MICRO REVIEWS | VOL. 3

How Memory Feels

On Julie Hanson’s The Audible and the Evident &


John Sibley Williams’ Skin Memory

by Annie Kim

Today the sun shines coldly through the empty stands of baseball parks, the bars of overcrowded prisons, exhaust fumes of cars queued up for virus tests, and thousands of classrooms tensing for the arrival of masked children. It’s July 15, 2020.

On such a day, in such a year, I have to ask: What can poetry offer us? 

I think about Mnemosyne. She was the Greek goddess of memory, mother of the nine muses. Both ode and elegy spring from her—our love and dread of her tidal pull. Poets skilled in her techniques of summoning and releasing have consoled us over the centuries during times of national and personal upheaval. All this seems clear enough.

But the how of it interests me. I want to say that poets revive memory (and survive it) by constructing on the page how memory feels. And how it disrupts consciousness, like a single raindrop splashing the surface of an otherwise still pond, sending ripples both downward and outward.

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On the cover of John Sibley Williams’ Skin Memory we see a sculpted face, just the bottom half: the right cheekbone slopes down to a pair of voluptuous, tightly sealed lips, neither smiling nor frowning. The top half of the face has been smashed away. Or has crumbled over the centuries in hot desert sand. But the devastation looks so elegant, so much like an alpine landscape with its snowy mountain ridge and glassy valley, that we hardly register its violence. 

It’s a fitting image for Williams’ fifth collection, winner of the 2018 Backwaters Prize in Poetry. As the speaker observes in the title poem that opens the book: “For now I can just listen. To how choreographed our forgetting. . . . Because skin has a memory all its own and because memory is a language that’s survived its skin.” 

That memory, in Williams’ hands, is both elegiac and lyrical.

The poems in Skin Memory create a landscape stripped down to its most archetypal elements—man, son, trees, stars—in language that hews close to the bone. The results are often beautiful, as in “Killing Lesson,” which, while not focused on any particular people or problem, presses urgently forward through a skillful handling of voice and assertion. Here are the opening lines:

This is the part where we crush
the most beautiful crayon in the box
beneath our bare heels
and refuse to wash our feet.
The part of the story
where childhood falters. That palm
we cut on a stray nail. . . .
We are not yet at the part
where sorrow becomes its pantomime
or blood learns to brown.
The house hasn’t burned yet.

Notice the swift movement from assertion to asssertion, both the statement as imagistic fact (“where we crush the most beautiful crayon in the box”) and as abstraction (“where sorrow becomes its pantomime”). Line breaks work seamlessly to pace the progress of these assertions, providing both momentum and restraint.

Similarly, one of the finest prose poems in this collection, “Father as Paper Cut,” shows how powerfully Williams’s spare lyricism can ring when it’s tethered to an emotionally resonant and specific subject. Here’s the entirety of the poem, though the original is fully justified:

or wet leaves weighing down a barn 
roof. As jagged sunrise softened by
a few itinerant clouds; the whole of 
winter winnowed down to one hard 
lake face. Tanned rawhide stretched 
along a living room floor; forgetting 
for a moment the no-longer-animal 
of it. As all that peaceful space 
between open palm & its clenching. 
How I want to remember you: bent 
metal that could be used to mark my 
inner thigh or the pages of a favorite 
book. As the profound resonance of 
a church bell, rusting soundless.

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But how does one write about collective memories—of a nation’s hatred, bigotry, and violence?

In Skin Memory, the poems tend to do so within the traditional lyric frame. Moths fly, barns burn, stars fill the sky. Most of all, ropes hang from trees. Sometimes these ropes simply hang, though they connote dread (“Swing,” “After-Bruise”); other times they’re part of unspecified but actual hangings ( “Dewpoint,” “Symptoms of Shelter,” “There is Still”). At no time, though, do we see particular historical references, specific people, or specific harms.

Perhaps the most direct treatment of collective memories comes in “After-Bruise,” one of the last poems in the book. It begins with the rope itself: “So, hang from the rope still strung over the sweetgum limb a folded paper dove, a dry red tourniquet, a note of apology.” Williams then contrasts that imagined lynching rope to the present rope’s purpose: supporting a tire swing on which kids joyfully play. There’s still a “shadow” beneath that rope, though, which leads him to question what’s beneath the shadow: “[j]ust some grass. What we’ve compromised in civilizing the rebel dead.”

It’s not entirely clear to me what that last line means. But what it does seem to mourn is the absence of memorial. Where is our monument to the people who were hung here? Who were they? What color was their skin?

Although Williams doesn’t answer these questions, the final impulse in this poem feels exactly right:

So—you rough bark made entirely of knots,
holding our children, holding up whatever once held
the sky—fray and snap. Snap cleanly.

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Going back to that image of the still pond I mentioned at the beginning, the one being disturbed by raindrops, I want to ask: How does that work as a metaphor for consciousness? How does the intrusion of memory affect our present sense of consciousness? And how does one represent it?

Julie Hanson tackles these questions in The Audible and the Evident, 2019 winner of the Hollis Summer Poetry Prize, with the steady hands of a surgeon. Hanson is, however, the kind of surgeon who’d amuse you with vignettes of domestic gardening, failed errands, and lightly strained parental relationships while you slipped into your anaesthetic slumber. Her poetics reflect a deep attention to balance, precision, and lucidity. Nothing much happens; nothing sways violently out of place. What drama there is unfolds subtly inside the speaker’s mind as she observes her mind recollecting, associating, questioning. She, herself, remains firmly planted in the sensible, evident world.

Take the opening poem, “Real Life, Dear Voyeur, Real Life.” It begins with the speaker inside her house while, just outside her window, Nature goes berserk with beauty at the height of October’s deepening colors. “Much has kept me from my task,” the speaker drily admits. After describing several delicious reasons for that deferral, the speaker turns to address the reader:

I tell you, real life is a pull and a lure 
and a fling-back thing, a need
and a need and a slow-motion slide
through all sorts of partially identified
coming-right-at-you sudden matters. 
Some of them just plain practical 
to attend to. And then, right before
Autumn, the yard was in Summer, 
the whole out-of-doors bobbing
or zooming—at any rate, busy. 
I hung our laundry on the line and, 
charmed by the shape and efficiencies
of the wooden pins, was made 
nostalgic for my own first toys. 

Notice the sharp turn halfway through this passage, where the speaker leaves aside her account of What Life is Like to inhabit memory: “And then. . .” Remember dizzying Summer, she asks herself, when everything was pleasantly dislocated, busy, full of itself? 

Here, we inhabit the speaker inhabiting herself. The moment is both exquisitely concrete—pinning clothes on the line—and soaked in quiet longing for past objects, past wonderment. Memory feels discovered, like a marble at the bottom of a drawer filled with bottle caps and rubber bands.

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More troubling and more interesting, still, than these lucidly recollected moments are Hanson’s attempts to grapple with the kinds of memories that slip right through one’s fingers.

In many of her poems, such as the imagistically vivid “Squall Line Stalling in a Memory of Rain,” Hanson stages the intrusion of memory and its effects on consciousness through sequential, clearly legible narrative. Memory disrupts and unmoors the self, but the poet’s recreation of that moment does not.

Something more mysterious and jarring occurs in one of the last poems in the collection, “Indoor Tundra,” one of my favorites. We see consciousness in all its tenses. Silvery imprints of memory float just below the firm silhouettes of the present.

Fittingly, Hanson begins the poem not in the simple, finite present, but in the imperfect—those days in early December:

The little that happens happens so slightly. 
White and weightless, 

but it does pile up. Every so often
a long slow spray of slush thrown out by a passing car 
spills invisible glitter onto my shoulders 

inside the house. I feel it, just barely, something 
from long ago this same time of year, 
something that ended just before dusk. 

That glitter is, ultimately, a force rather than a clear subject. It “resettles slowly, unseen,/and as soundless as scrutiny.” And that’s when the truly mysterious arrives:

. . . Someone speaking into my ear 

has become a conversation in a dining room gone dark
when someone at the side door rattles it and enters 
and a finger rubbed against the wall lifts up 

and the room is full of furniture. 

We glimpse for a moment the great intimacy of that dark in which our borders blur, our memories and desires merge. Then consciousness, it seems, walks in and flicks on the lights. We’re left in a room suddenly “full of furniture”—no longer peopled. 

It’s a stunning metaphor for how memory feels.

Julie Hanson is the author of Unbeknownst (Iowa University Press, 2011), an Iowa Poetry Prize winner and 2012 Kate Tufts Discovery Award finalist. Her work has earned fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Vermont Studio Center, as well as publication in New Ohio Review, VOLT, Plume, and other journals. She holds an MFA in poetry from the Iowa Writers' Workshop.

John Sibley Williams is the author of five collections, most recently As One Fire Consumes Another (Orison Poetry Prize, 2019), Skin Memory (Backwaters Prize, University of Nebraska Press, 2019), and Summon (JuxtaProse Chapbook Prize, forthcoming 2020). A twenty-three-time Pushcart nominee, John is the winner of numerous awards, including the Wabash Prize for Poetry, Philip Booth Award, and Laux/Millar Prize. He serves as editor of The Inflectionist Review and works as a poetry editor and literary agent.