A mercurial book of confessional poems that speaks to the grief and fury of illness.
Robbins rages against the confines of a rare disease in this poetry collection.
Myasthenia gravis is an autoimmune disorder characterized by a breakdown in communication between the nerves and muscles. Though a so-called snowflake disease—meaning that no two cases are exactly alike—common side effects include muscle weakness, double vision, and difficulty chewing. The eponymous musical, which makes up the first half of the collection, follows a woman, Jane, who has been newly diagnosed with the rare disease. To make things worse, her doctors have no idea how to treat her. “Maybe this is a dream,” sings Jane in “The Doctors.” “Nightmare, more likely. / These doctors don’t know me. They’re even unsightly. / Tweedle Dumb and Tweedle Dee. / No one’s got a clue of what to give to me.” Jane’s stay in the hospital is indeed nightmarish, as she is beset by giant birds, nurses dancing the cancan, and human-sized pill bottles screaming “eat me.” When she finally escapes the hospital after 12 days, Jane is still bombarded by unhelpful therapists, pharmacists, caregivers, and an anthropomorphized steroid named Prince Prednisone. The second half of the book continues Jane’s story, though it eschews the musical format. Instead, through a series of poems, Jane continues to narrate her search for a viable treatment while also documenting the numerous frustrations and insights she experiences along the way. There are some unexpected developments, as documented in the poem “Orgasms”: “I may have weak eye muscles, / weak hand muscles, weak leg muscles, / but glory be to God, my pelvic muscles / that froze with early childhood molestation -- / are now sooooo relaxed!” As the collection progresses, the poems begin to grapple with what an artistic life might be like given the new realities of this disease.
Robbins’ verses are lively and full of surprising images, as in “On Music”: “I must orchestrate / a new life for myself. // Where’s the bassoon? // Must create a schedule based on / when to take what pills with meals, / what pills without. / No soft pedal on the piano. // Must wear clothes that protect me / from sun (thanks to my new drug, / a wily, flamingo-pink and / powder-blue rock ‘n’ roll capsule).” Rhymes are generally reserved for more jocular poems, while the serious moments tend to be expressed in free verse or even prose. This mixture—of forms and emotional registers—is key to the project. It succeeds in capturing the manifold nature of illness, the way the sufferer can go from laughing to crying and back in a single moment. The opening musical should be read as a long postmodern poem (the scenes are too short and grandiose to actually stage) meant to be of a piece with the shorter poems that follow it. Though individual lines or poems can come across as sloppy or unpolished, the effect of the work as a whole is quite moving. It reads like the raw diary of someone trying desperately to make sense of what is happening to them using the medium through which they prefer to engage with the world.
A mercurial book of confessional poems that speaks to the grief and fury of illness.Pub Date: N/A
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: -
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: Oct. 3, 2023
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Sullivan, winner of Milkweed's 1996 National Fiction Prize for her fifth novel, this follow-up to The Cape Ann (1988), limns with discerning sympathy the struggle of a young girl to escape the terrible toll of a mother's mental illness. The story is set once again in the small town of Harvester, Minnesota; the time now is the mid-1930s, when Sally Wheeler's mother Stella begins having crying spells. She cries when Sally enters kindergarten, she cries in department stores, she cries over anything remotely sad. By the age of seven, Sally resolves that she will never cry as long as she lives. And while her mother gets worse, sinking farther and farther into a depression blamed on menopause, Sally struggles to live a normal life. Sullivan's insights into a child's desperate need for normality and acceptance give immediacy to her story. Close friends like Lark and Beverly- -characters from The Cape Ann—help, as do adults like Lark's mother Arlene Erhart and the widowed Mrs. Stillman and her shell- shocked son Hillyard. Grandparents are loving and attentive, and so is father Donald, but nothing can compensate Sally for her mother's worsening condition. Stella is eventually hospitalized; Sally and her father become the subjects of local prejudice; and, as Sally moves on to high school, these pressures take their toll: Her grades decline, she begins sleeping with boys, and she becomes involved with pathologically possessive Cole Barnstable. A drama teacher, recognizing her acting ability, helps her find some contentment, but when he dies in an accident, Sally falls apart, retreating into herself and cleaning house obsessively, although good friends do come through. Finally encouraged to realize her talents, Sally writes and stars in the ``The Kingdom of Making Sense,'' a play celebrating a place ``where everything is possible, for sadness rarely lasts beyond an hour.'' A perceptive and refreshingly unsensational account, if at times too slowly paced, of a child's determination to claim and affirm life.
Pub Date: Sept. 1, 1996
ISBN: 1-57131-011-8
Page Count: 424
Publisher: Milkweed
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 1996
The symbolism of Mary and child coming to liberate the immigrants may be heavy-handed, and occasionally Hussein’s language...
The first novel in English from one of the most important writers in Urdu, an Indian-born author (The Weary Generations, 1999) virtually unknown in the West. That should change.
The story is narrated alternately by Amir, an illegal immigrant in Birmingham, and by his teenaged daughter Parvin, who, having come to England at five, is struggling between the traditional expectations of her father and her desire to enter into the life of her adopted country. Adding drama are the time-shifts between Amir’s first coming to Birmingham and the present, when he is a legal homeowner but nevertheless engaged in a running battle with his wife and children, who have little idea of his struggles to give them a new and better life. It’s a conflict that brings to mind such writers as Henry Roth and Roth’s vivid images of the Lower East Side, as well as V.S. Naipaul with his tales of Indian immigrants in the Caribbean. But, while Abdullah does not suffer from such comparisons, his novel is unique in its depiction of a particular kind of suffering in what most of us consider a civilized country. Unforgettable, for example, is Amir’s memory of living in a house with eight other Pakistanis and his description of their absolute terror at being discovered by the authorities. One of the men finds a lover named Mary, who gets pregnant and later becomes the catalyst for a violent struggle that will break up the group home and force Amir and the others out on their own. After much difficulty, Amir becomes a British citizen, gets a job at the post office, and buys his own home. His dreams are realized, yet he doesn’t do nearly so well with his wife, daughter or son, all in different ways rejecting their father and the life he has chosen for them.
The symbolism of Mary and child coming to liberate the immigrants may be heavy-handed, and occasionally Hussein’s language can be awkward. But altogether Émigré Journeys is a remarkable performance.Pub Date: Aug. 1, 2001
ISBN: 1-85242-638-1
Page Count: 250
Publisher: Serpent’s Tail
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2001
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