Reviewed by Kate Champlin
Content Warning: suicide, grief, ableist language, abuse
Khoury’s latest poetry collection is brilliantly imagistic, creative, and vibrant with emotion. It is not an easy read. Khoury’s relationship with her mother was often difficult. In one poem, she expresses her love for her mother but compares living with her to pounding a nail up her nostril while suppressing her natural urge to flinch. Moreover, while complications from diabetes are the first cause of her mother’s death, Khoury identifies her mother’s final decision to stop eating as suicide. Khoury’s grief over her mother’s death is shattering. The shadow of tragedy hangs over every poem in the collection, including those about childhood encounters outside the family. Readers will empathize with Khoury’s experiences even as they live through the emotional roller-coaster with her.
Khoury presents all manner of her experiences with her mother: both the good and the bad. Khoury’s mother once appeared to stop a rainstorm simply by yelling “stop it” at the sky (32). She left her young daughter in awe that day. Khoury helped her mother to care for their horses, and her mother also taught her to bake. On the other hand, Khoury’s mother called Jill lazy and selfish and once suggested that she was “retarded” for wanting a tattoo (40). She demanded that her daughter stop crying “unless you want me to give you something to cry about” when Khoury reacted to this verbal abuse (37). In the poem “mother you are hard to heal,” Khoury depicts her skin sloughing off and adds “a daughter would give even this if this is what it takes” (43). Any reader who has tried to keep a loved one alive by sheer willpower will relate to this poem.
Khoury employs two strategies to make her fused love and grief apparent. The first is repetition. The first section of her collection–which charts the death of Khoury’s mother and its immediate aftermath–contains four poems titled “litany / fixation.” Each of the poems with this recurring title presents the same four-line structure. Here is the first of those four poems:
whoever thought the cup & spoon
would become a terrible symboli put the reasons to crack aside
i put the reasons for choirs aside (9)
Khoury gradually puts aside the reasons for a mother and a motive, for warmongering and touching, for imagination and blossoming. Compartmentalization, or reserving certain issues to deal with later, makes the initial stages of grief endurable. Meanwhile, Khoury’s first lines juxtapose images and point out the contradictions inherent in emotional turmoil. She asks when goodbye became a “glowing irony” (12), who expected a month to “become a mutilation” (16), and who thought an egg could become a tether (23). The final poem includes an unexpected fifth line: “only a fool thinks a bomb-razed earth can rewind back into a city” (23). This complex image speaks to both the enormity of her loss and the fact that it cannot be undone. Things can grow or be built over a razed bomb site, but it will never be the same city; the ruins will always remain under any new growth.
Khoury compounds her repetition with remarkably vivid imagery. The collection’s first section also includes a poem called “all aspects of the dream are aspects of the dreamer.” The collection’s third section—which charts the aftermath of the tragedy and Khoury’s attempts to move forward—includes three more. The initial poems in this group are pregnant with dread and longing. In the first, Khoury fights her way through vines and through the traps made of kitchen implements that her mother set up to keep people out. At the end of the journey, Khoury finds her mother in her living room and is allowed to see her die “properly” (18). This poem ends on an ambiguous note, with Khoury’s therapist asking what dying properly means. However, readers can surmise that dream-Khoury will get to spend more time with a mother who does not choose to stop eating.
The imagery becomes far more disturbing in the next two poems in the set. In the second, Khoury reminds herself that she chooses all aspects of her dreams, including her decision to enter her mother’s room. She also lies to her therapist about experiencing night terrors because she wants to hang on to her mother. Inside the room, Khoury chats about cooking shows while her mother criticizes her appearance. In the third and penultimate dream poem, Khoury lies bound in telephone cords while her mother smashes her face into the carpet. Khoury uses the scent of her mother’s leather gloves to remind us that her mother was a horse trainer. This dream poem gives the most vivid image of abuse in the whole collection. The dream also appears immediately after “the psychic channels my mother,” a verse where Khoury lies to offer forgiveness to her mother’s ghost. In this sense, the third dream poem’s disturbing imagery may represent Khoury’s reckoning with the abuse in the relationship and her own lingering and unresolved anger.
Khoury’s final dream is far more optimistic. In this dream, Khoury participates in a community event called “Throw Your Artifacts in the River Day” and uses the event to purge the rest of her mother’s things from her life. The event is at once deeply personal (several participants are weeping) and a community celebration. Someone is making balloon animals for the participants. The dreamed event serves Khoury as both an opportunity to mourn and an opportunity to move forward. At the end of the poem, Khoury enjoys the extra space in her vehicle even though the van’s carpeting gives her a rash. Even when moving forward is a mixed blessing, it is still a relief.
The poem is followed by two others that are also about moving forward: one poem called “hey mama let’s start over” and another that checks in with Khoury a year later. That final poem shows Khoury lighting a candle and wondering whether she belongs in the living world or with her mother. However, it also names her as the last survivor in the family, someone who continues even through mourning (70).
These final poems are not the only hopeful notes in the collection. A poem early in the third section questions whether suicide is genetic but still ends with a gritty declaration of survival. As Khoury puts it:
i’m going a-hunting
for the part of me
that can live through this (49)
Readers will empathize with this portrait of crushing grief and with Khoury’s difficult relationship with her mother. They will be awed by her wordplay and vivid imagery. While these poems are often difficult to endure, they present a powerful portrait of survival. Readers will understand that, since Khoury continues to survive her grief, it is possible for them to survive equally devastating losses. In this sense, Khoury’s readers will also find tremendous hope in her collection.
Title: earthwork
Author: Jill Khoury
Publisher: Switchback Books
Date: 2024
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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.