Bianca

Eugenia Leigh’s Bianca revisits disquieting pivots narrated in her 2014 debut Blood, Sparrows and Sparrows—her father’s kidnapping of his children and her witnessing of their mother’s scars among them. But the intricacies of childhood abuse’s impact, including on mental illness, are approached with language radically transformed by the father’s death and the author’s new relational definition: “I thought I forgave you. Then I took root and became / someone’s mother.”

A present parenthood, shared with “a good man,” sometimes collapses into the memory of having been parented by fist, threat, and weapon—“When will I be fixed enough / to hear my kid scream without tearing // my father’s phantom hands off me?” Being asked “between contractions” at the hospital about whether she feels safe going home with the baby slips her back into a childhood of covering up for her mom by claiming to be safe at home: “for a second, I am tripped again, / six again, and I am lying.” Because her younger sister once “dodged a knife / in the womb,” she fears that “a man who’d chase his baby with a knife / makes up half [her] blood.” Meanwhile, her child shouts new words like “knife” and “blue” but has, in words, a safe imaginary:

Look how he prods the window
with his knife, insisting
we cut up the storm, demanding
the blue back into view.

The book moves from a fear of genetic determinism to a recognition of loved ones who refuse to abandon her, even when “cursed at and punched.” The long poem “Bipolar II Disorder: Second Evaluation (Zuihitsu for Bianca)” introduces the author’s “bipolarity Bianca,” a character blamed for her “fever, [her] havoc, [her] tilt,” for scratching and screaming (“It was a joke”). A husband, a son, friends, sisters, and strangers (including a taxi driver profoundly forgiving of being vomited on) show care for “Bianca,” and eventually lead the text’s “Eugenia” to love her various selves “the way / a father or a mother ought to have loved them. / Them. // Yes, I suppose I do mean me.”