The Knife Thrower's Girl
In The Knife Thrower’s Girl, Naomi Mulvihill explores the commonplace convergence of what brings us joy, and what leads to death.
Review by Megan Foster
I am inclined to be shocked by violence. It isn’t that I haven’t witnessed it, or willingly turn a blind eye. But it might be fair to say that my optimism can be a form of obstruction. I miss the forest for the leaves; that is, the forest could be burning down as I blithely admire a leaf. I often have to force myself to step back and face the harsher realities of being human. At times I have no choice, when the cruelty of others leaves me reeling. In any case, it can be nigh impossible to strike the balance of finding joy with acknowledging the devastation that inevitably accompanies it. But Naomi Mulvihill’s poetry collection The Knife Thrower’s Girl manages to make peace with the everyday marriage of rupture and rapture, of beauty and savagery. Ushering in new life also brings death, and expressing love may invite hate. Yet still we survive––and fight for the very things that help us heal, and thrive.
In her poem “In the Garden of Intelligence,” Mulvihill describes a menagerie of beasts, from hens to bats to donkeys to vultures. With equal parts reverence and wit, Mulvihill demonstrates these creatures’ quiet beauty against loud, domineering humans, switching stanzas between praising the animal kingdom and critiquing mankind. “To every passing woman / the ass says, We’ve met. / Do you remember me? You rode me / into Bethlehem.” At times people can’t recognize their own fallibility. Mulvihill mentions a suburban girl with a leopard print tattoo standing in front of First Baptist Church: “In me, she fails / to recognize her double, / another suburban white girl / wanting to be an animal.” The religious are never far away in Mulvihill’s poetry, but here the animals are more worshipful than the humans who cage them. She describes a porcupine––his whiskers, his paws, his failed attempts at mating: “Last creature, or next to last, after an almighty sweep of destruction, / his body is a thicket, / A burden of hollowness, a forest of affliction, / Homage to God.” The animals are doing as they’re intended. It’s the humans who go against their nature and against each other. Humans are bereft of humanity. At times peoples’ violence is unintentional but nonetheless brutal, such as when Mulvihill writes, under the subheading Lorde, “How often do you have / to ask, ‘When a white woman / recites my poems, am I / trapped in my words in her?’” Appreciating the beauty of a Black woman’s poetry may lead to appropriation. Even actions veiled in good intention can cause thoughtless consequences.
Mulvihill gives another stark example of humans attacking their own in “Necessity”: “When I worked in an orphanage a boy / came to harvest sugar cane in what / he’d worn to work the street at a beach resort.” I found myself distracted by her sudden explanation of natural phenomena and etymology, dazzled by the brief factoid––and so stunned by the casual account of what followed. “His bunkmates picked up volcanic rock… scoria––a word / whose root gives us slag, drek / and excrement. At the field’s edge, / they stoned him. I see his diminishing blue / still, the turbulence of his dress as he ran.” Observing language and the natural world gives way to witnessing a murder, a stark reminder of how close beauty and brutality can be. Mulvihill goes even further to demonstrate how humans unleash their cruelty on more than their own kind: “Out of jealousy or boredom they / also killed each other’s adopted strays.” All this young, unfettered violence foreshadows potential threat against the narrator herself: “Then, I didn’t know what it was to wake / in a woman’s bed and enter the world / sure her touch must show on my skin.” Mulvihill only tells us that the boy wore his dress to work, nothing more. But the implication, alongside her own revelation at the poem’s grim conclusion, is that the boy had been bound by stereotypes against his gender, just as the narrator is bound by her sexuality. While the narrator hasn’t suffered the same fate as the stoned boy, she’s witnessed what becomes of those who fully embrace and showcase their identities. Being too human can get you killed. Then again, the narrator is alive to experience another woman’s touch. Though there may be potential consequences to her affections, there are plenty of joys to be had as well.
Even when beauty is in full bloom, the threat of death is never far behind.
Delving further into the complications of humanity, Mulvihill explores the beauty of being a woman in light of struggles for autonomy. “Dubbed, Staked Out, Overwritten––” details parts of a woman’s anatomy: “from the Atlas bone that holds / up my head to my Achilles tendon; / every hemisphere, groove, / fissure, plate, ridge and basin… I’ve been occupied / by centuries of men. My body / is an index of them.” While on one hand it’s marvelous, hypnotic even, to read the intricacies of a single body, it’s devastating to remember the ways that men continue to dominate women’s bodies. The very features that make women lovely are often marked by ugliness.
Similarly, even the ability to give birth can cost women dearly. Motherhood is fraught with complexities, as Mulvihill reminds us in “Step Inside.” “In the cellophane pages of an anatomical atlas, one / system overlays the last. Under a bone dome, the brain, / a scarred bride, drags her nervous train… Was it to purge herself of herself that my mother gave birth?” The act of bringing another being into the world often forces mothers to lose parts of themselves. Yet for many, like Mulvhill herself, the joys of motherhood are well worth it. In “Yes––Not at All” she writes that “[i]f I’m life’s outpouring, you’re / my outpouring… You are my person.” Though being a mother comes with its conundrums, she finds delight in her children nonetheless. Loving well often requires taking great risks.
Overall, The Knife Thrower’s Girl is a necessary reminder that even when beauty is in full bloom, the threat of death is never far behind. Mulvihill succinctly explores this sentiment in “Order,” in which she plays with the alphabet to contrast normal horrors with simple joys. “Between nap and nape is napalm… Jowl hangs above joy, lot beneath lost. / Where mess goes, message follows. A dog, / hit by a car, extrudes its own intestines / as it leaps around children on a seesaw. / See how delight rides shotgun with dread.” Splendor and sadness intertwined, as in every life. There is a savage beauty just in existing. Maybe at times it is enough to find heaven here amidst the hell, to appreciate any and all delights despite the risk of losing them. Maybe that is not a form of settling. It may be what helps us thrive.
Megan Foster earned an MA in the Humanities from the University of Chicago and has been a children’s bookseller across New England. She currently lives in New Haven with her husband and two cats.
The Knife Thrower’s Girl was published by The Word Works on March 1, 2023. You can purchase a copy from the publisher here.
