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A review by jd_brubaker
Patient. by Bettina Judd
4.0
This is a truly stunning work of poetry. The speaker in each poem imagines/writes themselves into the experiences of enslaved women who are forced into gynecological experiments. She writes about invasions of the body and the many consequences: blood, pain, the loss of agency and autonomy, and the fierce desire to survive.
One thing I found captivating about this work is how thoroughly the poems capture images of the body without necessarily naming body parts or specific actions of the procedures the women are being subjected to. As a writer who frequently writes about my in relationship to trauma, I thoroughly connected with and was inspired by many of these poems, their imagery, their captivating communication of pain and loss, and their intricate movements on the page that imitate the movement of instruments through the body.
As the book edges closer to its end, the poems shift. The language becomes more concrete, more sterile, as though the speaker(s) is/are aware that their time with the reader is approaching an end. These poems don't necessarily indicate death or loss of life, but they do forebode some kind of disconnect. For example, this quote is taken from the very first page: "I don't feel innocent here lurking with ghosts." And this from the first page, too: "It feels the same because I live in a haunted house. A house can be a dynasty, a bloodline, a body." And this from page seven: "I had the urge to scoot out of my hips but there was no blood. The smell of it but nothing."
These quotes are both specific and also abstract. We know they center the body and something happening in/to it, but we aren't given an indication of someone being in control of the speaker's body, someone claiming it, using it, dissecting it. We feel the presence of a "claimer," but we aren't shown who they are. Not explicitly. Here, however, are some quotes from closer to the end of this collection: "Body has a way of moving on / without you" (page 41); "Skin rarely lets me remember the good / so I make good memories for it" (page 41); "I have not yet learned / to look / when I am entered. / Not yet learned / where to turn. / Ceiling? / Curtain? / The barrel of / myself?" (page 72).
This speaker/these speakers are approaching the literal reality of their situation at a rapid speed. We are given a much keener sense of the body being overpowered, the body being taken over, the body being captured by someone. These poems give us a shape, an outline, but they do not center the colonizer. They center the voices and the bodies of the women who are dehumanized, women wrestling with how to exist in bodies that they're told/shown are not their own. These later poems also sprawl across the page, stanzas moving from left aligned to center, and then from center aligned to right and back again. It's the poems probing, searching, moving into the memories of assault in the same way that the bodies are being assaulted.
And while these poems condemn the practices of those who take advantage of Black women's bodies and those who practice them, the poems also carry an enormous sense of recovery, of taking back the narratives of those whose voices have been stolen, their bodies erased and objectified. It's seems a beautiful way to discuss trauma without centering the role of those who perpetuated the trauma. In essence, it's an erasing of those who seek to erase, and a centering of those who have been erased. Writing about abuse and loss and trauma are difficult, but Bettina Judd does it beautifully in her debut poetry collection. I highly recommend this book.
One thing I found captivating about this work is how thoroughly the poems capture images of the body without necessarily naming body parts or specific actions of the procedures the women are being subjected to. As a writer who frequently writes about my in relationship to trauma, I thoroughly connected with and was inspired by many of these poems, their imagery, their captivating communication of pain and loss, and their intricate movements on the page that imitate the movement of instruments through the body.
As the book edges closer to its end, the poems shift. The language becomes more concrete, more sterile, as though the speaker(s) is/are aware that their time with the reader is approaching an end. These poems don't necessarily indicate death or loss of life, but they do forebode some kind of disconnect. For example, this quote is taken from the very first page: "I don't feel innocent here lurking with ghosts." And this from the first page, too: "It feels the same because I live in a haunted house. A house can be a dynasty, a bloodline, a body." And this from page seven: "I had the urge to scoot out of my hips but there was no blood. The smell of it but nothing."
These quotes are both specific and also abstract. We know they center the body and something happening in/to it, but we aren't given an indication of someone being in control of the speaker's body, someone claiming it, using it, dissecting it. We feel the presence of a "claimer," but we aren't shown who they are. Not explicitly. Here, however, are some quotes from closer to the end of this collection: "Body has a way of moving on / without you" (page 41); "Skin rarely lets me remember the good / so I make good memories for it" (page 41); "I have not yet learned / to look / when I am entered. / Not yet learned / where to turn. / Ceiling? / Curtain? / The barrel of / myself?" (page 72).
This speaker/these speakers are approaching the literal reality of their situation at a rapid speed. We are given a much keener sense of the body being overpowered, the body being taken over, the body being captured by someone. These poems give us a shape, an outline, but they do not center the colonizer. They center the voices and the bodies of the women who are dehumanized, women wrestling with how to exist in bodies that they're told/shown are not their own. These later poems also sprawl across the page, stanzas moving from left aligned to center, and then from center aligned to right and back again. It's the poems probing, searching, moving into the memories of assault in the same way that the bodies are being assaulted.
And while these poems condemn the practices of those who take advantage of Black women's bodies and those who practice them, the poems also carry an enormous sense of recovery, of taking back the narratives of those whose voices have been stolen, their bodies erased and objectified. It's seems a beautiful way to discuss trauma without centering the role of those who perpetuated the trauma. In essence, it's an erasing of those who seek to erase, and a centering of those who have been erased. Writing about abuse and loss and trauma are difficult, but Bettina Judd does it beautifully in her debut poetry collection. I highly recommend this book.