Reviewed by Matthew Konerth
Content Warnings: Violence, murder, Covid-19 pandemic, colonialism, ableism
The word “drift” is often utilized in Diver Beneath the Street, an exquisite collection of poems by disability scholar, performer, and activist Petra Kuppers. Many poems are prefaced by short notes on drifting. As a few examples, the poem “Desert Song” begins with the preface “upon drifting in Joshua Tree National Park” and “Gothic” contains a similar note, “upon drifting at Lillie Park, Ann Arbor” (55, 74). When approaching Diver Beneath the Street, the concept of drifting not only reveals a key insight into Kuppers’ method as a writer, but acts as a guide with which to immerse oneself in this remarkable text. In order to truly drift, one’s mind must be open to the pushes and pulls of nature. By drifting, one disengages with anthropocentrism, and as a result, may end up in some unexpected places.
Equally inspired by Adrienne Rich’s “Diving into the Wreck” and the darker, original Brothers Grimm folk tales,1 the poems of Diver Beneath the Street drift through time and space, although rarely in a linear fashion. Kuppers’ poetry drifts through German fairy tales, colonial violence, murders of young women in Michigan and Maryland, and her own struggles with dis/ability throughout her life but especially during the Covid-19 pandemic. The only true witnesses to all of these events are ghosts and grubs. Kuppers’ poetry conjures spirits from a violent past, but places equal weight on the spiders, beetles, trees, and fungus who witnessed it all.
Kuppers’ work, here and elsewhere, is heavily influenced by ecosomatics, a field focused on embodiment with nature. Yet Kuppers avoids over-romanticizing nature while still recognizing its importance. Kuppers writes several poems exploring the anatomy of spiders and how fungal spores travel. Yet she also writes about earthworms as “European settlers who came with the colonizers in the 1600s, arriving in the roots and ballast” (86). In Kuppers’ exploration of dis/ability, and gendered, racialized, and colonial violence, nature is not only a witness but often an active participant.
In addition to Kuppers’ literary and ecosomatic influences, Diver Beneath the Street is a deeply personal work. It is an intimate invitation to memories of growing up queer in rural Germany, to Kuppers’ discovery that she lived next door to a site of horrific violence, to living with dis/ability and especially the recent horrors of Covid-19, where she describes herself as a witch in isolation:
The cauldron cooks. My fridge shoots
takeout’s white flags. A tiffin steals through the door,Witches’ helper in stainless steel. Transport vehicles
Hover clean, disinfected within an inch of their plasticlives. The gig economy thrives in delivery stakes,
Even if Uber burns, Shipt tips into the limelight.Leave the bags in the pentagram on the curb,
Do not cross the threshold. Deduct a trip a week,Five miles gained in an abacus of parsimony.
Netflix soars on prayer and thoughts. (46)
There is a deep, aching sadness in Diver Beneath the Street. Kuppers plays with fantastical, gothic metaphors as a means of processing and hopefully healing. Just like in Adrienne Rich’s “Diving into the Wreck,” which Kuppers says she is “swimming with” throughout her work, poetry is used to map, and perhaps understand, the damage that has been done by white ableist patriarchy (86).
If there is one caveat to my recommendation of Diver Beneath the Street for readers of Wordgathering, it is that readers should not approach this collection looking solely for poems focused entirely on dis/ability. Kuppers project is highly intersectional and acts as a wonderful refutation of the #DisabilitySoWhite paradigm. Her poetry encompasses all that is dehumanized or considered abject. It is a visceral, raw exploration of bodies and the remembrances of senseless violence done unto bodies. If that sounds compelling, Kuppers extends an invitation:
Will you dive with me, explore the wreck, with creatures and spirits, inside and out, towards dissolve?…
If I tell the truth, I am the diver. If I tell the truth, these women have been dead for as long as I have been alive.
If I tell the truth, there’s the visceral thrill of her skipping along the railway
line where Amtrak runs, the last glimpse, the beret on top of her head, her
thoughts on her school exam, a gumball stuck in her teeth.I do not see the dark wave pulling her under, the man, black hair and leather, sun kissed
skin.The diver sinks deeper into the muck. (xii, 3)
Title: Diver Beneath the Street
Author: Petra Kuppers
Publisher: Wayne State University Press
Date: 2024
Note:
- As Kuppers highlights, the name ‘Brothers Grimm’ erases the contributions Jenny Von Druste-Hülshoff and others made to folklore.
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About the Reviewer
Matthew Konerth (he/him/his) is a doctoral candidate in the University of Denver and School of Iliff Joint Doctoral Program. His areas of interest include critical feminist dis/ability studies, as applied to media studies as well as horror studies. Specifically, his scholarship hybridizes feminist and dis/ability theories and methodologies to further the mutual goals of both fields. His article “After The Queen’s Gambit (2020): The Rise of chess.com and the Chess #MeToo Movement” was recently published in the Board Game Academics journal. Matthew’s scholarship is informed by his own lived experience with Bipolar disorder, and his contributions to critical dis/ability studies focus on destigmatizing neurodivergence.