Reviewed by Diane R. Wiener
Fifteen poems appear in Sheila Black’s Medea in the Night Sky, designed, published, and handmade by Su Zi for Red Mare in a limited edition.1 Little did I know when I was fortunate enough to have acquired one of the 35 copies of this beautiful chapbook that the subject, definition, and gravity of Habeas Corpus would soon be garnishing so much attention.
In “Medea Speaks of Habeas Corpus,” via Black’s elegant delivery, the truth undergirding (mythic-genuine) Medea’s murderous acts are described cogently while the reader is led to understand how Medea might wish and hope for us to join her, somehow, in her story, complicating the infamous scenes and their relentless circumstances: “Her secret was she said no—or rather / she took revenge for the yes // that once filled her so exultantly. A woman / even alive might as well be dead.” As Muriel Rukeyser famously said in her poem, “Käthe Kollwitz,” “What would happen if one woman told the truth about / her life? // The world would split open.” Indeed, perhaps reflecting on Rukeyser, too, we are met by these lines from the conclusion of “Medea as Black Hole”:
What I transgressed with my crimes,
hands burned and scraped—that was love, too. I wanted, yes,
to pull the whole spinning worldback inside me. I could remember what
it felt like—laying my ear to its belly. (10)
As happens in so many of Black’s prior poems, grief, love, remorse, and feminism are linked in Black’s transmutations and offerings of Medea’s story. Talking with Medea, reflecting on having just interacted with Medea, the poet-protagonist asks—after (as Black notes) Roland Barthes—“why it feels / like a betrayal: that the one who loves / begins by believing they are loved.” (“Crush”) I am reminded of Carson McCullers’ tragic, iconic, and moving description, in The Heart is a Lonely Hunter, of the relationship between the lover and the beloved. The former must endure the pain of their pining unrequitedly for the latter in part as a consequence of the concurrent impossibility and necessity of their power dynamics.
Vitally, I find this work is readable as a Crip or cripped narrative of Medea, as in: “To be a body, to be in a body, // to hold as one holds a shell, / the plated skull, / avoiding the part that has not closed yet” (“The Life of Birds”). Images of longing, astronomy, woundedness, and flowers sweep in waves through the text. Black tells us of “the stars that showed us // what it is to live within the enduring fire // of regret. They showed us other things, too” (“Medea in the Night Sky”) and how “Some rivers tug their young back inside them / to float / upside down and stare back up at us” (“Medea on What Isn’t There”). It is unsurprising given the subject that motherhood arises, ebbs, and flows: “every mother is lonely” (“Medea as Black Hole”).
In his praise of For the Loneliness of Walking Out, Ilya Kaminsky reflects, “Lyric wisdom is rare. Lyric wisdom that comes without pretense, and is open, even vulnerable, graciously dipped in experience—is rarer still” (back cover). Medea returns several times in this chapbook, addressing and interacting otherwise with weather, stars, spiders, and—again—Black and (if we wish) the rest of us.
“I trained my children to be anti-capitalist / and now I work to support them,” we learn in “Mother/Medea,” and then I want to wonder, perhaps aloud, where “we” who mother differently while similarly are in this moment and what time it is today…as I am perhaps made aware when I then read of: “Each day / the shadows folding up their umbrellas to walk home” (“Everywhere and Nowhere at the Same Time”).
The poet and Medea have late night talks, again and again, as Medea attempts to school the poet kindly while candidly and the poet displays aching concerns, a longing mixed with assertiveness.
”Watch my lips,” she says,
”No safety,”and I think of how in the night I have hugged myself,
so lonely I felt like a blade of the moon,some sort of chipped metal, a mezzaluna
over a board of onionskin and tears. All she would like me to do
is sit down with her at a tableand drink stewed tea in the bleached morning.
(“Medea Talks About Our Stars,” 28)
Thank you, Sheila. Yes, I can do that. It rained here for nearly all of May. Summer is coming.
Title: Medea in the Night Sky [Red Mare 27]
Author: Sheila Black
Publisher: Red Mare
Year: 2024
Title: For the Loneliness of Walking Out
Author: Sheila Black
Publisher: Lily Poetry Review Books
Year: 2025
Note:
- Red Mare limited editions can be purchased via Etsy from creator Su Zi.
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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, For The Birds Arts & Literary Magazine, 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.