by Nicole Yurcaba
Savoring sadness but never giving in to it completely, the poems in Mary Biddinger’s seventh poetry collection Department of Elegy transport readers into the cracks and crevices of youth’s hot insanity and adulthood’s mundanity. Eager for experience and hungry for life, the poem’s speaker consistently examines the fine line between adolescence and adulthood and how those few years we spend standing on the cusp of adulting truly do shape us for the rest of our lives. That’s not to say the speaker doesn’t allow wiggle room for change—they do, but, if anything, the poems remind readers that there’s absolutely nothing wrong with quietly standing for a moment, breathing, and reminding oneself why those late nights in clubs with fake IDs are worth remembering.
The poem “Sudafed and Gin” opens with the bold command “Listen, I’m falling apart but it was worth it.” The speaker’s acknowledgement is a powerful one, an optimism readers may not expect in this Perks of Being a Wallflower-like realm where drugs, alcohol, and destructive behavior unite to form something rather beautiful. The speaker longs for the moment in grad school when “we’d get wrecked on Sudafed and gin,” and they confess “Sorry, but I do wish I had more photos from back / then.” This poem only hints at the deep nostalgia to come, because “Book of Mild Regrets” tips its hat to youth’s irresponsibility.
In “Book of Mild Regrets,” readers find a series of imagistic and narrative unrhymed couplets where the speaker declares “Here I am, fretting over whether it’s okay / to take a second Zyrtec.” The speaker doesn’t profess to worrying about aging, but the speaker’s worry slowly reveals itself as images of “fifteen years ago // I downed a pill nicknamed El Capitan while a woman I just met shaved my head with a knife.” The initial message is clear: growing older and participating in adulthood grant us not only responsibilities for which we didn’t ask, but also a sense of caution we never thought we would possess. The speaker recognizes that “almost yesterday // my amateur chainmail had me swallowing / half a marsh one night,” but “now // I can’t settle on a single laundry detergent.” The speaker’s laments form a longing reinforced by the couplets as well as the Alice in Wonderland-esque ending in which the speaker fell “straight through a mirror imported from Galway.”
“Snagged in Fishnet” embraces the impossibilities and loose ends adulthood poses, the never-ending lists of responsibilities. At the same time, it portrays the seemingly endless boredom adolescence offers as ethereal, a gift that one takes for granted at the time its offered. The poem opens with the gentle line, “It was time to go home, and then it wasn’t.” This line balances the sudden shift from adolescence into adulthood. The comma and the coordinating conjunction not only join the two independent clauses together, but they also create the representation of the swiftness with which adulthood overtakes adolescence. The speaker also marvels at how, during youth, “Things completed themselves back then,” and they acknowledge that in adulthood “It never happens now.”
As the poem continues, its philosophical contemplations blossom even more. Later poems like “Heaven and Dirt” bloom, reminiscent of Alice in Chains songs like “Nutshell” and “Down in a Hole.” A well-crafted prose poem, “Heaven and Dirt” takes a critical look at society—its trends and fads, how they change us and shape us through our lives, and how we cling to those from our youth as means of staying in touch with what was maybe the purest, most authentic part of our self. The poem opens with a focus on fashion: “There you go with the crushed velvet and makeshift bracelets.” It begins with the most accessible and superficial—what we wear and how people and society perceive it. As the poem progresses, the speaker embraces the development of the entire self and shifts from the superficial to the parts of ourselves we often hide from others through acts such as “checking / your favorite books out of the library just to sniff the pages you / previously sniffed.” The speaker states, “I recall someone once saying it’s hotter to be a bit messed, / for example some history on the skin or lipstick that’s trash.” The speaker’s return to superficial elements acknowledges how society and others critique us as we age, and in defiance, the speaker asserts “so I / suggested maybe you could roll in with a Cindy Crawford / past prime aesthetic, ordering the bangers and mash without / even perusing the menu.” The poem concludes by examining what we wear and what we adopt as “ours” in order to conform, but it reminds readers that the most magnificent beauty is when one can truly and authentically be themselves no matter what society dictates.
Department of Elegy is magical in that it makes readers yearn for the “ice / rink where music remains in 1982” and “Real excitement is a hidden bee / in a box of raspberries, putting the car in / a wrong gear, then gunning it.” Like the essays in Henry Hoke’s Sticker, Biddinger’s poems read like a good mixtape from the Nineties or that carefully crafted mix CD from the early 2000s. The poems are reminiscent of those songs that we play quietly on repeat during our darkest nights, when we’re alone and hoping there’s enough cash in the checking account to pay the rent and plenty of emotional resolve to see us through until morning. Yes, Biddinger’s honest, raw verses strip away the fake plastic rules society says we must live by and embraces the questionable and defiant youthful moments that create who we truly are.
Nicole Yurcaba (Ukrainian: Нікола Юрцаба) is a Ukrainian-American poet and essayist. Her poems and essays have appeared in The Atlanta Review, The Lindenwood Review, Whiskey Island, Raven Chronicles, Appalachian Heritage, North of Oxford, and many other online and print journals. Nicole holds an MFA in Writing from Lindenwood University, is the recipient of a July 2020 Writing Residency at Gullkistan, Creative Center for the Arts in Iceland, and is a Tupelo Press June 2020 30 for 30 featured poet. Her poetry collection Triskaidekaphobia is forthcoming Black Spring Group in 2022. She teaches poetry workshops for Southern New Hampshire University and works as a career counselor for Blue Ridge Community College.
