Re- View #10:
The Only Card in a Deck of Knives
Lauren Turner, Buckrider Books, an imprint of Wolsak & Wynn, 2020
By Jami Macarty, co-founder & editor w/ Danielle Hanson, guest reviewer & former contributor
Jami: Here we are, welcoming Re- View #10 to The Maynard Views Series! Hello Danielle, it’s lovely to have you join me as a guest reviewer for this tenth review in the Series. You’re a two-time contributor to The Maynard (Spring 2018 and 2020 issues); plus, your second poetry collection, Fraying Edge of Sky was reviewed in Re- #7 of the Views Series. So, I’m excited to have your company on this side of the editorial conversation to talk about The Only Card in a Deck of Knives, by Lauren Turner. Lauren Turner was also a contributor to the Spring 2018 issue; her poem “Cracked Fabergé Egg of Yes,” included in her debut collection, joins yours. I excite at such visits to the Isles of Serendipity!
Danielle: I remember Turner’s poem from that issue! I love the way she approachs a subject directly, then backs into metaphor and telescopes out again, multiple times, allowing readers to digest hard emotions. She uses the mix of emotional distance so well in The Only Card in a Deck of Knives too, and I appreciate that. Speaking of things I appreciate, it’s really nice to participate in a book discussion with you and The Maynard. I’m excited every time a new issue hits my inbox. I love that the editors take risks with poems that are somewhat odd in imagery or style. It was gracious of you to discuss Fraying Edge of Sky in depth in this series. I hope I can do justice to The Only Card in a Deck of Knives.
Author photo credit: Sadie Wiarda
Jami: I want to start with the title of Lauren Turner’s debut collection, using it to bring to the foreground the prevailing themes of The Only Card in a Deck of Knives. The title alerted me to themes I expected to be taken up by the poems. First, there’s the reference to the idiom: “Play the hand you’re dealt.” Indeed, Turner’s are poems that address the hard-to-accept, hard-to-deal-with realities of a woman’s life that’s comprised of a hand of sharp, potentially wounding and murderous weapons. Second, while I’m no devotee of Tarot, there seems to be a reference to a suit from that mysterious deck.
This is a dark carnival. What a wonderful way to add intrigue and mystery, to make the subject matter seem big and important beyond the poet.
Danielle: I don’t know the Tarot but felt similarly that it was involved, as part of a larger carnival world. This is especially true in the long prose poem “Blitzed Out” (18-23), which mixes a bad relationship with a seemingly older, more powerful man with: contortion and acrobatics (“Scrawny in an acrobat’s velvet suit, I try to contort into his life,” 18); ventriloquism dummies (“Fresh girl roped up in the lace of vintage dummies. I can see why you’d like that,” 19); magic (“Two truths to keep as doves under my silk hat,” 18); along with a peep show of sorts (“I guess it was my week on show. Rose breast held to the glass. / / But he kept young women behind so many windows. Ready to please,” 21). All this brings to mind knife throwing, given the title. This is a dark carnival. What a wonderful way to add intrigue and mystery, to make the subject matter seem big and important beyond the poet. It takes the material beyond the personal history and into destiny, after all.
Jami: “Playing the hand you’re dealt” is put another way in the collection’s first poem: “This is your waltz. / Sway to it” (“Engaging the Core,” 15). So, we’re in the metaphoric realm. In the same poem comes the question: “What does this body symbolize?” This is a foremost inquiry of Turner’s poems. The cards drawn in this woman’s life, the “knives” handed to this body mostly fall into two categories: trauma and illness. Both are gendered. That is, they are particular to women’s lives.
Danielle: I was struck by the themes in this book and how Turner was able to be playful with language and metaphor given the seriousness of what is at stake for the poet. I think that’s why these poems resonate so well for me. It would be easy to take an overly confessional, melodramatic route with the subject matter but Turner’s writing is too surprising for that. She is able to take the physical and make it a show. I see a split on the illnesses though: the physical illness that affects the mental (LAM), and the mental condition that affects the physical (bulimia).
The cards in the suit of trauma show assault, abuse, mistreatment, and power games between the poet and the men in her life.
Jami: The cards in the suit of trauma show assault, abuse, mistreatment, and power games between the poet and the men in her life. To some extent, those hard-to-live-with cards are on the reader’s table from the beginning. However, the illness is only tipped off by the recurrence of distilling words: “puking” and “tumors.” It isn’t until about midway through the collection that the reader knows for sure what the illness is: lymphangioleiomyomatosis (LAM), a rare pulmonary disease that is said to occur nearly exclusively in young women: “Tumors show up as black pinpricks, and LAM-infested lungs fill up” (“Quit Dying to Die,” 46). What do you make of the delay—the playing of some cards while others are held close to the vest?
Danielle: Could this be chronological for the first few sections? In “Self Trolling” (16), Turner mentions being twenty-four. “Blitzed Out” tells of an abusive love affair: “how we met on the terrace at Grumpy’s when I was twenty-three and the next two years are a smudge,” (23). In “Copywriting for Pornstars” (36), she already has “an M.A.” In “Quit Dying to Die,” she’s “twenty-six … she’s an emerging female poet” (41). Whether the poems follow the age of the poet or not, I like the progression. The violent, sexually charged imagery in early poems like “Blitzed Out” (18-23), “If You Haven't Found Me Yet, Say Goodbye” (25), and “Between Push and Shove” (33) offset the reader, sort of as a dominance play. I think this allows the poet to talk about more intimate topics from a place of strength. The male-to-female violence in the early poems is intimate, but it comes from outside the body. What’s more intimate and personal than your body attacking itself from the inside? I’m thinking of the LAM diagnosis here. How do you escape from your body’s abuse of itself?
Jami: Staying with the long prose poem, “Quit Dying to Die” (41-47), which forms “Appendix I,” the collection’s first of two appendices, it’s revealed that cancer isn’t the only medical issue the poet confronts in and through these poems: “LAM is keeping [her] bound in a paddock of question marks” (47); “Bulimia feels like taking control” (47). Turner writes, “It’s a clear-cut path, according to my therapist,” who draws an equation between when “feelings aren’t validated as a little girl” and “validation is contingent on perfection”: “perfection requires control” (47). Control “of course, is a mirage” (47).
I like the prose sections. I feel they expand the understanding of the subject matter of the poems, and they felt like palate cleansers.
Danielle: Up to this point in the book, we’ve been in a world of wild metaphors and language that forced me to work hard. Coming to a prose poem was a relief and a break. At least it seemed. But one sort of hardness was traded for another. I think the form Turner uses here allows her to give context to the book and connect with the reader on a personal level. It’s where the book gets very real and the stakes go very high. I like the prose sections. I feel they expand the understanding of the subject matter of the poems, and they felt like palate cleansers. The change in form is a powerful way to change the rhythm, slow down the reader, and make scientific medical language be read as poetry.
Jami: Continuing with “Quit Dying to Die” (41-47), which plays all the cards in the illness suit. The point is not only which illnesses, but who’s ill. The illnesses the poet contends with are presented and labeled as women’s. Medicine is, in part, responsible for gendering illness, further perpetrating and perpetuating systemic biases detrimental to women. Medicine, according to the experiences of the poet (and many other women), seems inclined to affirm principles of right and wrong behavior and of goodness and badness in human character through diagnosis: “It sounds like a fairy tale meant to scare little girls but, I can’t find the moral” (“Quit Dying to Die,” 41). What illness reveals about gender, and what gender reveals about illness are among the poems’ central concerns.
Turner’s particular knives are very heavily slanted toward women.
Danielle: I agree. Turner’s particular knives are very heavily slanted toward women. She tells us LAM affects very few men. Domestic sexual violence is largely against women. Bulimia is predominantly a female disease.
Jami: Turner’s argument that medicine and illness are gender biased find voice in this passage from “Appendix II, A Masculine Division” (71-76), another long prose poem:
My disease is female-gendered. The afflicted cohort calls themselves Lammies, sports pink feather pins and bemoans the babies deflating their lungs. I commit none of these acts, presuming myself above it all and being medically barred from reproduction. I refuse to join the league of dying women who believe grief is impolite, somehow unfeminine and should be hidden (72).
Within her poems, Turner actively resists these colluding energies within society, medicine, within other women, even internally.
I appreciate how this passage speaks to the collective and singular. The thing—a particular diagnosis—that brings the “league of dying women” together doesn’t necessary indicate that each will respond to the disease in the same way. Nor does it indicate that they will follow, or that there should be, a singular path to “grief.” The conspiracy to keep women “polite” is everywhere! Within her poems, Turner actively resists these colluding energies within society, medicine, within other women, even internally.
Danielle: I love this section. To refuse to be feminine in your feminine disease. There’s also this passage in the earlier prose section “Appendix I, Quit Dying to Die” (41-47):
If you’re looking for a princess, there isn’t one. I am the tower. Everyone wants to get inside the tower, or protect it from other assailants, because they believe a good little girl looks out its eyes. But those windows are empty (42).
Again, the refusal to be stereotypically feminine. And that amazing twist of the feminine missing from the windows of the woman.
Jami: This is a good time to map the structure of the collection, especially its appendices. The collection’s partitioned into five sections, each with an organizing theme: “bad” relationships; violence against women; who wields the weapon of power; negotiating the agreements of marriage; abuse of power in a relationship with a teacher/mentor. The collection also contains two appendices, each of these and the final section is comprised of a single long prose poem. “Appendix I, Quit Dying to Die,” appearing after sections I and II, focuses on illness and gender: “There are women in life’s prime with soft hair and clear eyes. / / While under the canopy of skin, their lungs bloom with minute holes” (41). “Appendix II, “A Masculine Division, appearing between sections III and IV,” focuses on power struggles between men and women: “Men can’t be crumpled down to zero, yet women are born there” (“A Masculine Division,” 71). “Appendix” here serves functions both anatomical and literary, a perfect word choice for this collection. Even as the word adds a layer of meaning and a ligature between medical and artistic realms, Turner’s appendices are indispensable complements to the topics explored.
These sections speak directly to bulimia, gender violence in medicine, and male predation in academia.
Danielle: Wow, I hadn’t caught the double meaning of “appendix” in my first reading. Turner’s use of language is stark and unusual. It forces you to stick with the poem and not wander. It also adds to the strange and “other” vibe of the images. She drops pretense and moves to more direct, plain language for the three prose sections. These sections speak directly to bulimia, gender violence in medicine, and male predation in academia. They’re compelling because of the break from poetic language, and because we’re already off-kilter from the strangeness of earlier delineated poems’ language and imagery.
Jami: To build on the connections between the biological and the artistic, and the importance of terms and diction, check out the multivocality of “purging.” In medicine, this refers to the expulsion of food; in legal texts it means removal of a group or people from an organization. Turner puts both meanings in play: “There’s something noble in saying purging, rather than puking or vomiting (“Quit Dying to Die,” 45). She applies it to writing itself: “This text writes a purge” (“Quit Dying to Die,” 45). Via writing, Turner asserts both the removing of herself from the impersonal—the monolith of women from whom society expects certain behavior—and asserting the personal in her artistic expression.
Danielle: I love Turner’s sentence in “Quit Dying to Die”: “When I still thought my body could be un-sicked, I was bulimic” (41). The idea that when she had bulimia, she perhaps felt in control of what was happening with her body, but wasn’t. And then when she is diagnosed with a serious physical illness, it implies she was able to gain some control over the bulimia. But the body could never be completely well. It’s just a trade.
Regardless of audience, this poetry insists on the telling and retelling...
Jami: Purging requires “retelling.” The poet uses her lines to enact a “retelling,” all the while aware of the dissatisfaction implicit therein: “No one appreciates this retelling” (“Blitzed Out,” 21). This reminds me of the composition teacher’s admonishment: “Show, don’t tell.” Turner’s statement also implies audience: Who wants to hear her story? Who is listening? Regardless of audience, this poetry insists on the telling and retelling: “When asked to put this story down, I need to be the one who answers” (“Stop Bringing Me Here,” 106).
Danielle: There are some things that you have to say. In fact, in a highly image-driven work, direct language can be a knife (reference intended). Take the sentence from “Quit Dying to Die,” where Turner describes her bulimia going into remission after her LAM diagnosis: “I stopped trying to die, because I am dying anyway” (45). Is there any metaphor or image that would express that as eloquently? She’s surrounded the direct language with metaphoric language. So, it’s even more stark when you encounter it. Again, telescoping in and out of emotional distance and directness of speech.
Jami: With purpose, Turner picks up her story and asserts her duty as narrator. In the process, she points out differences between art and life, poet and memoirist. In the end notes, Turner writes: “A book of poetry isn’t a memoir. This collection is an imperfect gathering of personal thoughts. As Björk said, You shouldn’t let poets lie to you ” (109).
Danielle: I copied the Bjork quote into my phone and have been telling people about it.
As the poet reveals her personal subjugations and injuries, she also places her struggles within the global context of mistreatment of women, including within medical and artistic domains.
Jami: To me this statement clarifies that the biographical aspect of these poems is only part of the focus, one subverted for a more basal imperative—to retell, to purge, to go on record about the abuses suffered and sustained by this woman. As the poet reveals her personal subjugations and injuries, she also places her struggles within the global context of mistreatment of women, including within medical and artistic domains. Women artists, such as Cuban performance artist, Ana Mendieta, perhaps best known for her astonishing “Earth Body” series, serve as examples and as equals within Turner’s artistic conversation. The names of Mendieta, who may have been murdered by her husband, and others brutalized by the patriarchy, are spoken, summoned to the present, revitalized in spirit to forestall the forgetting of their persons and their arts. Turner does this calling to present for herself, too. She draws apart the curtains on her life and the lives of her sister artists to lay bare some truths about a woman’s life: “curtains don’t open, they expose” (“Two Atheists Banking on Afterlife,” 28).
Danielle: I had to research Ana Mendieta because I was intrigued. This book is a book about violence against women, but it’s also a book about the love between women. How they protect each other. Turner writes: “When you’re a woman / in love with your friends, the scent you offer the hunt is your own” (“She Found Me Taking Photos of the Snails and Wondered Why I Was So into Being Down,” 37). In “Quit Dying to Die,” the poet meets a friend for meals while bulimic:
At my bulimia’s worst, she was the only in-person friendship I kept. Every Saturday for a summer, we met in a Turkish café to write. We’d order beetroot simits and eat them, alongside several black Americanos.
This shared meal was satiating then. But under any other context, I’d have purged it (42).
Women taking care of women’s stories and each other. That’s another truth of this book.
Turner is careful with the Ana Mendieta story in “A Masculine Division” (73-74), and Ana Mendieta cares for Sarah Otten’s murder. Women taking care of women’s stories and each other. That’s another truth of this book.
Jami: That points me back to “Appendix II, A Masculine Division” (71-76). This appendix brings to the fore medicine’s long history of “[i]gnoring female pain” (71). Society, with its penchant for pathologizing and delegitimizing such pain, is deeply implicated: “Often a sick woman is deemed entirely psychological, her symptoms a delusion of the synapses” (71). “This is another act of division”; “[i]gnoring female pain is an active violence” (71). To spotlight the dismissal of a woman’s trauma is to demonstrate care—for other and self. It’s vitally important for women to tell our stories. That’s one way we take care of ourselves, one another, the world.
Turner approaches this topic with an expansiveness of definition, calling out violence against women in its many forms.
Danielle: Yes, and what a good point to make in a book about the various violences to a woman’s body. Turner approaches this topic with an expansiveness of definition, calling out violence against women in its many forms. In the process, she forces readers to reflect on how impactful they can be collectively and how we should take each story seriously. In the final poem “Stop Bringing Me Here” (99-106), she writes about being shut out of access to power and education, due to a mentor shunning her after she and a different professor sleep together, with no apparent consequence to the older man: “my former mentor won’t look at me, hasn’t since finding out I’d been involved with you” (99). She continues, “I trusted you, [former mentor], but you prefer to trust power” (100). Add this betrayal to rape, medical issues, stress, disease, domestic violence, etc., and see how hard it is for women to be happy, healthy, and successful.
Jami: Staying with “A Masculine Division” (71-76): What if what makes women ill is men? Turner writes: “I read a memoir where the author divided her illness by men. This arithmetic isn’t useful to me and I have actively employed it” (71). Just like the statement, claiming the deductive reasoning “isn’t useful” splits into “actively employed,” the question as to men’s involvement in “female pain” can be thought of in two ways. On the one hand the question points to the medical patriarchy, where men wield the power and pigeonhole women in diagnosis. In psychological terms, women unable to escape the pigeonhole of diagnosis often become ill or go insane through broadly institutionalized disavowals of their pain and trauma.
Danielle: Yes, as we learn more about the connection of the brain to body, and we know about the stress women undergo, it is not surprising that we have a larger share of hard-to-diagnose, unspecified illnesses. The laziness and hubris of highly educated males, dealing with something they do not understand compounds the trauma. As Turner puts it in “A Masculine Division”: “Abridge violence against women with an illness thought to affect only women and the illness becomes a violence killing women” (71).
Turner is not, in the least, identifying as a victim. She turns trauma into power.
Jami: I want to turn toward the reliability of the narrator, the poet. I find Turner convincing in her assertions, as she invites me to peek “into [her] past’s foyer” (“Completely Gutted to Hear (of your Diagnosis),” 60). Through emotional authenticity and careful contextualization of abusive experiences, Turner calls out her abusers: “They don’t get forgiveness / just because you’re dying belongs in a poem ” (“Completely Gutted to Hear (of your Diagnosis),” 60). However, Turner is not, in the least, identifying as a victim. She turns trauma into power. I am grateful to her for writing, retelling, and purging from a position of empowerment. It’s enough for her to tell us, through her biographically open poems, what’s shaped her as a woman and an artist: “It takes gall, encountering / your foes in the thicket of blatancy” (“A Singular Abstract to Collective Pain,” 59). I am with her!
Danielle: Yes, Turner directs the reader and keeps them on their toes in a way that shows she has power. Good art surprises, and Turner mixes imagery and language in ways that surprise.
Jami: Ordinarily “retelling,” which tends to bring to the page thinking and writing that is already resolved, turns me off or bores me. Too often “retelling” asks little of me as a reader. I don’t want to be a receptacle. I want to participate as the text unfolds. I am not always willing to answer the poet’s demand that I witness their private lives. True to that, I balked at the suggestions that I am “implicated” or provide the poet’s “makeshift altar” or “confessional lap” (“Quit Dying to Die,” 45). I assert that I am free to give my attention as I am called to the poems and poet.
Danielle: Could it be that Turner is in an imagery-world that she hasn’t brought us into yet? These are both religious images. I don’t remember others from the book that are similarly religious. Also, these feel a bit more sentimental as images, more in the victim/confessional space that I don’t tend to enjoy reading.
Most of all, it is her voice, its tones of irony, pathos, humor, despair, and especially deep self-scrutiny, that compels my attention.
Jami: I tend to regard “retelling” with skepticism because it can lean rather naturally toward the narrative and prosaic. Neither the narrative nor prosaic gestures borne out of writing about the past in poetry are particularly exciting to me. Of course, writers are always writing about the past. It is impossible not to, but I want a language that tries. After all, the present is expansive, absorbent, gobbling the past and future in it; the present is all we have. Turner saves me from rhetorical entrenchment by building her writing upon trenchant image repertoires, rhythms, and cadences. Most of all, it is her voice, its tones of irony, pathos, humor, despair, and especially deep self-scrutiny, that compels my attention. This is a woman and a poet with the courage to remember and retell. That courage is valuable to me personally, and I think it is valuable to poetry.
Danielle: Yes, I think we have a new way of telling truth. I’m also not a fan of “confessional” poetry. I feel it often overdramatizes and rarely connects with me as a reader who has had a different set of experiences. I think it doesn’t reach the universal, but often stays with the individual writer. And I strongly believe art must connect, to show you something about humanity. By connection we can relate to what is other and understand/gain empathy. By contrast, Turner is able to talk about her experiences that are different than mine. Like you, I was drawn in immediately by Turner’s surety of voice. She commands the reader. So, when she gets to her personal story, I already believe in her as an artist. She already has authority. She doesn’t seem to want my sympathy, but to connect and be true. As you said, this is not a poetry of victimhood, but of sharing as an equal. As she writes in “Stop Bringing Me Here”: “I am terrified I built my poetry on the backs of violent men. / I am terrified. I built my poetry on the backs of violent men. / I am built on the back of violence” (104). She owns it.
Jami: One of the ways I connect to Lauren Turner as an artist is through the poetic risks she’s taking. She risks the misreading of everything-has-already-happened and is already-resolved quality in her poems, because she fixes her eye on another, higher purpose. Violence against women—in all of its forms—must be spoken about because doing so liberates the victim from the twin confinements of shame and repression. Mistreatment and dismissal of women must be spoken. For doing so ceases the silence that so often protects assailants. Speaking the truth also facilitates disidentification with the abusers. But speaking and retelling aren’t resolutions, per se. Turner’s poetry isn’t so much about resolution as it is a poetry of “retelling” in service of a very specific purpose: “I want to take the violence out of my life” (“Stop Bringing Me Here,” 99). For me, that desire is fulfilled within and by the poems as their lines accrue. Turner has left all her cards on the table face up; the “retelling” in these poems are her “felling blow to ambiguity” (“Self-trolling,” 16).