This Strange Garment by Nicole Callihan
Terrapin Books, 2023.
93 pages. $17.
Reviewed by Amanda Auchter
“Everything is temporary, I say in my head. // Everything is temporary, I say over and over,” Nicole Callihan writes in the first poem, “Everything is Temporary,” in her collection, This Strange Garment (Terrapin Books, 2023). The poems in this collection follow this notion of life as ephemeral. Cancer, a pandemic, hair, even the stars are fleeting in these taut and necessary poems. This Strange Garment speaks from a place of experience and wisdom, of struggle and ultimately, resilience, where not only the body becomes unrecognizable and ill-fitting in illness, so too “the absence of what defined you, / the sound of your own dumb breath” (“There is no happiness”).
How do we fight again the impermanence of the world, where “[e]ven the patriarchy, and my White Claw, and the crane’s flight, [. . .] the changing leaves [. . .] the sky, even the searching, the reaching, the naming, even those. Even this, temporary (“Everything is Temporary”)? Callihan sets up the narrative arc of This Strange Garment beginning with these questions as the narrator struggles with not just a breast cancer diagnosis, but with the everyday tasks and minute dramas of living. The poems, such as “Lost Lake,” which on the surface is a poem about friends enjoying an afternoon at a lake and motor inn, acknowledge that “It is not lost on us that we will each die. / One and then the other. Organs hardening.” In spite of this unavoidable truth, however, the speaker, as in so many of the poems in This Strange Garment, wills to own herself, to live in spite of the tragedy of being human, of living in a world awash in death and the metaphorical changing of the leaves. “I will watch the shadow of these leaves / until the clouds come, and then, I will wait / for their shape to return” (“Lost Lake”).
Callihan creates storms — real and metaphorical — throughout This Strange Garment. These are the storms which many of us suffer, endure, and when they pass, clean up from, which adds to the necessity of this body of work. In “Within Reach,” the speaker sees a coming storm move toward the house, but instead of a another poem about an ordinary storm, Callihan writes “[what is the trick for not getting stuck? // To stand in the storm like our ancestors.” This is a powerful moment, and exhibits Callihan’s ability to draw the past to the present, to exhibit the generational storms which we inherit. “How time moves through us like a current,” Callihan continues, “How the current moves through us like a wave” (“Within Reach”).
These storms, Callihan offers, are within the self, yet like anything else, they too are fleeting. It is interesting to note that the poem that follows “Within Reach” is one about this impermanence, “The Call,” creating a continuing dialog in the larger narrative arc of the collection. Where “Within Reach” ends with the line “So close. O storm, you are within,” “The Call” begins as though in conversation with the other voice noting,
And yet, there’s always
the and yet—the fish slips
through the silver net,
the strands of hair
that fall and fall
In this way, Callihan creates intimacy with her readers. Callihan’s use of specificity throughout these poems creates a space where we are able to palpate the body’s strange garment, lean it, catch the hair as it falls from the clip, shudder in the storms that flow through the body and spirit, bringing both destruction and ultimately, change in the way we see and experience the world. Callihan uses these very real moments to lean into the grittiness of struggle and survival of a cancer patient, a mother, a wife, a daughter.
The poem “Side Effects,” for example, Callihan’s homage to the William Carlos Williams poem, “This Is Just To Say,” utilizes the structure and wittiness of the Carlos poem to compare the speaker’s purple bruised fingers (“Because of the medicine”) with the famous icebox-cold plums in the original poem. Callihan writes,
It’s like I have little plums at the ready.
Only they hurt.
And they are not in the icebox.
Nor are they sweet and delicious.
Callihan’s dark wit and self effacement are the real joy of the poems in This Strange Garment. In using this particular voice, the poems are not rife with performative sorrow, but real, tangible, alive.
“One of the places to carry grief is in the mouth,” Callihan writes in “Cavity.” In This Strange Garment, Callihan gives us this grief via 42 poems, but also hope. The narrator is both one who asks “Has it passed? Am I through?” (“Blood Work”) of the chemotherapy, life, while at the same time praising “the gods” in “the peaches / in the cobbler [. . .]” and “the god in the scars, / and the god in what got cut out” and finally, “the god of the sun / on my face” (“Sunday Morning”).
“I am not the same woman who began / this story,” writes Callihan in “Desquamation.” This Strange Garment is about change experienced through the rawness of living with cancer, but more than that, is a treatise on strength, resilience, and the lessons gained from witnessing the temporal nature of living. “What comes / after the after?” the speaker asks in the title poem. Callihan answers: “A blouse // on a doorknob. The hush” (This Strange Garment”). These are poems — much like the blouse on the doorknob — that will leave the reader hushed, haunted by the ephemera of witness in the best way.
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.