Temper

Springtime has always been a season defined by both beauty and horror for me. In Chicago, the transition lurches between summer and winter temperatures; violent storms fell older tress, set off sirens, and cut the power; strange green shoots break through the ground and explode into soft, fantastic blooms. For May, I wanted to highlight a collection that holds both beauty and horror, and so teaches me how to do the same.

Beth Bachmann’s Temper begins with the murder of the speaker’s sister. As the poems unfurl, we learn that the sister was killed in a train yard, sometime after midnight, while waiting for her father to give her a ride home from the station. We learn that the father is the only suspect. The murder is never solved. This collection navigates media’s fascination with beautiful, young, dead girls, and society’s disinclination to actually engage issues of domestic, gendered, and sexual violence; femicide; human trafficking; or the alarming number of women and girls disappeared each year.

These poems are haunting and haunted. The nature of trauma is to return, to circle the wound: the body of the sister that appears over and over throughout the poems. In describing her body, Bachmann both writes into and through the glamorization of violence against women, by making the reader look, again and again, at the sister, and the world, including the men, surrounding her body. We, the reader, are implicated in that looking.

How to speak after unspeakable violence, about unspeakable violence, when the language and images you have inherited glamorize and sexualize violence, and the violated body? How could a sister speak of anything else?

Bachmann is telling one of the oldest stories in the world, and she does so in a way that not only resists dominant narratives surrounding trauma and violence. She forges a new language, a new story. The poems changed and continue to change me, as the speaker predicts in “After the Telling” describes: “You’ve put your hand// through my body and are caught/ in the rack of vines// I’ve descended into.”