Esther Lin
Let Our Bodies Change the Subject
By Jared Harél
80 pages. University of Nebraska Press, 2023.
It’s hard for me to view my parents with mercy. I suspect this is true for many readers. Not because our parents were so terrible but that we needed so much. Had I ever dreamt the reverse might be true: that my parents might have needed so much? Selected by Kwame Dawes for the 2022 the Raz/Shumaker Prairie Schooner award, Let Our Bodies Change the Subject is an elegant collection on young fatherhood. It is the second book of poems by Jared Harél, wherein he composes images around the suffering of parents—though his speaker would not call parenthood a source of suffering. Here is a young father who apprehends that with children comes the end of his own safety. He can foresee the pain they will one day experience; he suffers with them; he will never be solely himself again. Harél writes without self-flattery, in a spare, clean verse that refutes the desire to flatter oneself. In these poems, there is much to admire.
When I first thumbed through the table of contents, “Having a Third” caught my eye. I am a third child; what could this father of two possibly say to satisfy a third child? Like most of the poems in the book, it is a slim one-pager. No flourishes here, Harél goes straight to the point: “We have two children / but shall not have a third.” The poem is measured in its trim sentences, all in the firm indicative mood, lines neatly end-stopped. Yet instability hovers everywhere: As each sentence is uttered, the sentence repeals itself. A reader does not wholly believe this stern-jawed presentation. The poem continues:
A small selfishness, sure,
the way all life choices
imply privilege to choose.
We have two children—
beautiful and bright—
though they fight
like we might only keep one:
the victor of some vital
and ludicrous duel.
We have two children
but won’t have a third [. . .]
The repetition of the promise—“shall not have a third”; “won’t have a third” — points toward what must have been a prolonged disagreement between the members of this united we. That laughing sentiment, “though they [the two children] fight like we might only keep one,” hides a threat inconceivable to all parents, save the ones who have witnessed or endured the crimes that spurred immigrant parents like mine, and the speaker’s ancestors, to flee their homes. Another poem, “On Suffering,” refers to the inheritance of the inconceivable, one so terrible the speaker can hardly envision it for the reader. He confesses,
And though my grandfather told me
over and over, I don’t know
how he made it through bone and mud
in some shithole Polish village
in 1941, or how he lost everything, brutally [. . .]
Occluded memory is a common response to trauma, even inherited trauma, but in the language of survival, details are not necessary. If the speaker cannot recollect how his grandfather survived the Holocaust, the grandfather’s message has nevertheless been transmitted. Sometimes you can only save one child. If you ever feel safe—that’s only for now.
Of course, there is no “seeming.” We live in twenty-first century America; danger abounds. Perhaps the most ambitious poem is the one whose turning line, “Let our bodies change the subject,” forms the striking title of the book. It is a lovely phrase, exercising one of our best and least well-utilized verbs in English: “to let.” In this sentence, it is all at once invitation, directive, and plea for sex—sex, to distract the speaker and his wife from the conversation around the “news of another shooting.” His wife had shared her guess of what death feels like: “like giving birth, the body / insistent, having its way.” The speaker thinks of his “uncle’s melanoma caught early enough / to cut.” He has no other reference to death. He has only eros: “I want to kiss you. Build asylum inside you. / Let our bodies change / the subject.” Trauma surrounds the speaker, but he’s been too lucky to know it himself. A fact he acknowledges in another poem:
If I Never Find God
it may be because I search
like how my daughter dawdles
about our modest two-bedroom:
dreamy, off-kilter, driving
me mad, too lucky to really look
for her elusive other shoe.
Collectively the poems suggest that the arrival of children severed the speaker from his belief in God; that, as a single man, even as a married man, he was sheltered from the notion that God might fail to protect him. It’s a humble move, to unmask himself of airy sophistication and reveal this callow naivete, but the speaker unmasks again and again, sometimes wryly, sometimes with frustration. Harél shines in his ability to portray this inner turmoil in the simplest of terms: a missing shoe, a parent’s shrinking temper, the little home that should hold no mysteries.
A less sure-footed poet might resort to formal pyrotechnics to distract, like a magician’s shimmering scarf, from what might be an undercooked argument. He might clutter his poem with images intended to appease the reader. Instead, Harél’s poetic is daringly unvarnished; no language draws overt attention to itself. The poems are short, the most sprawling one running one and a half pages. They tend to be uniform in line length, ranging from trimeter to hexameter, full of caesuras coupled with the quick-stepping switchbacking of enjambed syntax—a springy line that evinces sincerity and wit. Harél’s language is everyday American English; if his poetic were a textile, it would be linen in the plain weave. Like a good weaver, he allows the source material to shine, and applies his craft with a light hand.
These poems call to mind the full-hearted poems of a young Robert Hass in Field Guide. Here are two poets interested in the themes of domesticity, spirituality, and doubt. Let Our Bodies and Field Guide both evince the sense of a busy river, with each poem like a raft of stillness upon that river. So much happens between each poem that readers may imagine the day-to-day dramas occurring in the white space, for it’s clear the characters change as the book progresses. Here some fruitful distinctions arise between the two poets. My favorite poem in Field Guide, “Song,” begins with a twinkle-eyed question:
[W]ho is more naked
than the man
yelling, “Hey. I’m home!”
to an empty house? [. . .]
[T]hat great crowds of family
should tumble from the rooms
to throw their bodies on the Papa-body,
I-am-loved.
From this absence of exultation emerges an exultation of absence, by way of a ravishing still-life: “slices of green pepper / on a bone-white dish.” The poem suggests that when the patriarch is caught without the signifiers of his status, he is vulnerable enough to receive beauty. Another unmasking! The unmasked father experiences the domestic sublime. With Harél, there is no such reward; his speaker loses the privilege of naivete and must soldier through the anxiety of raising a family. What’s more, Harél’s children are marvels as characters. They appear as clamorous, conflicted individuals, full of moral complexity. They remind me of the wise children of Woolf’s To the Lighthouse, who en masse operate as the novel’s Greek chorus and antagonist and protagonist. On the other hand, Hass’s children are merely signifiers. Only the father is real.
In his preface to Field Guide, Hass writes, “Feeling human [is a] useful form of political subversion.” Surely Harél agrees; the subversion within his poems is the deep yearning for a life of questioning, one that is not exclusive to personal responsibility in the form of fatherhood. Young fatherhood—how infrequently we read poems of this subject, much less an entire book! That this book wins a prize is news to celebrate, especially as Americans re-evaluate masculinity in the midst of our longstanding crises of mass shootings, anti-abortion laws, and transphobia. (Matthew Zapruder’s 2019 Father’s Day is excellent to read alongside Let Our Bodies.) Think of James Wright or Larry Levis. The twentieth-century literary father is not often thought of as exemplary, but here I’ve enjoyed a clear glimpse into the interior of a softer, deeply involved father, one who recalls, two centuries back, Coleridge in his conversation poems.
“Fluttering stranger!” Coleridge calls his infant in “Frost at Midnight.” As he stirs the hearth fire, his thoughts are resplendent tenderness: “Dear Babe, that sleepest cradled by my side.” We are given to the Romantic’s flowering of the domestic poem as he calls out,
But thou, my babe! shalt wander like a breeze
By lakes and sandy shores, beneath the crags
Of ancient mountain [. . .]
so shalt thou see and hear
The lovely shapes and sounds intelligible
Of that eternal language.
We cannot but feel the ecstasy of this direct address, a father’s desire for his child to fully experience beauty and expansion, as offered by the natural world. As if in reply, here is Harél’s speaker, with his family, seated in a “dome of wild darkness”:
The baby stayed asleep—a galaxy all his own—[. . .]
and our daughter blinked up from the edge
of the field, head back as if rinsing out shampoo.
The night was cold. Her spangly sneakers
went black and still and suddenly I knew
that if we did not reach her, something would—
hushed and hidden, yet I failed to speak.
The characters of “Good Star” are full of the proper admiration for nature as they stargaze. Even so, the father’s consciousness speeds to the future. Not toward beauty and expansion, but the dread unknown: The “something” that might snatch up the child. His own powerlessness against it. Coleridge echoes the same powerlessness in a prayer to God, the “Great universal teacher!” Much can be said on our current mood of powerlessness—climate change, the state of democracy, take your pick—but I’ll simply say that Let Our Bodies shimmers even without the hope of Coleridge’s prayer; even without the picturesque images of Hass, the ones that insist that beauty can save us. On these fancies, Harél is far too pessimistic.
And why would the grandchild of a Holocaust survivor be otherwise? As the book comes to a close, the poems grow more troubled, more aware of the losses that lurk around the corner. A late poem, titled “Spring,” begins with the trim tercet: “Each day, fresh evidence / of how thoroughly / I will vanish.” In “Birthday,” the speaker cannot even convince his daughter that “nothing is ever lost” when she turns seven and “missed being six.” Harél writes:
You take it
all with you, you bring all
your selves with you
into the future. I don’t know
what I believe, but I think
she believed me.
I told her nothing is ever lost,
and kept repeating it
till she rose in her nightgown
in the morning dark.
For now the children are spared. The pessimism is gentle. As a daughter and granddaughter of refugees, I recognize the peculiarly un-American admixture of pride in one’s survival, pride in one’s family, and resignation to fate. One may live the American life, but . . .
This tension, exhibited in bright, clean verse, makes for a sterling book. A good father and a bold poetic—in these cheerless days, who could ask for more? Already I look forward to Harél’s next book, wherein I envision a deepening of the speaker’s ambivalences, perhaps upon a wider canvas, with greater emotional extremes, of violence and despair, which the speaker will not now permit himself. As it is, I find the inner workings of Let Our Bodies terribly moving. For readers who are parents, they will find fellow feeling. For readers who are not parents (like myself) but have always found their own parents to be mysterious, this book provides a lucid possibility of what we might have known, had we opportunity. Harél offers the most generous version, of a father who labors to comfort his children without betraying his integrity. It is labor indeed.
Esther Lin is the author of Cold Thief Place, winner of the 2023 Alice James Award, and of the chapbook The Ghost Wife (Poetry Society of America, 2018). Most recently, she was an artist-resident at the T. S. Eliot House in Gloucester and Cité internationale, Paris. She was a 2019–20 Writing Fellow at the Fine Arts Work Center, Provincetown, and a 2017–19 Wallace Stegner Fellow. Her work has been included in Best New Poets 2022 and 2023 Best of the Net Anthology. Currently she co-organizes the Undocupoets, which raises consciousness about the structural barriers facing undocumented poets.