Glassworks
  • home
  • about
    • history
    • staff bios
    • community outreach
    • affiliations
    • contact
  • current issue
    • read Issue 26
    • letter from the editor
    • looking glass spring 2023
    • interview with Raina J. Leon
    • interview with Sarah Fawn Montgomery
  • submit
    • submission guidelines
  • looking glass
    • through the looking glass
  • editorial content
    • book reviews
    • opinion
    • interviews
  • flash glass
    • flash glass 2023
    • flash glass 2022
    • flash glass 2021
    • flash glass 2020
    • flash glass 2019
    • flash glass 2018
    • flash glass 2017
    • flash glass 2016
    • flash glass 2015
  • media
    • art
    • audio
    • video
  • archive
    • award nominees
    • read and order back issues
  • Master of Arts in Writing program
    • about Writing Arts at Rowan University
    • application and requirements
  • newsletter
  • home
  • about
    • history
    • staff bios
    • community outreach
    • affiliations
    • contact
  • current issue
    • read Issue 26
    • letter from the editor
    • looking glass spring 2023
    • interview with Raina J. Leon
    • interview with Sarah Fawn Montgomery
  • submit
    • submission guidelines
  • looking glass
    • through the looking glass
  • editorial content
    • book reviews
    • opinion
    • interviews
  • flash glass
    • flash glass 2023
    • flash glass 2022
    • flash glass 2021
    • flash glass 2020
    • flash glass 2019
    • flash glass 2018
    • flash glass 2017
    • flash glass 2016
    • flash glass 2015
  • media
    • art
    • audio
    • video
  • archive
    • award nominees
    • read and order back issues
  • Master of Arts in Writing program
    • about Writing Arts at Rowan University
    • application and requirements
  • newsletter
Glassworks

Review: Echo Bay

4/1/2019

0 Comments

 
Picture
Transformation and Letting Go in the Las Vegas Valley
Review: Echo Bay


Kaitlyn Gaffney

Jennifer Battisti
Poetry
Tolsun Books, pp. 48
​Cost: $10.00 (paperback)






In Jennifer Battisti’s first chapbook, Echo Bay, we meet a multifaceted and singularly articulate girl and woman, raised on the fringes of the Las Vegas Valley, navigating the complexities of memory with moving poetic detail. The speaker is at once enrapturing and unabashed, exploring adolescence, marriage, motherhood, and grief with both precision and universality. Through Battisti’s unique perspective, we examine the shaded, much less glamorous fringes of the Las Vegas Valley, just as we are presented with the much less idealized aspects of motherhood and marriage. Battisti’s profound work fosters an intensity of emotion which ranges from despair to joy to acceptance as the speaker searches for the freedom of letting go. ​​
She waits...to scour out the marks--
her own choices, the only ones
she cannot abrade,
while longing to belong
to only the deep
wilderness of autonomy.
-Jennifer Battisti, “Kitchen Sponge”
Nearly all the concepts and ideas discussed in this collection spring forth from the landscape. Battisti herself, in an interview with the Clark County Parks & Recreation Department, claims that she is “interested in...weaving the iconic and the indigenous in Vegas.” As a Vegas local, she presents in her chapbook a view of the area in a personal light, mirroring the profoundly personal subjects she explores otherwise. In “Valley of Fire,” she describes that a “road slick with sun / spreads easily, like a woman / opening her inside parts.” Amidst other images of off-duty showgirls and Elvises, a nearby electric power plant, small houses, and Def Leppard playing in the desert heat of summer, the Mojave is described as a mother in “View From Lone Mountain”:
The Mojave cradles
this strange cup of longings in her center
--
a child who fits and kicks,
fights sleep.
Nurses the colic away with lavender sunrises
dipped in coyote’s breath.
These feminine, reproductive metaphors with which she describes her hometown and childhood experiences blend brilliantly with her incisive commentary on being a wife and mother. This commentary often has a strong undercurrent of trauma or tragedy, which is similarly paralleled with the natural surroundings. In her poem “The God of Small Deaths,” Battisti recounts her journey from trying to get pregnant—“I prayed for the absence of shedding”—to eventually experiencing a miscarriage. Here we see a distinction between before and after, reassimilating to a life after a seemingly irrevocable transition into the “universe” of pregnancy. An innocent debut image of doves singing during her breakfast focuses in on a darker dove that flees the scene as the speaker begins to “leak fuchsia.” She recounts her trip to the hospital with concrete imagery, and ends the poem thusly:
Later, I left with the lie
of lingering hormones--running water after
the tornado ripped the bones
from the home.
This is a tragic and explicit mention of the concept of “lingering,” which is encompassing for this collection as a whole. In this work, Battisti explores memories and emotions that sting and ravage the mind and body—which linger and, more substratally, need to be let go of. This can be seen just as prevalently in her poems surrounding the end of her marriage. Though they mark a significant transition, there is a stagnancy in these poems—a quiet, surprisingly curious period of finality following a decision made unspoken. Most notably, the poem “The Resurrection” reimagines an attempt to revive the marriage as a ritual. The marriage is described as a “forgotten heap,” and despite the attempt, we see again the resignation to the outcome of the marriage: “We are tired. Belief, light as a feather, stiff as a board. / We circle the mass like giant grieving elephants.”

Amidst this sense of surrender in her collection, Battisti is expertly able to explore that which grows and thrives in spite of that which lingers. Most literally, in poems like “The First Week,” “Jackalope,” and “Communion,” she examines the experience of having a child and watching her grow. She describes the irreversible change of life after giving birth, a forfeit of autonomy and yet a journey into the joys of being a mother: “I felt the deep pull of motherhood. / The glorious becoming by a ferocious undoing.” In “Communion,” we see a collision of the concepts of transformation and lingering, as she describes her “hips haunted by the phantom / baby straddling the notion of being separate.” She describes her placenta, shared with her daughter, as their “first Communion,” conveying a profound closeness and love that comes naturally and, despite the trials of motherhood, brings her a sense of oneness and peace.

This collection of poetry is a uniquely powerful examination of transition—into adulthood, into motherhood, and at the same time out of adolescence, out of pregnancy, and out of marriage. Just as Battisti as a speaker accepts her need to leave behind the hot, boisterous charm of her youth in Vegas, she demonstrates a steady yet emotional determination to let go in many aspects of her personal life, mirroring the two aspects poetically. However, just as the speaker must transition and continue to grow, Echo Bay makes it clear that she will never forget where she came from and, more effectively, what has shaped how she views her newfound family and sense of love; in “Fishing at Midnight,” Battisti makes this simultaneously uncomplicated and deeply impactful observation:
The moon hovered
over us, cracked in places

like shattered dishes glued back together,
refusing defeat.

The kind of loyalty I understood.
0 Comments



Leave a Reply.

    Archives

    February 2023
    January 2023
    December 2022
    November 2022
    October 2022
    September 2022
    August 2022
    July 2022
    June 2022
    May 2022
    April 2022
    February 2022
    December 2021
    November 2021
    September 2021
    August 2021
    June 2021
    May 2021
    April 2021
    March 2021
    February 2021
    December 2020
    November 2020
    September 2020
    August 2020
    July 2020
    June 2020
    May 2020
    April 2020
    February 2020
    January 2020
    December 2019
    November 2019
    September 2019
    August 2019
    July 2019
    June 2019
    May 2019
    April 2019
    March 2019
    February 2019
    January 2019
    November 2018
    August 2018
    June 2018
    May 2018
    April 2018
    February 2018
    November 2017
    September 2017
    August 2017
    June 2017
    May 2017
    April 2017
    February 2017
    November 2016
    September 2016
    August 2016
    June 2016
    May 2016
    April 2016
    February 2016
    January 2016
    December 2015
    September 2015
    August 2015
    June 2015
    May 2015
    April 2015
    March 2015
    February 2015
    January 2015
    October 2014
    April 2014
    January 2014
    March 2013
    December 2012


    Categories

    All
    2Leaf Press
    7.13 Books
    Able Muse Press
    Abuse
    Agate Publishing
    Agha Shahid Ali Prize
    Alfred A. Knopf
    Alternative Book Press
    A Midsummer Night's Press
    Andrews McMeel Publishing
    Animals
    Apocalypse Party
    Aqueous Books
    Art
    Ashland Creek Press
    Atticus Books
    Autumn House Press
    Bedazzled Ink Publishing
    Bellevue Literary Press
    Belonging
    Black Lawrence Press
    Book Review
    Bottom Dog Press
    Button Poetry
    Cake Train Press
    Catholic
    Chapbook
    Chronic Illness
    Coffee House Press
    Cold War
    Collection
    Coming Of Age
    Copper Canyon Press
    Creeping Lotus Press
    Divertir Publishing
    Drama
    Dystopian
    Dzanc Books
    Editorial
    Essay
    Essays
    Fairy Tales
    Family
    Fat Dog Books
    Father
    Feminism
    Fiction
    Finishing Line Press
    Flash
    Forest Avenue Press
    Furniture Press Books
    Future Tense Books
    Gender
    Geology
    Gospel
    Graywolf Press
    Hadley Rille Books
    Harbor Mountain Press
    Headmistress Press
    Historical Fiction
    Holocaust
    Home
    Howling Bird Press
    Humor
    Hybrid
    Identity
    Illness
    Immigration
    Jaded Ibis Press
    Journalism
    Kernpunkt Press
    Knut House Press
    Language
    Lanternfish Press
    LEFTOVER Books
    Lewis Hine
    LGBTQ
    Literature
    Mad Creek Books
    Meadow-Lark Books
    Memoir
    Mental Health
    #MeToo
    Microcosm Publishing
    Midwest
    Milkweed Editions
    Mixed Media
    Moonflower Books
    Motherhood
    Multi Genre
    Nature
    Nonfiction
    Novel
    Other Press
    Painting
    Perceval Press
    Poetry
    Poetry Prize
    Poetry Review
    Politics
    Press 53
    Prose Poetry
    Race
    Red Bird Chapbooks
    Red Hen Press
    Relationships
    Religion
    Scribner Books
    Sexuality
    Shechem Press
    Short Story
    Son
    Spirituality
    Split Lip Press
    Spoken Word
    Stories
    Suspense
    Symbolism
    Tarpaulin Sky Press
    Tolsun Books
    Torrey House Press
    Tragedy
    Translation
    Travel
    Two Dollar Radio
    University Of Utah Press
    Unnamed Press
    Unsolicited Press
    Violence
    Wings Press
    Winter Goose Publishing
    Women
    World War II
    Yale Younger Poets Prize

    RSS Feed


Picture

glassworks is a publication of
​Rowan University's Master of Arts in Writing
260 Victoria Street • Glassboro, New Jersey 08028 
glassworksmagazine@rowan.edu
​All Content on this Site (c) 2023 glassworks