the lines in "Election Day" where the daughter laughing in a corner doesn't "fit" even after she is present in the poem, the anxiety of emotion (an unease that emotion is self-indulgent?) when there is no sentimentality in the poems seems to me to be both a part of the poems' process & an anxiety about reception. It is exciting to read the poem & have this sense of Steensen's mind at work— considering the poem, the writing of it, the reading of it, expectations regarding what "fits," etc. [...]
Learn on, at Jacket 2! And if you're appetite has been thoroughly whetted and you're craving more reviews of House of Deer, head to The Rumpus for Molly Sutton Kiefer's take.