Arktoi Books is an exciting new imprint of Red Hen Press. The brainchild of beloved poet Eloise Klein Healey this series, which publishes both prose and poetry, highlights the very best writing by lesbian authors. Officially launching this year, the first title is by the poet Elizabeth Bradfield.
Site-Specific Adaptations
November, 2004
This winter, I became a man.
It happened the first week of November
while my girlfriend guided
photo tours of polar bears.
For a week in Manitoba, she wakes,
eats, and rides the tundra buggies
with tourists over eskers, lending
story to what they see. This year, though,
another landscape competes
with what’s running the boreal
treeline: she and I
are on the ballot. Our home.
Our tax burden and hospital
visitation rights in eleven
states. She’s wary. Bans talk
of the election. But still,
to some of them she looks
suspect: short-haired, short-nailed,
with a walk that’s wide and expects
to be made way for. Out in the tundra,
she tries to keep them focused—
Look at the fox digging
for his cache of meat. But,
no bears in sight, a bored wife turns
from the view saying, ‘So
have you left anyone at home?’
My lover says, A gyrfalcon!
Until the last few years, we knew
almost nothing of their nesting habits.
It’s November 2. Four more days
with this group, seven with the next,
then she’ll come home to me.
What weather they’re having—
mid-twenties and clear, bears
at the bay’s edge in golden light
testing the new ice, hungry for seal.
Four more days in the buggy. Four more
dinners of careful talk. My husband
is a poet, she finally says. For the first time
not risking this truth and hating
that what she loves
could bring her to this lie.
Bradfield is a naturalist, and a number of the poems in this book walk the two sides of the environmental avenue: wonder at the beautiful discoveries in the natural world, and concern, even outrage, at the threats imposed against it—extinction, pollution, industrialization. Human carelessness—blindness—continues to endanger the already frail flora and fauna at every corner of the earth. But the speaker moves beyond accusation and into the position of accountability: “Allow me to be responsible for you.” And furthermore, on the subject of our feathered neighbors, from the poem “Splitters & Joiners”: They are
joined to us. Separate from. These birds
with their own stories and associations, flying through
the groupings we imagine and impose. Not unaffected,
though, by the long, strange echoes of their names.
Cleverly, Bradfield applies this “co-habitation” of populations with two other groups: the straight and the queer one—“joined to us. Separate from.” The use of such words as “natural,” “vulnerability,” and the outcry at the imposition of a dominant group over the well-being of another suddenly take on a more complicated resonance.
The context of the poem above is the Bush reelection year, when our soon-to-be-out-of-office-but-not-soon-enough Republican president ran on the anti-gay marriage campaign. The “site-specific adaptations” is in reference to the art of survival of both animals and members of the GLBTQ community. Confronted with adversity and ever-changing political/ global climates, creatures of this world, of the troubled times persevere and overcome.
The power center for the speaker is voice and language, which is why that fight-back phrase, “My husband/ is a poet” comes laden with affirmations of pro-same sex marriage and agency of expression. Bradfield demonstrates this shift in power dynamics—taking the upper hand in the struggle against homophobic rhetoric and hate speech—with the poem “Cul-de-sac Linguistics” in which a group of young boys being to taunt a lesbian couple with an “anti-homo riff”:
O, the high profanity of kickball games,
the rough posturing demanded
by even this tame street. Listen, they’re learning
how well bastard fits with fucking, how ass
can’t be mis-used. No one could hope to ease
their jagged entries into this profane world
which is fucking beautiful, ass-bastard gorgeous,
the evening light wild and soaring
like kickballs on a true arc into flowerbeds
of penis tulips and pussy daffodils
that nod their heads in wild agreement
with the whorish, shit-loving lot of it.
This book has set a high standard for the series, but Arktoi Books will no doubt deliver. A forthcoming poetry title The Heart’s Traffic is by Kundiman fellow Ching-In Chen. And I look forward to other titles in this welcomed new series that promises to extend the conversation of identity politics and queer activism to an exciting new level.
(From Interpretive Work, published by Arktoi Books, 2008. Used with the permission of the series editor.)
Hmm, I read “Cul-de-sac” differently – sounded to me as though the speaker worried for a second the taunts were directed at her, then decided otherwise, revelling in a little (flarfy?) obscenity of her own. In any case – great book, good on you for getting the word out first.
I read “Cul-de-sac Linguistics” as in the end, a love song to a complicated world, and a celebration of the language we use to both denigrate and praise what we do and don’t understand. The whole book is an equally layered and demanding knock-out.