Reviewed by Kate Champlin
Jennifer Ruth Jackson’s Domestic Bodies has an especially intriguing cover. It depicts a dressmaker’s mannequin wearing a halter top, wide skirt, and frilly apron. This dress and apron will remind many readers inescapably of the iconic 1950s housewife, while the dressmaker’s mannequin implies interchangeable people or gender and domestic roles. The cover’s background is flowery wallpaper adorned with a pattern of knives. The foreground is domestic, although the dressmaker’s mannequin implies an eerie lack of human presence in the household. The background is simultaneously domestic and dangerous. Audience members / readers opening the book for the first time will perhaps wonder if these kitchen weapons will be turned on the poet or used to attack those who threaten her.
The answer is: both. Jackson chronicles pain, loss, and the dangers of being female and disabled in a relentlessly ableist and misogynist culture. She chronicles with such sharp insight that the poems become weapons. The book provides female and disabled readers, especially, with shared weapons to turn on our attackers.
The link between horror and the domestic is also a major theme in this collection. “I’d Rather Be Dead Than in Your Shoes” depicts a conversation between friends in the kitchen. However, this conversation will likely both horrify readers and provoke a shock of recognition. “I’d rather be dead than disabled” is a common (nondisabled person’s) response to disability and one which nearly all disabled readers will have heard personally. The narrator describes her reaction to this familiar experience:
He sees me as a half-lived thing.
A caricature of all his fears. My wheelchair splashes
a boogeyman’s shadow across the kitchen cabinets. (27)
Many disabled readers will also be acquainted with the experience of being the boogeyman in others’ imaginations. In fact, it’s fair to think of “that awkward moment where someone sees you as a monster” as the boogeyman’s shadow that lurks in the back of our minds. Thus, while the poem showcases stigma or self-disgust, it also promotes community by reminding disabled readers that their (our) worst experiences are or can be shared. This awareness encourages readers to turn their anger and disgust outwardly, toward the culture that enables this common sentiment, rather than inwardly.
“The Word is Disabled” addresses a similarly common stigma while encouraging disabled readers to embrace their extraordinary identities. Jackson’s narrator declares:
I am that gimp you give glares to like candy
when you ram your cart into me. My fault?
…I am that leech you accuse of bankrupting your country.
Yours. Like it isn’t also mine. Like I can love it, butit can’t reciprocate, embrace my twisted limbs. (57)
Like “I’d Rather Be Dead Than in Your Shoes,” this poem chronicles familiar horrors: in this case, those that take place in everyday conversation, in neighborhood supermarkets, and between neighbors. Disabled readers will also be very accustomed to hearing or otherwise being subjected to these insults, and they will likely identify the horrors presented in this poem as shared experiences.
In one way, “The Word is Disabled” builds on this sense of outrage with a straightforward protest; as the title declares, the word is disabled (dammit)! In contrast, there is something strangely freeing in the way the poem responds to the slurs that it presents. The litany of “I am” seems to reclaim these slurs as it lists them. One can imagine the poet speaking back to the rude shopper and the political accuser: “Yes, I am that gimp; I am that leech. Want to make something of it?” The poem reclaims these words and does so without the shame that our culture often ties to disabled identities. Best of all, even as the poem reclaims these familiar insults, its title ensures that the original protest looms over every stanza. We are reminded that the word is disabled (dammit) each time we glance at the top of the page, and the poem makes both reclamation and preferred terminology into powerful weapons for our community’s shared arsenal.
Meanwhile, knife imagery recurs in several of Jackson’s poems. A poem late in the chapbook, “Tyranny,” particularly recalls and complicates the cover image. In this case, domestic weapons are tied specifically to discrimination or violence against women and questioned through war imagery. The poem describes a war zone which may be literal, may be part of an imagined war within United States territory, and may be a metaphor for the violence that already takes place in many American homes. The poem also reminds readers that women are exposed to special dangers both in war zones and, in many cases, on the home front in peacetime. As the final stanza declares:
For us women, they save
worse fates than bullets, generally quick,
not granted to us despite our monsoons of tears. (75)
“They” are the soldiers of the poem’s “Top Man,” but the Top Man’s identity is never firmly established. He may represent an authority figure, the literal head of an army, or a person who slips between both roles. The poem provides another link between horror and domesticity. Whether the war is real or metaphorical, it is in our homes and on our streets, and our supposed safe places will not keep us safe. What, the poem asks, can we do in such a situation? As Jackson puts it:
Who will fight back when the night smells of blood
and gunpowder when they are merciful,
when a knife is our best weapon to his grenade? (75)
I suspect that there is no answer to this question. Handheld and domestic weapons of resistance are no match for the weapons of war through mass destruction. This is especially true when weapons of war take the form of social discrimination and structural inequalities. However, if the poems here are knives, then the collection suggests another answer to Jackson’s question. Poems may be no match for grenades, for daily violence against women, or for daily violence against the disabled. Nevertheless, poems can draw attention to inequity and abuse by showcasing experience, death, and survival through unforgettable imagery. Poems can satirize discrimination and create community through the recitation of shared experiences, reclaiming insults while deriding those who deploy them. While they may be no match for war weapons, poetry’s presence is an offering that is far better than having no defense at all.
Domestic Bodies provides a sense of community through the recitation of shared negative experiences. Brilliant imagery and shocking recognition make for an unforgettable reading experience.
Title: Domestic Bodies
Author: Jennifer Ruth Jackson
Publisher: Querencia Press
Date: 2023
Back to Top of Page | Back to Book Reviews | Back to Volume 18, Issue 1 – Summer 2024
About the Reviewer
Kate Champlin (she/her) is a late-deafened adult and a graduate of Ball State University (Indiana). She currently works as a writing tutor and as a contract worker for BK International Education Consultancy, a company whose aim is to normalize the success of underserved students.