Hold the Pulp
Chapman’s sophomore collection skillfully and delicately marries joy with despair, bitterness with optimism, and hope with disappointment.
Review by Josiah Cox
Someone recently shared with me that her family and friends had questioned, at times, subtly, her terminal illness. This shocked me, as my own refusals of reality rarely do. It seemed clear to her that they did so out of a coddling optimism. When she joked about walking off into the countryside to die alone, the oil, for a moment, mixed down with the vinegar.
Levity has a similar earthward thrust in Danielle Chapman’s Boxed Juice. The title of her second collection, alone, suggests a pleasurable measure of it. Well before Chapman references Gerard Manley Hopkins’s poem “Spring,” one has already gotten the sense of “all this juice and all this joy” from Chapman’s description of clouds (“lavender croissants of vole fluff/ such soft smudged smut”) and of what she sees within the Ocean Hall aquarium,
…Of course, it would be
the sea dragon oscillating galleon sails
delicate as scallion skins
through cylinders of glycerin. (“Optimism”)
One already knows, too, that as much as these small marvels are “off to war” with pain and hopelessness, they are wrought with them. And perhaps inversely warped by them, in the case of “Optimism.” So “Leaving Boston” opens the collection to say, wherever the poetry is going, hope is a rigorous way of going:
Burgundy geometries of waiting chairs recede
and magazines flap open behind us
as we smack through overpasses
like waves of a whopping headache
and rowers in late sun
dip trim oars into the Charles in unison.
Ibrutinib. Ibrutinib.
There is a discipline, a sport to hope:
to pray for prayers that break the surface whether
you’re better or (please Jesus never)
worse.
Chapman sets such a strong literal backdrop for such gentle metaphors that they ripple back up from the penultimate stanza. The repetition of a cancer drug’s dactylic name evokes exertion in addition to a daze. One considers prayers as oars, but also gets a sense for the trimness of those prayers. Hope can be considered as a collective effort. Hope can, this poem allows, go clear-eyed into a “late” situation, take despair seriously, row with the belief that a particular effort or situation is doomed. Whereas Chapman’s portrayals of optimism in this collection suggest that eyes have somewhat glazed or gauzed over.
Chapman is a rare poet, who can harness a charge in things like childhood and spring flowers without sentimentality, triteness, and bald designs diffusing it beyond any power.
Context which Chapman’s debut, Delinquent Palaces, introduced in its final section, Boxed Juice reconstitutes as its bulk: illness, children, and spring. They’re inextricable in the heart of the book, “Anyway in Spring,” where a woman reckons with the “blessed-in-forsakenness” of having twins while her husband tries to survive lymphoma for the umpteenth time. Elsewhere in the periphery, mostly, this core tension makes Chapman’s vision sound:
…though through the window
I wade into yellow
warmth as if into the aural form
vision has been tunneling toward—
tigered lemon flutes
trembling acetylene
and, past the nauseating pain,
Easter, blistering. (“Friday Migraine”)
Which is to say, Chapman’s aesthetic is no anesthetic. Although, she conveys the Jobean idea that wonder and beauty can refigure one’s perspective on pain in at least a few poems. “Catch-All,” for example, expresses no regrets for tearing into a neighbor’s nettles as a child:
they stung me into seeing…
…the quivering gobble of [Lottie Shoop’s] chin,
teacup clicking dentures as she sprang
up in her wattled hut
and broke a rib
of aloe vera–
gel belling the top of that claw goblet.
It didn’t cool the sting, and yet, noticing
sunshine thumbing plums in a string
catch-all
I was already well.
One feels in Boxed Juice an electrical tether between language and life. This description of aloe vera, especially, is strangely exact. Chapman is a rare poet, who can harness a charge in things like childhood and spring flowers without sentimentality, triteness, and bald designs diffusing it beyond any power. Her slant, intermittent, and displaced rhymes help, though I hear tradcore poets huff as I admit it, while her whimsical aural chimes compound to an off-kilter fullness.
Often Chapman’s “aural form” works inversely to the spiritual law (“we lower when we need to lift”) that Simone Weil recognized. Diction elevates in “After Ashbery’s Last Reading” only to “round and brake, round and brake down seven levels” of a “Brutalist carpark.” Hard not to hear the Dantean hell in that, but Chapman’s “Alphabet City” takes the collection to its lowest and truly brutal level. The tone lifts in its cartoonish second line but drops something far more serious than an anvil in the third.
On the other side of Stuy Town, pronounced
Stoy! Tone! between glugs on a forty of OE
by the skater who was about to rape me,
we climbed a graffitied wall as if the projects were
a Babel you had to risk your feudal life to breach.
The rhyme is perversely perfect and devastating. It is very poignant that the speaker will go on to quote Shakespeare’s Gloucester, whose eyes have been gouged out, to give voice to her trauma. “Alphabet City” like King Lear is through and through a tragic poem. The ending proffers neither healing nor positive light:
…Could I
have guessed how long I’d have to lie there
staring at the ceiling crack observing
myself my soul escape my skin sulfured
by the searchlight tower’s Stalinist glow—
twenty-five years of, where did she go?
was it my fault? who where her clear gods?
did they cut off her ears that I might hear You?
It does suggest clarity, though, whether the speaker recognizes through these questions an illusion that she had held or recognizes these questions themselves as harmful illusions that must be let go. The literary critic Terry Eagleton might identify in it the tragic hope of King Lear, not a flourishing but excising self-deception as a precondition of it: “It is not true that language can repair one’s condition simply by lending a name to it, but it is true that one cannot repair it without doing so.”
It’s an enjoyable modulation of style in Chapman especially, whose revels in particulars and unpredictable metaphors can sometimes muscle up to what appear to be, and I’m unfairly ripping Chapman’s own phrase, “incomprehensible flights.”
Alphabet City” represents the most bitter note in Boxed Juice, and is reminiscent more of the stark landscapes, moments of spiritual desolation, and torqued grit that pervaded Delinquent Palaces. But its inclusion is apt because so much of Boxed Juice concerns seeing things as they really are. An inherited spirit that will admit no weakness, former shades of self, a niceness that “lets out what should be hemmed,” fundamentalisms that obscure more elemental and dynamic knowing, literary nonsense—these are some of the things that get an honest revision, more typically with sane humor and the savor of joy.
Chapman’s poetic remains distinctive and mostly unchanged from the mere decade between her two collections. I previously mentioned her penchant for aural play. And meter, to alter Glyn Maxwell’s metaphor, remains the silent, skeletal, but fairly scoliotic frame from which her free-verse creatures ride. In “Leaving Boston,” you sense dactyls and anapests thrust into, and through, iambic throbs. Also recognizably Chapman is Boxed Juice’s Shakespearean range of tone (i.e., angry, ecstatic, affectionate, exasperated, silly, defiant, contemplative, etc.) and diction (from the pharmaceutical “Ibrutinib” to lyrical “tigered lemon flutes” to, why the heck not, “Stinky Butt”). I suppose this consistency further confirms what Ilya Kaminsky praised in her first book, the evidence of “an already developed, master poet.”
But there’s at least one subtle development in her latest work. Chapman more often inclines toward direct, uncomplicated expression: “You know it hadn’t a drop to do with love,” “The heart won’t make it’s point,” “There’s a spirit in me that admits no weakness,” “I will not quarrel or cry out, nor call anyone Hitlerian” (all first lines). Other first lines, like, “Catastrophe closes us into this house,” or these initial lines which precede the sea dragon in “Optimism,”
I made a fascinating box. Then I broke
some boxes down. I smashed them
into boxed juice. Then I pulled over at Ocean
Hall to see what monster might rise up within…
even have a Kavafian elegance. Simplicity of statement gives the root image full exposure, while line breaks heft the adverb’s sequential movement to afford associative throws more delight as they land. It’s an enjoyable modulation of style in Chapman especially, whose revels in particulars and unpredictable metaphors can sometimes muscle up to what appear to be, and I’m unfairly ripping Chapman’s own phrase, “incomprehensible flights.” Poems like “Saint’s Novella” and “Apologies to Borges” also reflect a broader influence than typical of current American poetry, striking the symbolists’ brass.
Though Boxed Juice never asks, I sense it agonizing over the question, does hope disappoint? Or, does optimism? A firm answer flows from narrow terms. The two concepts and their relationship remain ambiguous in this collection, but Chapman’s after “unfiltered exactitude.” These are poems to enjoy. Boxed Juice gives vinegar without gall.
Josiah Cox won the 2024 First Things Poetry Prize, selected by Amit Majmudar. He’s from Kansas City and currently works as a property manager in Baltimore. His work and contact are on his website.
Boxed Juice was published on October 8, 2024, by Unbound Edition Press. You can purchase a copy from the publisher here.
