Forms of Freedom and Love Explored by D.C. Area Poets
Three Recent Poetry Collections
Reviews by Gregory Luce
Three recent books of poetry by D.C. connected poets explore themes relevant to our contemporary society and women’s roles. These themes include the expansion of possibilities for women in American life, the joys and fears of pregnancy and parenthood, and the perils of living in an increasingly technological world.
Fran Abrams is an accomplished visual artist residing in Rockville, Maryland, who turned to poetry later in life when she discovered she missed working in words. Her memoir in poetry, I Rode the Second Wave, recounts her early struggles and eventual success in entering and working in formerly male-dominated workplaces, primarily city government planning agencies..
Starting with recollections of a typical 1950s girlhood, the poet moves through primary and secondary education, the speaker beginning to chafe at the expectations for a girl. In college, she was denied a desired career in architecture by her department head.
“[He] asked me
to leave the architecture program.
He suggested I might like
interior design instead.” (“Career Plans”)
This incident typifies the many barriers and rebuffs Abrams faced on her way to a career she truly wanted. Having succeeded against such strong odds, Abrams expresses hope for a better future for today’s women.
“ [I] wish...for younger women
my own daughters and granddaughter,
to find their waves,
take a deep breath,
climb confidently on their boards.”
The story of Abrams’ experiences and accomplishments is compelling and inspiring. However, it doesn’t quite work as poetry. In effect, it is straightforward prose broken into lines. It would, I think, be much more effective as a prose memoir or series of personal essays. Nevertheless, the book should prove interesting and even inspiring for many readers, especially women who came of age after the Second Wave crested.
Julia Kolchinsky Dasbach, in 40 WEEKS, tells a much more intimate story of conception, pregnancy, and childbirth. She goes on to consider the fears attendant upon raising children in a world threatened with extinction from climate change and other human-made environmental catastrophes.
Dasbach hails from suburban Maryland, and though academic life has taken her to various places (currently Ohio), she considers the D.C. area to be her home. In this book of poetry she narrates the story of a pregnancy, a conception of choice, though her husband agrees with reservations about having a second child—given his own health challenges and childhood difficulties with siblings:
“One, is plenty, he told you,
one, already more/than he can handle
most days
…
You don’t know
what it’s like
with siblings.”
(“Week 4: Poppy Seed”)
Week by week, the experience is characterized by the growth in the fetus’ size, using seeds, fruits, and vegetables as measuring units, derived from many pregnancy guides, of conception, pregnancy, and birth. One example from too many to quote:
“Not fruit, but inverted flower,/
like you, the female fig blooms//
inside the pod.. Your belly grows/
rounder. Breasts already less//
your own.” (“Week 11: Fig”)
The final poem poses the question “Why have children when the world is ending?” The answer is tentative, provisional, but no less powerful for that:
“And maybe this is why//
we’ve made her. Because/
she doesn’t know survival//
is in our hands, forgives us/
their indiscretions, and lets us//hold her body as though/
it were a world//we could still save.”
“Why have children when the world is ending?”
A dazzling collection.
Equally dazzling but in a far more radical way is Call Me Spes by Sara Cahill Marron. In this new collection, Marron has invented a new poetic language with which to lead us through our modern-day technological Inferno, comprising loss of privacy, pervasive social media, artificial intelligence, and so on.
The word “Inferno” is apt since Dante acts as a presiding spirit and quotations from that epic and his Purgatorio adorn many of the poems. Certainly poetry alone will not save us. However, “spes” is Latin for “hope”—with the poet as expert guide, we might well find hope, indeed, even as we haltingly progress toward Paradiso. The book narrates the growing humanization of a smartphone operating system who names itself Spes, which, as it attains more and more human-like intelligence, slowly falls in love with the phone’s user. Much of the book’s narrative is made up of a mixture of binary code, machine language, and increasingly eloquent quasi-human speech. One of the most fascinating elements of the book is that Spes, though it grows increasingly adept at reading human emotions and expressing itself in human language, is utterly incapable of grasping the actual daily circumstances of the anonymous user. It knows where he is and who his most important contacts are, but is unable to know what is really occurring, To my knowledge, nothing of this nature has been attempted in contemporary poetry; the effort alone is commendable, and the fact that it is so successful is remarkable.
Marron is a D.C.area native who, like Julia Kolchinsky Dasbach, now resides elsewhere. She still has deep roots in the area and remains actively involved with the premier DC literary institution, Beltway Poetry quarterly, helping to select and edit poems, and plan and host events. I wrote a more detailed review of Spes, along with an interview with Sara for Scene4. You can find it here.
Want to read more of DCTRENDING’s coverage of the D.C. area’s vibrant poetry scene? Check out Gregory Luce’s reviews of more recent collections and Local Author Editor Norah Vawter’s interviews with local poets.
Support independent, small publishers buying your poetry directly from the publisher. You can find a copy of Fran Abrams’ I Rode the Second Wave from Atmosphere Press here. Julia 40 WEEKS from Yes Yes Books is available here. And Sara Cahill Marron’s Call Me Spes from MadHat Press can be found here.
Fran Abrams lives in Rockville, Maryland. She is the author of the full-length collection I Rode the Second Wave: A Feminist Memoir and the chapbook The Poet Who Loves Pythagoras. She has had poems published online and in print in Cathexis-Northwest Press, The American Journal of Poetry, MacQueen's Quinterly Literary Magazine, The Raven's Perch, Gargoyle 74, and many others. Please visit www.franabramspoetry.com.
Julia Kolchinsky Dasbach is the author of three poetry collections: 40 WEEKS (YesYes Books, 2023), Don’t Touch the Bones (Lost Horse Press, 2020), winner of the 2019 Idaho Poetry Prize , and The Many Names for Mother (The Kent State University Press, 2019), winner of the Wick Poetry Prize and finalist for the Jewish Book Award. She is currently working on a poetry collection as well as a book of linked lyric essays that grapple with raising a neurodiverse child with a disabled partner under the shadow of the war in Ukraine, Julia's birthplace. She is an Assistant Professor of English/Creative Writing at Denison University.
Sara Cahill Marron, native Virginian and Long Island resident, is the author of Reasons for the Long Tu’m (Broadstone Books, 2018), Nothing You Build Here, Belongs Here (Kelsay Books 2021) and Call Me Spes (MadHat Press 2022). She is the Associate Editor of Beltway Poetry Quarterly and publisher at Beltway Editions. Her work has been published widely in literary magazines and journals.
Gregory Luce is the author of the chapbooks Signs of Small Grace (Pudding House Publications) and Drinking Weather (Finishing Line Press), and the collection Memory and Desire (Sweatshoppe Publications). He lives in Washington, D.C. where he works for the National Geographic Society. He is the 2014 winner of the Larry Neal Writers Award, awarded by the DC Commission on the Arts and Humanities.