Reviewed by Diane R. Wiener
Retired music educator and therapist Marilyn McVicker has been writing since high school. McVicker’s bold poetry collection unwaveringly examines what life has been like for individuals living with chronic illnesses throughout the COVID-19 pandemic; crucially, the poems address what life had been like for these individuals before anyone knew anything about COVID-19.
As has been remarked by many Disability activists, Disabled people knew about and arguably invented “mutual aid”–and understood actively its power, necessity, and relevance–way before able-bodied people came to refer to the presence and usefulness of mutual aid, largely in the context of the abled’s “lockdown” during COVID-19, particularly at its onset.
Arguing against the problematic and dangerous falsity of life having “returned to normal,” or COVID-19 being (or allegedly having become) part of “a new social/societal normal,” McVicker’s poems emphasize how isolation, mask-wearing, threats of contraction, and risks of severe illness and death are and have long been all too familiar to the gigantic number of people living with compromised immunity and other chronic health conditions.
In the first lines of “Sometimes,” the poet remarks, “Sometimes, I do not know / how much pain / one human body can contain.” This is a wise reminder. McVicker’s poems have references to whirring fans, visits to specialists, discipline, times of the day and night (and their variances in light), shifts in voicedness, clinic appointments, and plenty of strong feelings. There are questions, annoyances, dares, and all manner of understandable frustrations, including impatience. McVicker’s authorial voice could “help” a lot of people, but that is not really the goal. (More on that subject later.)
In “Resentment,” the titular emotion blooms, it “opens within” the poet on “some days.” Resentment is “like the main drain in the bottom of the pool, / sucking out everything that was buoyant, / leaving only the scum of negativity.” The poet describes how resentment “swallows,” how it feels to “come up short.” When we review poems for Wordgathering, it is not surprising that many of the poets whose work is under review share their lived reflections about being wronged by rude and patronizing doctors, being subjected to heapings of daily ableism, feeling tired, and, yes, negotiating feeling resentful. There are poems in McVicker’s collection about losing one’s hair, having one’s “Plans Derailed,” and the “Things People Say.”
I appreciate when poets can articulate “strong” feelings (among these resentment), bring them forth with candor, using imagery, by combining abstractions with idioms, and doing so without being overly florid. I am grateful when a poet can nearly knock me down energetically (with my permission, and thus my consent), with lines including, “The kids call, are going / swimming, then to hunt shark’s teeth on their way / to visit the other grandparents.” Why does such a line–this one, McVicker’s–nearly knock me over? It is so “everyday,” so positively (seemingly) “ordinary,” and it reminds me of Marilyn Hacker’s and Muriel Rukeyser’s motherly while pissed-off references to shit, cleaning, and their clues, to death and its attendant, unavoidable and uneven what-ifs and what-nots. Yet there is also a lovely and ironic reference to a shark! And its teeth. The “kids” are actually going to find said teeth from this primeval creature, now deceased, and, presumably, the children do not yet understand the pain, the resentment, the responsibility that subtends illness and aging. No need to blame the kids, but, well, someday they will understand.
In her preface, McVicker writes, “I must warn the reader that my writing is not intended to be uplifting or inspirational. For every moment or emotion I have captured on paper, there are other experiences, just as strong, but opposite. It has been a balancing act to learn to accept how I feel on any given day, to embrace and express my own humanity.” (25) I read the preface after the poems, and believe that made me appreciate these sentiments differently and likely more than if I had read the preface in advance of the remainder of the volume.
A jaunty and at times sarcastic while heartfelt treatise (yet somehow a romp), I was particularly intrigued by “Ode to My Eye Drops” (including the poet’s thanks to Sharon Olds–who incidentally lived in the same apartment building that I did, decades ago; we often encountered each other when getting our mail). Addressed in the second-person to the personified and necessary, medical substance, the drops’ companions, or “shelfmates,” are enumerated in elaborate, even fanciful detail. These items are “lined up like little soldiers” that are “ready to attack and defend what my deficient immune system cannot.”
In “Ode to My Eye Drops,” McVicker’s salutations to various substances necessary for self-care, in the context of a risky, and risk-filled embodiment, are simultaneously amusing, dire, and bold (another poem, aptly entitled “Risk,” is elsewhere in the collection):
O, Lotemax™, O loteprednol etabonate! Welcome! Come live among us!
Come join the refrigerator of gamma globulin and prescribed pharmaceuticals!
Come join the oxygen cylinders, injectables and infusion supplies!
Come join the kitchen cabinet of supplements and pills! (63)
Grief, loss, the vicissitudes of living with and dying from cancer, and so many poets’ (and this poet’s particular) pre-death curiosities about posthumous possibilities are not strangers in this collection. Despite her non-inspirational goals, and so many deeply grave subjects, the poet also writes of “Hope” in a pastoral gem:
And yet, each morning
I roll over to greet
your deep eyes,
warm flesh,hopeful the day may bring
A new bird to our feeder,
or the unfolding
of some new blossom.
Title: As for Life: A memoir in poetry exploring the isolation & loss of chronic illness
Author: Marilyn McVicker
Publisher: Redhawk Publications
Year: 2022
Back to Top of Page | Back to Volume 17, Issue 2s – Spring 2024
About the Reviewer
Diane R. Wiener (she/they) became Editor-in-Chief of Wordgathering in January 2020. The author of The Golem Verses (Nine Mile Press, 2018), Flashes & Specks (Finishing Line Press, 2021), and The Golem Returns (swallow::tale press, 2022), Diane’s poems also appear in Nine Mile Magazine, Wordgathering, Tammy, Queerly, The South Carolina Review, Welcome to the Resistance: Poetry as Protest, Diagrams Sketched on the Wind, Jason’s Connection, the Kalonopia Collective’s 2021 Disability Pride Anthology, eMerge, and elsewhere. Diane’s creative nonfiction appears in Stone Canoe, Mollyhouse, The Abstract Elephant Magazine, Pop the Culture Pill, and eMerge. Her flash fiction appears in Ordinary Madness; short fiction is published in A Coup of Owls. Diane served as Nine Mile Literary Magazine’s Assistant Editor after being Guest Editor for the Fall 2019 Special Double Issue on Neurodivergent, Disability, Deaf, Mad, and Crip poetics. She has published widely on Disability, education, accessibility, equity, and empowerment, among other subjects. A proud Neuroqueer, Mad, Crip, Genderqueer, Ashkenazi Jewish Hylozoist Nerd, Diane is honored to serve in the nonprofit sector. You can visit Diane online at: https://dianerwiener.com.