“Yoke & Feather” by Jessie van Eerden

Yoke & Feather by Jessie van Eerden (Dzanc Books 2024), described as  “a collection of braided essays,” is an intimate yet sweeping search for the “everyday sacred,” the small prayers and essential longings underlying our daily striving for connection, fulfillment, and as yet unrecognized need.

Linking seemingly discordant experiences so apt they ring harmonious as playground song, van Eerden ruminates within the mundane, connecting memories of past loves and losses to moments here and gone in a spidery blink, burrowing deep in search of illuminating connections. This moving collection explores the poetry only found in meditation on our deepest longings.

In “Bless the Smallest Hollow: On Longing and Online Dating,” van Eerden cuts through device screens and online profiles to the heart of the matter:

“What I wish the matching algorithms could do is telescope into the nonvirtual and give us side-by-side bodies, while also adding an accumulation of the next several years, to reveal to me, in the future graying and sagging and thickening, what our online profiles portend. Whether he would hold my hand if I were dying of cancer in a white hospital gown with no hair…”

Here van Eerden cuts through the smudged surface of a phone screen. The modern search for a partner may begin with the mystery of technology, but the end goal remains unchanged. While the blush of romance now asserts an alphanumeric surety, what happens when that pixelated bloom wears off? There is an uncharted vulnerability, a coded “Hail Mary,” to placing in the cold hands of artificial intelligence the hope for a solution to existential uncertainty.

The story “Answer When You Are Called” explores the value of names, those we call ourselves and those we assign to the world. Van Eerden ponders a question posed by her lover’s daughter: “Will we have to call you Mama if you and Papa get married?” “no,” I said, “you have a mama. You can call me by my name.” She considers the importance of claiming the people and places of our life with a title:

“I took him–my love with whom I’ve begun to paddle rivers–to my homeplace, where I can bob my hand fencepost to fencepost and say, ‘I touch you and name you.’ ”

Here, she can look down a familiar lane and see in her mind the face of an old friend whose name she remembers “as clear as a name on a map.” The wonder is that her companion, visiting this place of her childhood, cannot do the same.

This collection requires contemplation and, in return, inspires exultation. Interwoven stories relate the everyday to the mythic, the temporal to the biblical. Images such as “a dresser with little knobs on the drawers, a small mirror on a stand, a place to live your life, a place for making and displaying homemade cards” represent prayers for a place of inner consolation, making way for abundance even amongst ruin, where “maybe it breaks you open so you are large enough to bear God inside…”

Recurring imagery of feathers, as prayers, remembrances, warnings, create vivid, visceral responses to which readers may find themselves responding as if in direct discourse with the author. In “What I Want Your Voice to Do,” no sooner does the reader recognize their brain tingling with the formation of new folds than the author seems to reply:

“I remember back through gauzy folds in my brain, when I once read philosophy and it read like poetry, when I was twenty-one, when I wrote things in composition books that I thought could literally keep somebody alive, or resuscitate, if they were that far gone.”

Jessie van Eerden

Jessie van Eerden is the author of two essay collections, Yoke & Feather and The Long Weeping, and three novels: Glorybound, My Radio Radio, and Call It Horses, which won the 2019 Dzanc Books Prize for fiction. Jessie holds an MFA in nonfiction from the University of Iowa and teaches creative writing at Hollins University. She has also been awarded the Gulf Coast Prize in Nonfiction, a Mid Atlantic Arts Foundation Fellowship, and residencies at the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, Fundación Valparaíso, and Wildacres.