Reviewed by Diane R. Wiener
Poet and clinical psychiatrist Celeste Lipkes’s debut poetry collection draws together while highlighting distinctions between magic, enfreakment, trauma, illness, and living through and with(in) medicalization as both a practitioner and a recipient of services.
In my editorial role for Wordgathering, and as a frequent flyer in our book reviews sections, I have had the opportunity and privilege to read many works across genres that bring forward questions and offer assertions about living with, not despite, illnesses and disablement while critiquing established and often suppressive systems of power that render such questions and assertions not only affirmative but necessary. Lipkes joins many ongoing conversations about these complicated, life-and-death subjects.
The poet’s approach and aesthetic offer readers a vivid, unique and at times ironic sleight-of-hand for negotiating some truths’ illusory aspects concurrent with creativity that is no illusion whatsoever. There is a lot of playfulness in the repeated referencing of a “Rabbit” who leaps (or plural rabbits who leap) through the book five times, as if in its tall grasses, pissed off at governmental responses to COVID-19 as much as it is instructive about how to perform on life’s many stages ethically and with self-protection. “Everything the body says will be used against you,” the poet-protagonist-as-instructor-magus tells us in the fourth “Rabbit” poem (11). One must not self-indict, it seems, or be ill-prepared or surprised when the medical and other experts might seek to indict us.
Readers who appreciate mythography and enjoy / admire wordplay that is vivid and audacious (rather than “clever”—calling these poems merely “clever” would, I think, be far from adequate) will likely find Lipkes’ poems inviting, evocative, even at times mesmerizing. John Steinbeck, Homer, and sonnetized fish make appearances, too. And it is not only rabbits who manifest themselves intermittently.
There are five poems entitled, “Dove,” five called “Hemicorporectomy,” and five “Escape”(s). “Rabbit” and these three together and separately create a kind of interweaving musical leitmotif, with each one bracing the book’s main sections like a Four of Wands might make meaning in some Tarot decks. I was reminded of Russian composer Modest Mussorgsky’s often cited and adapted 1974 piano suite, Pictures at an Exhibition, except the settings in Radium Girl are comprised of anti-didactic lessons for one’s lover co-mingled with hospitalization and near-death-experiences.
I know, for me, how it feels when the three words “we found something” are uttered by a whitecoat. The second “Rabbit” poem brings this horror to bear, in solidarity with readers, with some feeling of humor, as when the poet says, “When the doctor says, ‘We found something,’ / I don’t say: ‘no shit’ or ‘oh thank God / I’ve been looking for that sweater everywhere” (5). The poem “campanology” (“n. the study of bells”) includes references to mathematical proofs, a “mishear[ing]” of the cinematic soundtrack to The Diving Bell and the Butterfly, and charcuterie. It concludes with a sensuality present in a lover’s absence: “memory lapping endlessly” (45). Lipkes has a wide berth for references and imagery.
There is no titular poem, though “Radium Girl” makes her appearances. In the final “Hemicorporectomy,” we learn this protagonist is “the woman” who “is pinned in a box, / perforated with swords / & cut neatly in four / like a pill too strong / to take whole” (53). No shit, indeed, doc. Yes, more references to magic, but not to trickery. Rather, we are privy again to women’s long-standing experiences with or of being scored. And if, for example, you might want vivid “Instructions for Exiting the Psychiatric Ward,” there are details available in the first instance of “Escape” (57).
Lipkes offers some of the poems to invoke unusual kinds of prayers. That happened for me. And I didn’t just feel a sense of magic, humor, or irony, either, when reading these poems. After all, radium can be lethal when it is unprotected, intrusive, or excessive. In 1939, a time period that is seeping tragically and infuriatingly into the present, Noel Gay and Ralph Butler wrote the song/send-up, “Run, Rabbit, Run,” referencing two rabbits who were allegedly killed in Shetland during a German air raid. This song, an apologetic refutation of oppression, was later transformed into a British nursery rhyme. It has also been referenced in popular culture examples ranging from horror movies to the Muppets and Looney-Tunes characters. So, too, these poems range in their currency, delivery, and style, rabbits and their company at turns laughing, making jokes, and playing hard and fast with serious, including deadly, subjects.
Get out of the hat; read the book.
Title: Radium Girl
Author: Celeste Lipkes
Publisher: University of Wisconsin Press
Year: 2023
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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.