Review
Pink Elephant by Rachel McKibbens
Cypher Books, 2009
Reviewed by Janelle Elyse Kihlstrom
I have to warn readers that Rachel McKibbens's first book, Pink Elephant, is probably going to break your heart. But every once in a while, it will make you chuckle, and in the end, you'll feel a little bit more hopeful in the parts of yourself where hope is scarce. I don't normally make wagers like that, but I feel good about this one.
It isn't just the fact that these poems recount a childhood so nightmarish it's difficult to imagine a poet surviving it intact, but it's the fact that McKibbens is a poet, not only a witness to trauma or an eloquent teller of sad tales but a wordsmith who has honed her unique style of tough-girl/tough-mama confessional lyricism to a fine, sharp point.
I must admit that when I first read McKibbens's poems "Easter, 1981" and "What Comes Next" for publication in Melusine's debut issue, I was unaware that she was a world-class competitive slam poet, who would win the 2009 women's individual title. Those two poems, along with the bulk of this collection, speak for themselves as they stand on the page, although I have no doubt they would pack a wallop read aloud.
The punchline stanza of "Easter, 1981" provides an example of the thread of black humor tinged with sadness that runs through the collection:
Is that the bitch screaming in there? She asked. We nodded our heads. He hits her too, huh? And I saw that she was pleased. Finally, I had something. Something she could love me for. He does it all the time, I said, You should have been here for her birthday.
"What Comes Next" remains one of my favorites here because it shows McKibbens's scope as a craftswoman, weaving dream-logic, familiar folklore, and personal history into a lyrical progression that, in the midst of enunciating the limitations of a fixed narrative, posits what may be possible, once one has claimed a voice: "... what other choice do you have but to defy your history,/ become the god riot of your own small and meaningful world?"
Poems like "814," about two children encountering the physical facts of human death for the first time in an alley they were forbidden to ride their bikes through, straddles the fence between narrative poem and prose narration, but, in any case, keeps the reader hooked through the strength of its telling.
Most poems balance narration with reflection, as in "The First Time," which opens the collection with the story of a small child running away with her younger brother and the legacy of that sense of homelessness in the adult woman: "It's why you are here now,/ carrying a bag full of things/ that will not help you, why houses/ fill with those less deserving,/ why saints hold their hands out/ to everyone but you."
In "The Second Time," the sense of hopelessness descending on the child in the poem is so all-encompassing that it seems to permit no future even for battle scars, much less transcendence. Through the stark images provided us, we can see the small girl standing there, but she cannot see a path forward, as she "... stood at the curb, holding/ a bloody sack of coins, waiting/ for silence to overcome/ the night./ The sprinklers came on/ in the courtyard/ as I made my way up the sidewalk,/ following a trail of blood back/ all the way home."
That there will be a future becomes evident as the collection progresses, and especially in the final two parts of the book. There is a large measure of wisdom here entwined with the horror and sadness, and the poet reveals the secret to her survival, aside from the evidentiary fact that she has become a poet, in the short poem "How It's Done."
To forgive my father means to uncover the value of my own life. To admire what had the guts to be cruel, to lie down with it at the smallest hint of kindness and donate this body to house the few sweet things that could come of it.
And in a poem about a mother's negligence, she writes, "This is how I learned the difference/ between women and mothers./ That is when I knew/ what I wanted to be."
Mother-love in these poems is a force to be reckoned with, as in the last stanza of the collection's final poem, at first glance the ironically-titled "Finally, the Author Gets Personal":
And I realized what I was prepared to become. Thief of my own body. A woman who could pull a boy from herself, chew through his cord with her love-sharp teeth.
The collection begins with a portrait of survival, with running away from a legacy of seemingly irreparable damage, and ends with the progressive emergence of not merely a survivor but a woman living on her own terms, with the courage even to love.
Rachel McKibbens was born in Anaheim, CA. She is a member and co-founder of the Right Coast Writers Brigade. Her poems have appeared in numerous journals and anthologies, including World Literature Today, The New York Quarterly and Bowery Women: Poems. Among other honors, she is a New York Foundation of the Arts Poetry Fellow, a Pushcart nominee, and the 2009 Women's Individual World Poetry Slam champion. She has read her work at universities, schools, galleries and various other venues across the nation. She teaches poetry and creative writing across the country at all levels. An ex-punk rock chola with five children, she lives in upstate New York. Pink Elephant is her first book.
