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The Arranged Marriage by Jehanne Dubrow

Source: Gift
Paperback, 57 pgs.
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The Arranged Marriage by Jehanne Dubrow reads like mini-memoirs of marriages on the rocks, marriages marred by abuse, marriages that require covering up.  These arrangements are made consciously and sometimes with little say by the women engaged in them.  Much of the truth about these women is concealed, but even that concealer is thin and, in many cases, see-through.

“Wait long enough and anything takes on a
sheen of sharpness. Mustn’t leave her hands
untied. She could stare the whorl from
fingertips. Cut him with her eyes.” (from “All the Sharp Things”, pg. 7)

In “The Handbag,” the speaker examines the contents of a wife’s purse at the back of the closet and how it hides things from her husband.  She leaves to buy groceries, and while her husband may control what is purchased, there are so many possibilities outside that she can take advantage of if she so chooses.  Does this woman choose to go to the police station?  Does she read and improve her mind away from her husband? The possibilities are endless.

In “House of the Small Dictatorship”, cigars are clipped, pages of a newspaper are opened, and many other things get done without the husband lifting a finger. But the woman’s efforts are rarely mentioned. In “Domesticated Fowl of the Sula Valley”, birds fly away and the girls are given little explanation. Dubrow uses this poem to shed light on many of the missing girls and women and how their fates are never known. Even as these compact poems resemble the cloistered lives of these women — some controlled by their spouses — they also espouse a sense of hope in between the lines.  A freedom they can see but that they will need the courage to take ahold of it.

The Arranged Marriage by Jehanne Dubrow is harrowing and sad. The poems leave an indelible mark on the reader, and her verse is chock full of imagery that surprises. Many of these poems will be long remembered, a lasting testament to the women who have suffered — many in silence.

RATING: Cinquain

About the Poet:

Jehanne Dubrow is the author of five poetry collections, including most recently The Arranged Marriage (University of New Mexico Press, 2015), Red Army Red (Northwestern University Press, 2012) and Stateside (Northwestern University Press, 2010). She co-edited The Book of Scented Things: 100 Contemporary Poems about Perfume (Literary House Press, 2014) and the forthcoming Still Life with Poem: Contemporary Natures Mortes in Verse (Literary House Press, 2016). Dots & Dashes, her sixth book of poems, won the 2016 Crab Orchard Review Series in Poetry Open Competition Awards and will be published by Southern Illinois University Press in 2017.

Mailbox Monday #355

Mailbox Monday, created by Marcia at To Be Continued, formerly The Printed Page, has a permanent home at its own blog.

To check out what everyone has received over the last week, visit the blog and check out the links.  Leave yours too.

Also, each week, Leslie, Vicki, and I will share the Books that Caught Our Eye from everyone’s weekly links.

Here’s what I received:

Falling for You by Jill Mansell from Anna for Christmas — Thank you!

As a teen, Maddy Harvey was a bit of an ugly duckling. Luckily she’s blossomed since then, and Maddy thanks God for this small miracle when a tall, handsome stranger comes to her rescue one starry summer’s night.

Instant attraction turns to disaster-in-the-making when Maddy learns the identity of her superman: Kerr McKinnon. Of all the colorful residents of the small Cotswold town of Ashcombe, why did it have to be him? Because as family feuds go, the Montagues and the Capulets have nothing on the Harveys and the McKinnons.

 

The Arranged Marriage: Poems by Jehanne Dubrow from SantaThing.

With her characteristic music and precision, Dubrow’s prose poems delve unflinchingly into a mother’s story of trauma and captivity. The poet proves that truth telling and vision can give meaning to the gravest situations, allowing women to create a future on their own terms.

 

 

The Emperor of Water Clocks by Yusef Komunyakaa from SantaThing.

“If I am not Ulysses, I am / his dear, ruthless half-brother.” So announces Yusef Komunyakaa early in his lush new collection, The Emperor of Water Clocks. But Ulysses (or his half brother) is but one of the beguiling guises Komunyakaa dons over the course of this densely lyrical book. Here his speaker observes a doomed court jester; here he is with Napoleon, as the emperor “tells the doctor to cut out his heart / & send it to the empress, Marie-Louise”; here he is at the circus, observing as “The strong man presses six hundred pounds, / his muscles flexed for the woman / whose T-shirt says, these guns are loaded“; and here is just a man, placing “a few red anemones / & a sheaf of wheat” on Mahmoud Darwish’s grave, reflecting on why “I’d rather die a poet / than a warrior.”

Through these mutations and migrations and permutations and peregrinations there are constants: Komunyakaa’s jazz-inflected rhythms; his effortlessly surreal images; his celebration of natural beauty and of love. There is also his insistent inquiry into the structures and struggles of power: not only of, say, king against jester but of man against his own desire and of the present against the pernicious influence of the past.

Howl and Other Poems by Allen Ginsberg, which I got from SantaThing for a second time.

The prophetic poem that launched a generation when it was first published in 1965 is here presented in a commemorative fortieth Anniversary Edition.

When the book arrived from its British printers, it was seized almost immediately by U.S. Customs, and shortly thereafter the San Francisco police arrested its publisher and editor, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, together with City Lights Bookstore manager Shigeyoshi Murao. The two of them were charged with disseminating obscene literature, and the case went to trial in the municipal court of Judge Clayton Horn. A parade of distinguished literary and academic witnesses persuaded the judge that the title poem was indeed not obscene and that it had “redeeming social significance.”

Thus was Howl & Other Poems freed to become the single most influential poetic work of the post-World War II era, with over 900,000 copies now in print.”

Emma got me this great bag for Christmas too!  Thank you!

What did you receive?