Reviewed by Daniel Bratton
Content Warning: Sexual abuse and assault, adult trauma, explicit language, harm to animals
Readers familiar with Jane Joritz-Nakagawa’s critically acclaimed long poem Plan B Audio (2020) will find themselves on familiar ground in LUNA, the author’s eleventh full-length poetry collection. Through her distinctive experimental poetics, she continues her investigation of connections between her traumatic experience of two life-changing surgeries for gynecological cancer and what, in a recent interview with Thomas Fink, she has identified as “larger themes” including life and death, social norms, and the limits of human understanding. Themes in LUNA include “not only disability and the post-cancer body but also such things as Gaza, Sudan, animal rights, Ukraine and so on.” These intersections are at the heart of what Eric Selland, in his foreword to Joritz-Nakagawa’s Poems: New and Selected, praised as her “radically open form—a framework through which the data of life, and poetic themes and materials, freely migrate. She does not reject the personal, but she does not privilege it either. It is simply part of the data.”
With one exception, the poems, prose fragments, and what she has called a “poemessay” in LUNA contain no titles, contributing to what is essentially another long poem. However, the three-page “poemessay” previously appeared under the title “my non-heroic, non-inspirational tale” in an issue of Persimmon Tree devoted to the theme of Heroes. Although she has observed that this poem, in dealing with the prescribed theme, is somewhat atypical in that “it is not like me to write narrative poems that are autobiographical to such a large degree,”1 it effectively fits into the rest of her long poem in dealing not only with personal trauma but also her refusal to valorize her response to it, as in this excerpt:
during cancer
in 2015 and 2018
i prayedfirst to live
then not to cut my genitals
then not to cut too muchthen not to take everything
few wishes are granted
in this lifeyou say I am a hero an inspiration
the bravest person you know
i am none of thesejust an ordinary person
who poops and pees
like everyone elsewho has a colostomy
and a urostomy
into plastic bags that stink itch and leak (45-46)
Correspondingly, in her interview with Fink, she remarked of Plan B Audio,
I wanted to reject the idea of “battling” cancer, as if tumors were outside one’s own body and preferred the idea of therapy or co-existence v. fight. …When I learned I had cancer, I wanted to feel peaceful not in combat with myself. I also reject phrases such as “she heroically battled cancer” because as a person with cancer I was essentially passive and vulnerable. I was unable to treat it myself, I relied totally on others. I see nothing heroic in a cancer diagnosis. It simply is a fact of life.
Her observations suggest Susan Sontag’s well-known arguments against disease metaphors, particularly the “War on Cancer,” as well as Arthur Frank’s criticisms of the restitution narrative.
Joritz-Nakagawa’s identification of social norms as a major theme in her recent poetry relates to Frank’s contention that “contemporary culture treats health as the normal condition that people ought to have restored” (77), with the “expectation that for every suffering there is a remedy” (80). The poem she wrote for Persimmon Tree underscores the disjunction between the restitution narrative and her personal experience of cancer:
i am tired
of hiding the facts
i have no bladderno anus no rectum
no ovaries no uterus nor fallopian tubes
no vagina no vulva at all (46)
In an earlier section in LUNA, she writes:
i have a body
i accept and reject
on different daysa failure to the disability
community
and body positivitylike the injured cow
lying in its own feces
i hardly move anymore (22)
Characteristically, she builds her critique of social expectations of people coping with cancer obliquely through associated images, the above simile reinforcing the theme of animal cruelty that runs throughout the poem:
cows wearing nose rings
dream of escape
you’d like to liedown with them, tell them
everything’s ok, though
that’s a lie.they will never lie
down.
And:
the sheep looks on
while its child’s tail
is hacked off by the wool farmer (21-22)
Nor do such painful and haunting images, suggesting strong identification of the subject with abused animals, support Frank’s preferred type of narrative, the quest, summarized by Angela Woods as “the arduous but ultimately triumphant ‘journey through illness.’” Joritz-Nakagawa adamantly refuses to be her own victorious hero: there is no holy grail. She writes of “the waning life / no longer looking to find anything” (87).
Rather, the poet’s often disorienting technique of juxtaposing wildly disparate images and concepts—what Fink refers to as a “chain of associative assertions”—suggests Frank’s chaos narrative, though these ongoing chains of assertions are in fact anti-narrative, episodic rather than diachronic, rejecting sequence, order, and closure. They return us to Selland’s recognition of Joritz-Nakagawa’s “radically open form,” a force field where images (“more in the mind than outside it”), brief borrowings from other sources, data from a violent and dysfunctional world, and conflicting ideas collide on the page:
swing vote deliver my trance empty muse my lost time survive shrinkage mainstream void ruptured solitude blood of clients broken warning signal i ask without speaking in my dungeon operation of symbols (same on any universe) (58)
Such passages, reaching a crescendo in the final pages of the book, push the limits of language, at times approaching Frank’s schematic realm of formlessness and meaninglessness. However, Joritz-Nakagawa does not shut readers out of her chaotic experiences, openly inviting them to enter her world through word play (often satiric) and even word puzzles, encouraging them to assume an active role in her poetic process.
In imposing form, open though it may be, upon this welter of conflicting forces, Joritz-Nakagawa both captures and stays the confusion: echoing William Carlos Williams, she records, “so much depends / on things going awry” (68). She also reveals another source of solace. Battered by the hailstorm of occurrence in both her personal life and the outer world, where “tiny babies without incubators / move frantically on a dirty / blanket trying to stay warm / their mothers already buried” (23), and a gang-raped Ukrainian woman imprisoned by Russian soldiers wants to ‘take off [her] skin,” she finds shelter:
these days there
is a cold draftbetween my legs and
a large lump
of tissue wheremy anus and
rectum used
to be thisis a serenade
to my post cancer
body in partso i kiss the warm
grass and roll
in the sun carefullylisten to the
melodies of winds
and treesan old woman
living alone
in the countrysidewhen asked if
she believed in
god she repliedshe did but that
she spelled it differently:
n a t u r e (32-33)
She is also kept going by her own sardonic sense of humor, dark though it often is. Lamenting her life in a “bubble world” removed from affirmative social changes occurring in society, she quips, “i want to march with BLM / but i live in a tiny hamlet filled with elderly Japanese who / have dementia” (43). Elsewhere, she writes, “a mushroom / resembling a penis / must be poisonous” (76). Finally, she feels empathy for those who also suffer, offering a sad sense of connectedness: “it’s a horrible / time / to be living // another’s loss / becomes / your own” (20).
These are not “easy” poems: they often sear the reader’s soul. I have never read anything quite like them. It’s remarkable that Joritz-Nakagawa has found the strength to weave humor and compassion into such a nightmarish wordscape.
Note:
The poem’s Plathian closing lines “but I’m here to tell you / I just turned sixty and I’m / alive alive alive” relate to Persimmon Tree‘s being an online magazine “to showcase the creativity and talent of women over sixty.” The quotation in the text is from an Email from Jane Joritz-Nakagawa to Daniel Bratton, 18 Aug. 2024.
Citations:
Fink, Thomas. “Exchange with Jane Joritz-Nakagawa on [“A POEM IS A CAFÉ”] in Plan B Audio.” Dichtung Yammer, 5 Oct. 2024, https://dichtungyammer.wordpress.com/2024/10/05/975/.
Frank, Arthur. The Wounded Storyteller: Body, Illness, and Ethics. University of Chicago Press, 1995, second edition 2013.
Sontag, Susan. Illness as Metaphor and AIDS and Its Metaphors. Picador, 2001.
Woods, Angela. “Beyond the Wounded Storyteller: Rethinking Narrativity, Illness and Embodied Self-Experience.” Health, Illness and Disease: Philosophical Essays. Carel, Have and Rachel Cooper, eds. Acumen, 2012, pp. 113-128.
Title: LUNA
Author: Jane Joritz-Nakagawa
Publisher: Isobar Press
Year: 2024
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About the Reviewer
Daniel Bratton (he/him) is co-founder of The Elora Poetry Centre in Ontario. After teaching for over twenty years at Toronto Metropolitan University and the University of Toronto, from which he received his Ph.D., he spent seventeen years in the Far East, primarily in Japan, where he was Professor of English at Doshisha University in Kyoto. He met Jane Joritz-Nakagawa at a poetry reading she had organized for Bill Berkson when he was visiting Kyoto. His biography, Thirty-Two Short Views of Mazo de la Roche, was short-listed for “Best Book (Non-fiction) 1996” by Quill and Quire, and other books and articles have been published in South Korea, Japan, Australia, England, Belgium, Romania, India, Canada, and the USA.