The opening poem, “What to Expect When You’re Expecting,” sets the soul-baring tone for Elizabeth C. Garcia’s stunning collection, Resurrected Body (Cider Press Review 2024). No wonder this book won Cider Press Review’s 2023 Editor’s Prize! The phrasing of Garcia’s first poem will cause most mothers to recall those scary, cringeworthy moments in the delivery room with imagery of a woman being “spatchcocked” with “the last secrets of your body / splayed on the table like a butcher’s shop.” Resurrected Body’s clever cover illustrates a tree growing from a prostrate woman’s abdomen with roots extending under her body—she has roots in the past and nurtures the future generation. The volume digs deep into a full range of emotions, from the anger in “Ad for Salems, 1978” to the sorrow and loss in “Post-hysterectomy Dream, 1959.”
Resurrected Body is divided into three sections: karst, charnel, and derrick. An important theme in the poems is the transformation a woman goes through from daughter to wife to mother, and the difficulty of holding onto a self separate from those roles. A fine example occurs in “Soul Bone” as the speaker is searching for the piece of herself that is indestructible.
Many poems deal with the tenderness, frustrations and aggravations of motherhood. In one, the speaker declares “Motherhood is not unlike Philippe Petit” walking a tightrope between Notre Dame’s two towers. In another, “When she wakes, rigid,” a mother tries to comfort a child frightened by a storm, and she hopes “the world is not so scary when it’s named.” Yet the ending implies she worries words like thunder and “her own incapable hands” may be insufficient to arm the child against a scary world. And many women will relate to a mother’s dark humor in “Cotyledon”: “To kill the time before dinner / instead of them / I drag my kids to the park.”
Not all poems are told from a mother’s viewpoint. Some consider parents and grandparents as fully human beings, separate from their parenting roles. Humor sparkles as the speaker reveals her mother’s movie-star crush in “Mom & Tom Selleck.” And it’s laugh-out-loud time with the speaker who takes “A Moment of silence” “to honor our dearly departed / dinner, this slick pink mess which was once / a chicken. Let us honor what skill was lost / with granny, who could clean and cleave / the whole bird, could butcher with the best.” In a more serious and contemplative poem, “At the funeral of a semi-distant relative,” the speaker considers her complicated relationship with her father. She ponders competing sides of his personality:
“. . . which memories I’ll cling to
and which I’ll let go of when he’s gone,
why his absence might somehow
make it easier to choose—as if letting go
is a matter of will power
when the memories cling to you
like burrs. I want to say I will miss
my father the way, in winter, you miss
the warmth of the sun
until you are stifling in August’s
thick cotton. Is it love to worship
what someone never was, to burnish
their soot back to silver, like Aunt Blanche’s
best tureen, its bowl reflecting
some image of yourself you wouldn’t mind
inheriting? Is there some nagging part of him
that knows the hours he’s spent
tending every twig of the family tree
may not offset his younger self—
the explosions of ceramic, the sudden
absences, the air for days
serrated with ice?
If only the days we adored him
could claim us with the same
blue intensity: hot afternoons
at the weedy racquetball court,
and cool gas-station slushies.
Windswept motorcycle rides,
clinging to his back. Wrestling matches
on the living room floor. . .”
One chilling poem in the collection draws on a nightmarish event that took place in central Florida. A young man named Jeffrey Bush is in his bed sleeping when a sinkhole opens up and swallows him whole. The poem explores the survivor’s guilt his brother experiences. He still lives nearby and visits the scene of Jeffrey’s death often. Powerful sinkhole imagery appears in several of Garcia’s poems.
Another standout is “Eve at 87” —after Toni Morrison’s “Eve Remembering.” Eve is noteworthy for her exuberant embracing of life, the desire “to swallow every seed, / to know the juice of anything!” Playful language invites readers to venture outdoors to enjoy the seasons with images like “the pine’s promiscuity in spring / chartreusing the world, the aspens’ bony fractals / lacing the face of the mountain.” Or like this one: “autumn strumming its amber ballads, summer / fields frothing with milkweed, the old girls / shaking out their hair. . .”
The poems in Resurrected Body are accessible and totally honest, a collection to read and reread and treasure. We at Southern Literary Review hope this busy mother of three finds time to pen more of her insightful poetry in the near future.
Elizabeth C. Garcia
Elizabeth Cranford Garcia is the former Poetry Editor for Dialogue: a Journal of Mormon Thought, previous Poetry Editor for Segullah, and a contributor to Fire in the Pasture: 21st Century Mormon Poets. She has twice been nominated for the Pushcart prize, and her first chapbook, Stunt Double, was published in 2016 through Finishing Line Press. She is a former Assistant Professor of English Literature, with an M. A. from VSU and a B.A. from BYU. Her work has most recently appeared in Chatauqua, Tar River Poetry, Portland Review, CALYX, Tinderbox Poetry, Anti-Heroin Chic, and SWWIM. She is a Georgia native.
Full disclosure: The poet was a student in my class many years ago when I taught high school English in Thomasville, Georgia. I wish I could claim credit for her brilliance, but she arrived in my class already a shining star. —Donna Meredith
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