Barrelhouse Reviews: Belly to the Brutal, by Jennifer Givhan

Review by Jessica Poli

Wesleyan University Press / August 2022 / 128 pp

Where does a mother’s body end and a child’s begin? Belly to the Brutal roots itself in that liminal space. Motherhood, as Jennifer Givhan writes it in this collection, might be thought of as a kind of self-birth, blurring the boundaries between mother and child from the very beginning in tangible, physical ways. The book’s opening poem, “The Nopal,” speaks to this directly:

The cells she & I passed
through the blood barrier, flashes of bright pink

 bulbs at the tips of our organs as she grew
inside me—cells we still share, planting traces

of ourselves within each other through the migration—

Here, organs are not mine, but ours. Planted in the poem, as well, is the idea that even after mother and daughter separate during birth, they will still be physically present in one another through traces of DNA. In science, there’s a word for this: microchimerism, or the presence of cells originating from one individual in another genetically distinct individual. These cells can remain for decades, meaning that mother and child are both, for many years, chimeras of one another.

Givhan’s poetry also tackles the messy and complicated realities of inherited trauma—specifically, that which is passed from mother to daughter through the womb. Throughout the poems, wounds are shared and bonded over until the body seems to double, the figures of the mother and the daughter simultaneously separate and joined forever. Givhan meditates on the lineage of daughters that has led to her and her own daughter, with the understanding that the new generations would not exist without the old, and thus they are imprinted upon one another throughout time and space:

I realize why I recognized you
when the doctors laid you

 at my breast—I know you,
bright one, I know you—

 Then you & I
were born.

Birth, in these poems, doubles the self—the child is an individual, but they are also inextricably a part of the mother, and vice versa.

This idea of doubling is also embedded in the language of the poems via Givhan’s fondness for compound neologisms. As a lover of compound words in general, I must take a moment to appreciate some of hers: brickred, heartshaped, bitemark, cavemouth, riverbed, orangebright, milkheart. These words bloom on the page, expanding, paradoxically, in their compactness—much like our concept of the mother’s and child’s bodies expanding via microchimerism. This becomes even more apparent in Givhan’s repeated use of certain compound neologisms, which often refer to the figures of mother (motherbound, motherlove, motherfear, motherbody, motherpoet, painmother, firstmother, wolfmother, motherbroken) and daughter (daughtercup, daughtercherried, girlwound, girlchild, girlbody, girldemon). These words, at once compact and expansive, reflect the effect motherhood has on every aspect of life for the speaker and her daughter. In this collection, love, fear, pain, and the body are inseparable from mothering.

In “Girlchild     Prophetess,” Givhan writes of the daughter: “I sometimes re-live through her. She takes me through the dark forests, teaches me which wolves are prey. How to not be afraid. Still, the motherfear returns.” The speaker’s fear is not just fear; it encompasses all threats and proves inextricable from motherhood of a daughter. Across the collection, the speaker’s fears transform, recycling and reemerging as new, distinct fears of what the child might experience. Alongside these anxieties, Givhan weaves another thread: the child reversing the roles and mothering—caring, assuaging fears, guiding, teaching. Though it is not enough, in this poem, to completely diminish that motherfear, a moment of relief arrives when the daughter can mother.

Who carries who lies at the heart of many of the poems in this collection, beginning with the tender knowledge that both mother and daughter must hold: “Someday one of us will carry a ghost.” And sometimes the thing being carried is not a who, but a what, revealing a speaker who is heavy with the weight of memory, family history, and the tenuous future. In “I am dark      I am forest,” which borrows its title from a line of Rilke’s, the speaker lists, at length, the things she carries: 

I carried a bowl of menudo into the forest     I carried my bisabuela’s
tripas not daring ask whose intestines I carried con cilantro y radish y
cebolla chopped fine

Later, a brilliant moment of transformation:

I carried her face             the scars her warped esposo left her granddaughter
             carried those wounds through the womb           not wolf but blue-eyed
man            I stirred the menudo        my belly the pot          scalding       

Here, Givhan returns again to the blood barrier, to the cells passing through the womb—but in this poem it’s not only cells that are passed, but also scars, wounds. Passing down trauma, an act a mother is helpless to prevent, may provoke despair, but Givhan transforms it through the warmth and sustenance of the menudo, naming her belly, and thus womb, the soup pot. While pain might be passed, the speaker reminds the daughter—and us—that there is also menudo, which is to say warmth, love, and care.

Belly to the Brutal is a sustained meditation on the love between mothers and daughters, as well as an excavation of the systems that attempt to pull them apart or oppress them. Although her wounds are deep, Givhan finds space and room for healing: “I teach my daughter[s] their names, loud [daughters] // their names: & call into being what cannot hurt us / [again].”

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Jessica Poli is the author of Red Ocher (University of Arkansas Press, 2023), which was chosen by Patricia Smith as a finalist for the Miller Williams Prize. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Best New Poets, North American Review, Poet Lore, and Salamander, among other places. She is currently a PhD student at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln.