Book Review: The Book of Ugly Things (Cali Linfor)Reviewed by Linda CroninPoet Cali Linfor's first collection, The Book of Ugly Things, is published as part of a four book series under the title The Lantern Light. While I'm not familiar with the other poets or their work, I was amazed at how appropriate that overarching title was to Linfor's work. Linfor shines a light on the dark side that surrounds so many things in this world. Her use of language is very evocative and reminds one of a painter at work. While Linfor chooses to examine the ugly things that can be found everywhere in the world, she looks at them in a new way that allows hope and light to shine through. Together the poems in the collection are a celebration of hope and joy in the discovery of beauty in things which are often seen as ugly. Linfor was born with a genetic disability and feels this disability freed her from the traditional standards of beauty and allowed her to see things in a new way. Linfor's disability has allowed her to reach state of acceptance with mixed states of being. While the majority of her poems are lyric, a narrative light does shine through in some poems and in others she takes that narrative and explodes it. Linfor plays with form and uses meter and end rhyme in many poems. She varies stanzas but retains the cohesiveness of form that can often be found in the number of syllables per line. She opens her collection with the poem called "Lyric In the Light" which is effectively an examination of the effects of The PTSD. She shows the way trauma impacts the body and can be felt through actual sensations. The chest is referred to as "the resonator, muscle/memory. The cavity,/hollow that never empties" (Linfor 205). She goes on to show how panic causes the body to react. "Helpless, hopeless / the bow contracts, panics, bolts." (Linfor 205). She talks of what is known of PTSD and the reactions people have to trauma. But is at the end of the poem after Linfor has examined a topic which is often surrounded by shame, not looked at directly she gets to a line which reveals a basic impulse about these poems and her desire to shine a light on topics which may be considered ugly. Linfor writes:
Hang the lamps too in bare trees. In a later poem called "The Setting ," Linfor directly examines the place of an attack and shines a light clearly on the speaker's emotions. She describes how wildflowers have grown in "the holes my heels dug out"(Linfor 208). She wants her lover to know her and to know all signs of her, the pretty and the ugly. She writes "You have to know why/and who. I only know the place" (Linfor 208). In" Matiljia Poppy" Linfor begins a process which will happen over and over again throughout the collection, she examines an item, an item often thought to be ugly, and shows it in new light. Linfor shows the beauty that is hidden from people who choose not to look at things closely. She writes "A native showgirl / I have tried to coax into my garden" (Linfor 207) and continues further on the poem say "She is ugly too / but so full of pollen and glitz, we don't see it." (Linfor 207). "Apocalypse" a later poem in the collection is an extended narrative in some parts and in other parts an exploded narrative. The stanzas vary in length and are rich in rhythm and image. This poem along with "Stringfellow Acid Pits, Emergency Drills, and Smog Alerts" the subject of fault lines, earthquakes, remember childhood imaginings and emergency drills is investigated and explored. At the end of the first section of "Apocalypse" it is the children who know when something is wrong and not the truth. Linfor describes the practice of duck and cover and goes on to say how the children know this will not work. These poems again examine trauma and its effect. Linfor believes that in the end nature will triumph: "The dull gray sparrow will make it, transform into a new species" (Linfor 212). She goes on to say "But all the predators,/including us, will go.. . The earth may shatter" (Linfor 212). In part three of "Apocalypse" she turns to religious imagery to make her meaning clear. Time and again she describes the end of the world and how they we not ready. "We have not been to Costco lately./We don't have enough water … Not that it matters./The shockwave will dissolve us" (Linfor 214-215). Linfor returns to the idea that trauma is contained within the body, felt and experienced by the speaker. But even within all the tragedy, there is hope for healing. It is this feeling of hope that the reader comes to trust Linfor will deliver. She looks beyond the ugly, difficult thing until she sees the beauty that exists within everything. There is joy in her imagery and her language. Balance between the ugly and the beautiful is vital to her. Her language is clear and conversational. She seems have been influenced by a number of poets including Raymond Carver, Maxine Cumin, Lucille Clifton and Adrienne Rich. Her language is clear but alive filled with imagery and light. Linfor does not turn to her disability and her family history until halfway through the collection. Her mother is first mentioned in "Doing Death Drops" when Linfor describes her mother's miscarriage. It was the same day she underwent a childhood accident. "They had to seal my mouth to save my tongue./My mother lost the baby the same day." (Linfor 216). Yet just two poems later in "In The Deep Line Of My Left Palm," Linfor's mother is dead of cancer. She writes "I can't believe her last tear/is in the deep line of my left palm" (Linfor 218). She goes on to describe her grandmother, her grandfather, her lover and others. In "This Burning," she writes "I was loved so loved." (Linfor 225). In "My Lover Runs His Fingers over Me" she describes her lover finding her scars from the surgery she underwent when she was two. She just grabs something that sounds horrific yet manages to find the beauty of it. She writes "Cut/where the scar still laps into air / and bone… Don't be afraid. Enter me. Here" (Linfor 229). In "Radish's Feast" Linfor confronts her disability and that of her grandmother. Both have a genetic disability which affects the arms.
She always keeps her other hand carefully covered. Between stanzas of the one poem, Linfor has inserted what seems to be the speaker's thoughts and desires for the grandmother to tell her how to be a woman with one hand.–how to be complete even with a disability. She writes "Tell me the story/of how you have sex/with one hand" (Linfor 232). There is a narrative within the narrative contained in the italics. In the final poem of the collection called "Ugly Things," Linfor describes how she always reads the end of the book first unable to bear not knowing what the outcome will be. She explains that she does not turn the end of picture books before the first because "I trust them" (Linfor 277). Poems too are read in order; that is not because of trust, but "Poems tend to be short/I can endure what happens" (Linfor 277). She no longer needs suspense or created terror. She feels she has lived through enough. It is in this final poem that we see a peek into where her obsession with ugly things has come from. She writes:
My son, a child of four, announces She tells them all of these things can be pretty, "the crust/ of blood means healing, vapor/dances and cold air" (Linfor 278-279). Her son does not like it when two things are true at once. She goes on to say she knows one day her son will know horror that everyone does:
But we all know Truly this collection causes you to see things in a new way, to look beyond the surface appearance to the beauty underneath which is not always seen. Linfor writes in beautiful imagistic language which creates a picture, almost a painting of her world and the world as she sees it. Her language is clear and concise yet filled with images that allow the reader to visualize exactly what she means. Although when I first started this collection I was not sure, perhaps turned off by the title, but in the end I feel it is a collection well worth reading that helps the reader to re-evaluate how they see the world.
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