On Ancestors and Ethnic Biases by Carlene Gadapee

Tender Machines
By J. Mae Barizo
Tupleo Press
68 pages

“The Mothers,” the first poem in Tender Machines by J. Mae Barizo, opens with an imperative: “must.” This requirement is specifically directed to women, to mothers in particular, but also to the reader as well. What must we do? What do societal norms expect of women, and of all of us? And if we reject these circumscribed norms, what are the alternatives? There are a lot of questions raised in both the individual poems and in the collection as a whole, all articulated through the conduit of a speaker that is observational and not judgmental, and one that presents situations and images for us to engage with or not; we are not compelled, but instead invited to enter this world of brokenness, of cityscape as physical and emotional setting, and of both social and personal loss.

The speaker in Barizo’s poems is not afraid to posit existential questions, and she is relentlessly and dispassionately observant. There is a consistent theme throughout the collection that weaves around the role of women, both in society and within themselves, historically and emotionally. The speaker, through unvarnished observations, impels us toward witnessing sacrifice, damage, complicity, and self-justification. As a reader, I’m most drawn to two elements of Barizo’s poems: the recurring images and motifs, and the detached quality of the speaker. What is also particularly striking is how the poems speak to each other, page to page, and throughout the entire collection. If one poem raises questions, the next often amplifies or clarifies them. For example, the speaker in the poem “Survival Skills (Small Essay on Extinction)” asks, “Were/ my ancestors/ concubines or slaves?” This is a fine distinction, and one worthy of the pause that the line and stanza breaks provide. In the next poem, “Fugue on the Maiden Name of My Mother,” the subject matter is both historical and personal. It focuses on the generational and historical abuse of women in general, and specifically of the speaker’s own forbears. She calls the “mad priest from Spain” the “dear despoiler of my/ ancestors” and then states that she is “left here to procreate, to recreate/ this history, my oppressor my settler my colonizer, my love.” The socio-political and the personal collide; this is a truth that might apply to any relationship, this losing of self both in one’s lineage and in one’s own life. The first poem, “Survival Skills…” questions the historical status of women, and the second, “Fugue…,” amplifies the question. What role did our own female ancestors have to play? And how do we fit, or not fit, into that pattern?

Barizo also confronts implicit ageism and ethnic biases in her poems. In “Woman Contemplates Her Complicity,” the reader finds both topics explored in a short, fourteen-line poem that is a socio-political, ethnic, and economic commentary. The speaker talks about levels of privilege, saying, “I’m writing you in yoga clothes made in the country/ my parents left behind,” and “My grandmother is so poor she drinks/ food supplements (‘Ensure is cheaper than real food’) / while we watch the whites stomp on the reefs.”  Shortly after this, the speaker claims, “I’m complicit…Whose side am I on?” This poem is tightly crafted, and tonally, there is anger and self-justification simmering throughout. This is a tone that permeates many of the poems in the collection, and it is an earned one: we should be angry, but we are also challenged by what self-preservation and our ideas about personal success might look like as well.

The second section of Tender Machines is titled “Small Essays on Disappearance.” This is a series of short poems that function as essays, in the truest meaning of the form: they are attempts to explain or to engage the reader in existential and metaphysical questions. The first poem of this section asks us to consider “what happens/ to the past after it loses its radiance?” and to ponder the nature of memory, of history, and our role in it. In another poem in this section, the speaker talks about “nostalgia blooming/ before the moment is even/ done” and “the photo/ itself implying a world surging/ beyond its edges—” There is no end stop to this poem; this careful craft choice suggests that there is no conclusion to this line of thinking, and that we, the readers, should also delve into the ideas that the image leads us to. Other poems in this section are deeply evocative of personal loss and tragedy; these “essays” beckon the reader into the poet’s space, and we are then engaged in the attempts to explain and explore hard topics.

The next section is titled “Tender Archive.” The poems shift in structure to fragments of thought and image; they remind me of the poem fragments of Sappho. The images are observational: here they are, and you can choose to engage or not. Intimacy is obliquely presented, as in, “And if you die, then/ what.” The last poem of this section is titled “Exit Music,” in which the speaker says, “you rise, remembering/ to wind back the clocks.” The metaphor is clear. This section of Tender Machines reads like the fragmentary recollections of broken relationships, both between people and within the speaker herself—a winding backward, and of controlling human-constructed time.

There are many places in this collection that readers might find themselves having to do a little research; Barizo is a cross-disciplinary artist, and her command of musical references is woven throughout the poems. The poems stand alone well, but it helps immensely if the terms and allusions are more familiar to the reader. Knowing classical music and what a fugue is, for example, allows the reader to better access the rich subtext of many of the poems. In “Morning in a City,” knowing something of “Hayden sonatas played by/ Pogorelich” would be very helpful. This poem depends in large part on the reader being able to follow the metaphor crafted from musical references: “the existence of such music in a room with/ crooked walls is a departure from a world one cannot/ give birth to, a room of undiluted sun.” I’m well-versed enough in musical terminology and various composers to follow the metaphor and appreciate the invocation of a different kind of sonic element beyond what word choice can do in a poem, but for a reader who might not know this information, a poem like this might not fully open up. The poem is beautiful; the setting, the images, the sounds, and the intimacy are simply stunning. In the penultimate stanza, the speaker says, “Such tenderness, those sunrises with your hand at my/ rib cage, our longing like a famine in a green country….” The idea conjured up by the simile of longing and famine is breathtaking. This is probably my favorite poem in the entire book.

The overarching theme of this collection is captured in the last part of the poem “Lux Aeterna.” The speaker says, “Tell me/ that I remember it correctly, that the light/ will lick and lick the damage clean. That it is not/ ruin already. Tell me.” The poems, through Barizo’s speaker, present damage, both lived and recollected from a wider sense of history. Recurring images and motifs build a sort of still-life of hurt and disconnection: musical instruments like pianos, spinets, and violins, references to shadows, clocks, socks, machines, clouds, and forgetting appear many times. They create a sense of cohesion in a text that, on the surface, seems to be more about displacement and emotional distance.

The poems in the last part of the book are more intimately reflective. In “New York, November,” there is a wisdom statement: “Our lives/ as we keep track of them/ are acted out in simple/ gestures….” What I’m most struck by in this passage is the phrase “as we keep track of them,” which suggests that memory and our lived experiences are personally curated, and are not chronologically time-dependent or even relevant to anyone else. This phrase is followed later in the poem with, “All I can really be sure/ of these days are the words/ I write you from my crowded/ heart”—in fact, the entire poem reminds me of the work of Rilke, especially when he says that we should learn to “live the questions.” There are also resonances of Shelley’s “Ode to the West Wind,” which recounts the hectic colors and turbulence of autumn weather as a metaphor for the poet-speaker’s inner chaos and despair. “New York, November” ends with “the way one season/ meets the next, violently,” and I can’t help but make the poetic connections. Poets and their poems talk to one another in a grand tradition of words, emotions, and images, and Barizo’s work is fully engaged in this literary conversation.

Carlene M. Gadapee teaches high school English and is the associate creative director for The Frost Place Studio Sessions. Her poems and poetry reviews have been published by or are forthcoming in Waterwheel Review, Smoky Quartz, Margate Bookie, Wild Words, Allium, Vox Populi, and elsewhere. Carlene resides with her husband in northern New Hampshire.