{"id":770,"date":"2023-08-13T14:45:36","date_gmt":"2023-08-13T18:45:36","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lynndomina.com\/?p=770"},"modified":"2023-08-13T14:45:36","modified_gmt":"2023-08-13T18:45:36","slug":"review-of-territorial-by-mira-rosenthal","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lynndomina.com\/?p=770","title":{"rendered":"Review of Territorial by Mira Rosenthal"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a>Mira Rosenthal. <\/span>Territorial. <\/em>University of Pittsburgh Press, 2022. 93 pages. $18.00.<\/span><\/p>\n

Mira Rosenthal\u2019s poetry is both stark and lyrical\u2014stark in its themes and often forms, for the poems often exploit the white space surrounding the lines, yet also very musical, the sounds of her words repeating and revising each other. The reader can\u2019t help but pay attention. The poems in her second collection, Territorial, <\/em>(Rosenthal is also a translator of contemporary Polish poetry and has published several collections of her translations) consider the land and geography, especially the violence committed against it and its creatures. They also consider the territory of the human body, particularly the violence and threats of violence against female bodies. Most importantly, they implicitly and explicitly link environmental violence with gendered violence.<\/p>\n

\u201cSquirrels of North America\u201d initially seems simply to observe that most common of rodents:<\/p>\n

From grab to flit, from clutch to twist, through leaf
\ntwitch to the wind\u2019s acoustic shifts, in parks, in yards,<\/p>\n

one splayed in the shade below a picnic table, belly
\ndown, arms out like a kite trying to fly from summer<\/p>\n

heat & ash that blackened the nostrils of every breathing
\nthing in the vicinity of a swamp in flame\u2026<\/p>\n

In this opening, I first notice the repeated \u201ci\u201d sounds: \u201cflit,\u201d \u201ctwist,\u201d \u201ctwitch, \u201cwind\u2019s,\u201d \u201cshifts.\u201d Then I notice how many of the \u201ci\u201d sounds are followed with a \u201ct.\u201d Then I notice the repeated \u201cl\u201d sounds, in \u201cflit\u201d but then also in \u201cclutch\u201d (which also has the \u201ctch\u201d of some of the other words) and \u201cleaf.\u201d Then in the second couplet, Rosenthal emphasizes the \u201ca\u201d while maintaining the consonance of the \u201cl.\u201d Similar sounds occur in the third couplet. A high proportion of the words are also monosyllabic, permitting a correspondingly high proportion of stressed syllables. So many sonic elements are working together here\u2014I\u2019m caught up in the music and nearly forget that the lines are describing the action of squirrels. If all this poem did was continue this musically energetic description, it would be fun and memorable and almost certainly successful.<\/p>\n

But it does so much more. Mid-way through the poem, the speaker introduces herself: \u201cI disappeared \/ down one of those paths with a nice enough guy\u2026\u201d She\u2019s a teenager, trusting nature, life, and the boy she\u2019s with: \u201cI trusted being this far in with no other \/\/ ear to hear me.\u201d But then the boy says, \u201cYou know, you should be \/ more careful.\u201d <\/em>Suddenly, her experience becomes sinister. I wonder at the boy\u2019s motive, which seems to be both to frighten her and to position himself as heroic because he doesn\u2019t assault her, but he can only acquire this creepy virtue by frightening her, by suggesting what he could do if he wanted. For the speaker, everything changes:<\/p>\n

\u2026his words spread like a blanket over my young<\/p>\n

face to shield the stunned animal & a knot of hard
\nacorn lodged in my throat & I swallowed & swallowed it<\/p>\n

down. I was safe, but only for now. The boy took
\nmy hand, later, by the fire & fastened his fingers to mine\u2026<\/p>\n

When we look back at the beginning of the poem, we notice that much of the vocabulary implies danger: \u201cgrab,\u201d \u201cclutch,\u201d \u201ctwist.\u201d The squirrels are acrobatic, but the language also unifies the poem well before the reader recognizes the true subject. In the two couplets that remain, Rosenthal returns to imagery evocative of squirrels, but the tone has irrevocably chilled:<\/p>\n

\u2026I kept silent, eyes fixed on the coals as tiny claws<\/p>\n

gripped bark just beyond the frame of light, from grasp
\nto hide, from lash to flight, something wild gone dark.<\/p>\n

Rosenthal maintains her attention to sound and rhythm, even relying again on \u201cl\u201d and \u201ca,\u201d but there\u2019s nothing playful left. The speaker and the readers understand that she\u2019ll never be safe again, that she, indeed, never was safe at all.<\/p>\n

An equally haunting poem is \u201cThe Apron,\u201d also composed in couplets. It begins with a description of an ordinary apron and a person searching through stacks of ordinary saved objects. Its obsessiveness soon emerges, and the poem becomes self-reflexive, the speaker calling our attention to her associative connections between objects and events with the phrase \u201cWhich reminds me.\u201d In writing the poem, the speaker is longing to rewrite history. Early on, the apron string reminds the speaker of \u201cthe plank of an arm, fallen \/\/ from a body asleep in a chair\u2026\u201d Here, the image seems to be just a metaphor, the arm and the body serving the description of the apron. Later, this body becomes a \u201cher\u201d the speaker recalls and imagines, a woman who performs ordinary tasks, needlework, baking, protecting her dress with the apron. Then the speaker admits, \u201cI reason I just might save her \/ this time, in the dank garage, saying please \/\/ don\u2019t pull the trigger.\u201d <\/em>The line breaks here are masterful, the delay between \u201csave her\u201d and \u201cthis time\u201d emphasizing how the speaker has likely tried again and again to change the course of events. Through an additional series of associative metaphors, the poem reaches its conclusion:<\/p>\n

\u2026she pressed the phone there, calling my father
\n& how he drove over & how he found her<\/p>\n

slumped in the chair, her arm fallen open,
\nhead bowed to her lap, as if reading.<\/p>\n

The earlier \u201cbody asleep in a chair\u201d suddenly isn\u2019t just a body and isn\u2019t merely asleep. This poem seems to follow a mind thinking, but Rosenthal\u2019s selection and placement of detail reveals what a careful and thoughtful writer she is.<\/p>\n

Several of the poems in this collection are more stylistically experimental\u2014\u201cThe Invention of an Interstate System\u201d and \u201cIn the Background of Silence\u201d are two compelling examples that rely on long lines, with each line separated from the others into its own stanza. In the poems formatted this way, Rosenthal\u2019s associative leaps are more extreme, requiring the reader to be even more attentive, but the poems invariably reward the reader\u2019s effort.<\/p>\n

Nothing in these poems is wasted, not a single word or syllable or sound. In poem after poem throughout Territorial, <\/em>the writing is tight and musical and concrete, and the substance is profound.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Mira Rosenthal. Territorial. University of Pittsburgh Press, 2022. 93 pages. $18.00. Mira Rosenthal\u2019s poetry is both stark and lyrical\u2014stark in its themes and often forms, for the poems often exploit the white space surrounding the lines, yet also very musical, the sounds of her words repeating and revising each other. The reader can\u2019t help but […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[65,66],"class_list":["post-770","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-areviewaweek","tag-mira-rosenthal","tag-territorial"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lynndomina.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/770","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lynndomina.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lynndomina.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lynndomina.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lynndomina.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=770"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/lynndomina.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/770\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":772,"href":"https:\/\/lynndomina.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/770\/revisions\/772"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lynndomina.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=770"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lynndomina.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=770"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lynndomina.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=770"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}