Girl in a Bear Suit by Jen Jabaily-Blackburn
Elixir Press, 2024.
103 pages. $17.

Reviewed by Amanda Auchter

Jen Jabaily-Blackburn’s debut collection, Girl in a Bear Suit, is critical reading for these times in which a woman’s story of assault or abuse is still fodder for news commentary, message boards, and memes. This extraordinary book utilizes Ovid’s Callisto, which centers on a woman whose punishment for her own rape was to be turned into a bear.  In Girl in a Bear Suit, the victimology is explored with deft language, tenderness, and wit, where the woman is both bear and “BEAR,” at once dislocated and grounded.

Girl in a Bear Suit opens with the poem “Callisto,” of which there are twenty in the collection. This version, subtitled “disambiguation,” sets the tone and clarifies the dramatic situation of Jabaily-Blackburn’s overarching narrative. In this poem, 

Callisto may refer to a dead moon 
or a girl in a bear suit. Girl in a bear suit 
may refer to itself & its reverse, a recursion
of bears & girls trading wardrobes. 
Or is it self a dead moon.

Jabaily-Blackburn’s Callisto is not just a girl in a bear suit, a shame suit, a punishment suit, an other, but is also the reverse: strong, voiced, a witness of violence that refuses to be pinned down. She is both and nothing, a dichotomy of a patriarchal society’s finger wagging and a phoenix-like character bursting forth from the ruins. This “reverse,” is similar to how tarot cards are read — right side up, one meaning, reverse, something entirely different. In this, Jabaily-Blackburn is reading her Callisto’s fortune, her future, and giving her power from this knowledge. 

“May you become a wild / thing and not remember the idea of hunter before his /arrow has gone and translated you to stars,” Jabaily-Blackburn writes in the poem, “The Many Exciting Possibilities of Metamorphosis.” This poem beautifully pairs with the poem “Impossible Houses,” where the speaker says, “on the day they say I stopped or began” and “I spent years trying to reinvent the stairway,” in that the latter reflects on the self’s injury and subsequent climb toward metamorphoses and the former, the speaker’s ultimate, heartbreaking wish for other: the body’s violence turned to stars, that the wounded psyche forgets, becomes a wild thing, rife with voice and power.

In “Callisto: Tantrums,” the speaker begins, “sometimes I forget we’re both of us now.” This chilling statement plucks the thread of not only of the duality of self, but of the before and after of violence or loss. The self is not one thing or another, not entirely changed, but not exactly the same. It is both, Jabaily-Blackburn so accurately portrays throughout Girl in a Bear Suit. In the post-traumatic response, the wounded self often will “bang on the piano” one day, and another, “cut the strings” (“Callisto: Tantrums”).

In the poem, “Callisto: Contronym,” Jabaily-Blackburn furthers the narrative arc of opposites. Here, the speaker is working toward recovery of both the physical and psychological self. “I do not want to be a cautionary tale,” the speaker says, noting “you have been mislaid” but “you yourself     vitally are not lost.” The “you” in this poem is both speaker and audience. This juxtaposition of “mislaid” and “not lost” is an incredibly powerful moment in Girl in a Bear Suit in that while acknowledging the brokenness that comes with any violent act, the essential self survives, the bear suit is only temporary, the self mislaid, but intact. 

It is this that makes Girl in a Bear Suit such a necessary and powerful collection of poems. Jabaily-Blackburn voices hope for healing and strength in spite of “the woven nets of scent” that “dragged me miles from myself” (“Callisto: Applied Classics”). The self heals. One day, it wakes up “brilliant,” where before, “Living back there was to act pressed      between glass slides / to be cross-section & mounted” (“Callisto: Applied Classics”).

“Myths have always made / witches of us when / we’ve refused to bend,” Jabaily-Blackburn writes in “In the Old Bedroom, Willoughby.” The poems in Girl in a Bear Suit takes these myths and reclaims them: girl unzips herself from the bear suit, steps out into the forest, becomes 

two sisters 
two selves

                         one bird who sings
& one never

two sisters who never
asked for harm

                         but injured asked to fly
then flew

                                       (“Callisto: Diastema”) 

The poems in Jabaily-Blackburn’s debut collection, Girl in a Bear Suit, fly, each one “a beautiful / warning” (“Callisto: Business Casual”). They grant a new mythos to the twenty-first century woman, one of empowerment even in the face of violence and misogyny. These are strong, elegant poems that play with shape, form, erudite classical tales which speak and hiss (“The Inner Moons of Jupiter”). Jabaily-Blackburn gives powerful truth to our stories, saying: “If we all lifted up our shirts / you would see / nothing, but sense / a presence of matching scars” (“The Inner Moons of Jupiter”). Jabaily-Blackburn has us shedding our old suits and skins, leaving the shadows behind, to gather our cubs (“Callisto: Mama Bear”), and to become “[a]ll beast. / All nest” (“Callisto: All Beast”). 

Amanda Auchter is the author of The Wishing Tomb, winner of the PEN Center USA Literary Award for Poetry and the Perugia Press Book Award, and The Glass Crib, winner of the Zone 3 Press First Book Award for Poetry. Her writing appears in publications such as Alaska Quarterly Review, HuffPost, CNN, Black Warrior Review, Shenandoah, Tupelo Quarterly, The Massachusetts Review, and the Academy of American Poets Poem-a-Day project, among others. She holds holds an MFA in Creative Writing from Bennington College and is a contributing reviewer for Rhino and Indianapolis Review. She lives in Houston, TX.

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