Joanna Valente’s debut collection of poetry, Sirs and Madams (Aldrich Press, 2014), is a study in human relationships among different kinds of kin — speakers, strangers, and family members both living and dead — that fleshes itself out through an extended homage to sisterhood. Three sisters’ voices overlap and interweave throughout this text; by turns, they dominate each other, themselves, and this collection, but never quite the world around them. These women, and the poems themselves, are defined largely by their positioning among one another. The voices of Tessa, Maggie, and Marianne, shaped by the experiences and fixations that preoccupy them, begin to glean identity from the light the other poems cast around them, as much as from the language and the soul that constructs each of them as separate identities.
And yet, despite all the togetherness, there is a profound sensibility of isolation in these poems. The sisters’ voices seem to mesh so well in part because of their respective isolations — they seem to have little else but each other. Valente utilizes ghosts to convey this sense of immersion without revelation or fulfilled exchange. In “Her First Love,” for example, it is “on the anniversary of her grandmother’s death” — a moment in which absence, a lost connection, is being felt especially keenly — that the boy in question invites the speaker over because, in his isolation, he’s begun to see ghosts (the text ambivalently implies that he sees ghosts of Elvis Presley — a pop-culture metaphor for the denial humans exhibit towards loss too keenly felt — and his own sister). The poem’s speaker, and ostensibly her sisters, “[weren’t] sure who was the ghost.” Perhaps this boy is already being depicted as an elusive character, someone the speaker cannot connect with as she wishes. After a section break, Valente gives it to us straight: “He tells her he loves her, that he means it. / They kiss & he pretends she is a boy.” Despite their physical connection and the intimacy of a shared space, where they are each other’s only chosen company, their connection is corroded, is false, is not to be trusted. The sisters are right to suspect his vicissitudes, his ephemera.
As such loneliness permeates the core of Sirs and Madams, it requires only a small shift for the reader to suppose that these poems are not only about the sisters’ loneliness, but about our own. In “Palm Reader,” Valente’s speaker addresses a deceased member of her kin, a former intimate, remembering ill-fated trips to the grocery store in the addressee’s later stages of dementia; she closes by indicating her preference for solitude, for the pain of an authentically ceased connection, over the wound created by a false gesture towards a continuation that cannot exist:
” You tell me I’m a good girl as I bag your groceries;
your voice came from the kind of dream where waking up
cold & alone is a relief.”
Valente keeps her speakers — indeed, the entire book — at a remove from the reader, as well. The title is evocative of the antiquated greeting of an impersonal, formal letter: “Dear Sir or Madam.” Even as Valente addresses her readers, she cannot entirely pierce their isolation, nor can we entirely access her speakers’ various states of alienation. Of course, it’s difficult to forget that “Madam” has a sexual connotation, too: the title of a woman who runs a brothel, another social space that puts people in close proximity to each other while failing to erase their deeper sense of loneliness, of un-coupled-ness. In this sense, “Madam(s)” implies “Sirs” as patrons of a brothel — a universe in which all women are madams and all men their patrons. Such titles bear a deceptive kind of formality — a tradition intended to civilize, to contain. Perhaps these poems embrace a certain kind of formal decorum because something needs to contain them, contain their heat and light and shadow and grit and verve. They are too aware of everything around them, everything swirling in collision in this too-big container of our universe (as Valente writes in “Everyone on the Other Side of the Universe”):
It was unbearable the way
he would send me to bed, tucked in by ghost stories
about children falling down elevator shafts, children
holding their breath underwater too long to swim
back up. Everyone on the other side
of the universe standing upside down in my closet,
tailoring my clothes in the reverse eye.
A lost earring, a stray cat — didn’t matter,
I knew it was them. As though they thought
I wouldn’t notice.
Even now, I sometimes hear them cackle —
like callous cicadas in reverb.
The awareness of other people, their felt presence, is a weight, is something that curdles these speakers’ awareness around the edges. How to navigate this world, this universe, so filled with other people and the butterfly-effect sensations of their existence? How to reckon the hostile distances between ourselves and others? Valente rejects all easy answers, and will not allow them (at least, not in the universe of this book) for her readers, either: she closes the collection with an image of Philomela, the woman who was raped by her sister’s husband, then mutilated (her tongue cut out) by this same man so that she could not share her story — a sickening connection, a vicious, vacuous kinship — waits for the three unwitting sisters “on that street to teach them/ the hate of love.” After the final wound: more blood.
Fox Frazier-Foley is the author of Exodus in X Minor and The Hydromantic Histories. She loves animals, art, travel, Vodou, and sleeping.
