Reviewed by Michael Northen
Since the publication of her first book of poetry, Elective Infinities, in 2011, Kara Dorris has been making her voice known in the disability literary community through a series of poetry collections including Night Train Home, Have Ruin, Will Travel, and When the Body is a Guardrail. As a result of her connections with other disabled writers, in 2023 she edited the ambitious anthology, Writing the Self-Elegy, which invited over thirty writers to explore their own relationships to past and present selves through poems and companion essays. Now with her latest book, HitBox, Dorris has returned with her own poems. There is much that will be familiar to those who follow her work, but, as with any poet who continues to grow, there are surprises as well.
In each of her previous books Dorris created some scaffolding that held the structure together. In Have Train, Will Travel, for example, it was a series of questions and answers–with alt-ego Sara–formatted as prose poems. In this newest book, the device is a hitbox which Dorris defines as “…the invisible shape [around a body] used in video games for real-time collision detection.” Throughout the book the author places poems that center on specific points of collision such as “HitBox: Gender,” “HitBox: The Perfect Woman,” and “HitBox: Beauty as Symmetry.” In addition, a more formal superstructure organizes the book into four sections, each containing a title. These titled sections are accompanied by parenthetical subtitles. For example, the first, “absence as reward” is followed by “(not your Madonna/whore),” clueing the reader into the theme running through the section. If this seems like an excessive concern for form, it is actually quite helpful because Dorris frequently asks the reader to reach for connections that are not easily made.
The title of Dorris’s previous book, When the Body is a Guardrail, provides another key to reading the current book. The image of the guardrail frequently appears in HitBox as the poet tries to maintain balance between one extreme and another. More than just bumper bowling, it is a continual crashing back and forth as a way of trying to move forward.
This violent ricocheting between opposites is apparent in the book’s very first poem, “Wasp Nest as Pinata,” where she declares:
I thought we should stop shaping pinatas as cute nothings: bunnies, donkeys, shooting stars. As things that never harmed. (p. 15)
Instead, she imagines them as wasps’ nests that need to be destroyed and on which she can take out her anger.
I thought I could splinter my anxious guts by spilling someone else’s… an outlet for rage & rage’s grief.
The piñata, of course, is the stand in for those aspects of society and patriarchal tradition whose bright colors camouflage the damage they do, particularly to women and those with disabilities. But her own life and actions are complicit in this situation. All she can conclude in this first poem is:
I thought we could wrap pain… in paper mache & streamers, in mystery, in the physicality of hitting & being hit, & then we could hit until there was nothing left.
Throughout the book, Dorris targets various piñatas that she feels need hitting, but is also mindful of the guardrails within which she needs to stay to avoid destruction. The hitbox poems provide specific points at which she can make some of her challenges.
Many of her targets are aspects of male culture and, not surprisingly, video games embody that worldview. A poem that takes this on directly is “What Princess Peach Says to Mario After He Rescues Her.” The trope that women are princesses in need of rescue is confronted in several of the book’s poems, but in this one Dorris lays out the difference between the way that men in love think women perceive them and how they are actually perceived. The poem’s summarizing last lines distills it all:
Yeah, I love you like a candle flame
loves a candle holder. & you, you love me
like a candle holder holds a flame. (p. 69)
While watching Dorris zero in on her targets can be engaging, her skill as a writer interested in furthering disability poetics should not be overlooked. Some activist poets prefer a free flow of words that allow them to get their point-of-view across, but even a casual look at HitBox surfaces Dorris’s concern with poetic form. Among the wide variety of conventional forms that she uses are the ode, ghazal, nocturne and aubade, most of which she signals to the reader in the poem’s title. In her efforts to move between two poles, Dorris takes a traditional form and then moves away from it. As Jim Ferris says in his foundational essay, “Crip Poetry, or How I Learned to Love the Limp,” disability poetry is poetry because it is part of the tradition that claims poetic forms, but it is also the job of disabled writers to transform that tradition by putting their own stamp on it.” Dorris herself asserts, “I have no allegiance to form once a poem has been drafted. My resistance to tradition is to take the formal elements that are working and discard the ones that aren’t.”
In “Ghazal with One-Sided HitBox” Dorris retains some structures of the traditional ghazal including the two line stanza and the repetition of the last word of the first line in the last word in each stanza’s second lines, but deviates from the traditional ghazal by making the poem narrative and not including her name in the last line. This is a risk-taking move because doing so places her between two guardrails –in this case, traditionalists and those contemporary critics who might perceive her choice to write ghazals in the first place as an example of h cultural appropriation (in our interview published in this issue of Wordgathering, Dorris addresses these concerns). Fortunately, like the haiku and pantoum, the ghazal has a lengthy tradition in American letters.
One beautiful example of use and departure from a conventional form is “Aubade with 20/20 Vision.”
It begins in a way that we might expect of an aubade:
Some mornings all we can hope for is a tumble
of light & color when opening our eyes,
to keep the line tight between sleep to dream& hear & now. (p. 83)
It is an experience that many readers will have shared, an experience commensurate with the Buddhist tradition that each morning is a new birth. We hope for light to return the shape of reality that is familiar to us and with that shaping to color the world. Dorris chooses the image of the kaleidoscope to represent the process of bringing indiscriminate shapes into focus. The aubade itself is a poem that can take any shape, and Dorris, as creator, has chosen the three line stanzas. Granted that It would be rare for a poet to pass up on the chance to exploit the many meanings of light here, Dorris takes the unexpected turn of redirecting this work into a critique of other poets, one that hits particularly hard at disabled poets who in advocating for the right to have their differences legitimized sometimes deny that to others.
You would think those devoted to clearer sight would be beyond jealousy & greed, would not steal another’s tool for seeing infinity, for expanding vision beyond 20/20. Perhaps that’s what we should fear: those who steal sight then replace it, sell back their own version (p. 83)
It is all of these elements, the play with form, the rhythmic feel and invocation of images, and the drawing in of references that make Dorris’s poetry at its best a joy to read.
In addition to her critique of cultural norms and the transformation of traditional forms, a third characteristic of the collection is Dorris’s use of reference. It is expansive and also risky, asking a lot of the reader. Is the same reader who immediately recognizes Princess Peach also going to know what liget is? In the aubade mentioned above, for example, Dorris employs two allusions. The first is a direct reference to Jung; the second is a sly allusion to a famous statement by Augustine when Dorris writes,
We chant, give me light but not too much, give me knowledge, but not too fast. (p. 84)
Nevertheless, for those who love poetry, it is these kinds of demands that make this work engaging.
When Sheila Black, Jennifer Bartlett, and I were working on Beauty is a Verb a decade-and-a-half ago, one of our criteria for the poets whose work we included was that they had published at least one chapbook of poetry. As strange as it now seems, it was not easy to find poets who met that criterion, but Kara Dorris was one of them. One of the delights of having published that anthology has been the opportunity to watch the poetic development of poets like Dorris. Her continued critique of culture from a feminist disability perspective and her inventiveness in bridging the gap between traditional and more experimental forms witness this change. For those who are already followers of her work, HitBox will be welcome because it extends those attributes that characterized her work in the past while continuing to push in new directions. For those new to her work, HitBox can reveal what disability poetry is capable of.
Title: HitBox
Author: Kara Dorris
Publisher: Kelsay Books
Date: 2023
Read Michael Northen’s interview with Kara Dorris in this issue of Wordgathering.
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About the Reviewer
Michael Northen was the facilitator of the Inglis House Poetry Workshop from 1997-2010 and the editor of Wordgathering from 2007-2019. He was also an editor of the anthology, Beauty is a Verb: The New Poetry of Disability and the anthology of disability short fiction, The Right Way to Be Crippled and Naked (both from Cinco Puntos Press). He is currently working on an anthology of disability poetry to be published by Northwestern University Press in 2025.