Review by Daniel Lassell
When I picked up a copy of Susan L. Leary’s fourth book of poems, Dressing the Bear, I immediately gathered that elegy and grief played a central role. Take these opening lines from the collection’s first poem, “If, Elsewhere”:
You startled yourself
with your own death
as I startled myself
with the facts. (14)
By the end of this first poem, the reader learns that it is the speaker’s brother who died, and in continuing further, readers piece together that the brother had struggles with addiction, which eventually led to his incarceration. For example, take these lines from “Poem Beginning with Two Lines from William Carlos Williams”:
upon the glow
& rattleof the bathroom
lights,the color of
heroin,lovely as snow
or a finger’spinch
of the earth. (62).
Dressing the Bear is not a book solely about grief on a personal scale though, but a kind of grief that transcends beyond the poet’s experience, a book with a widening lens that is also cognizant and empathetic toward universal experiences and concerns. It is a book that doesn’t explore grieving from predictable avenues. Instead, Leary is a skilled poet who approaches the hard subjects from aslant perspectives from within the trenches of daily living, such as watching television or going shopping. These happenstance memories of what might seemingly be mundane circumstances for most become, instead, the starting point for a much deeper, wider conversation with grief. Take, for example, the titular poem of the collection, “Dressing the Bear,” where the speaker remembers a time when she and her brother are at a Build-A-Bear in the mall, attempting to stuff a newly created bear. The speaker’s brother, infatuated with a girl he's loved since sixth grade, seeks to showcase his love to her:
[…] I consider his face as he forgets he has one,
as if in loving the girl & loving her limb by clothed limb,
for once, my brother can love himself. (26).
Here, readers get this beautiful image of a brother and sister. Yet, it turns in its poignancy when the speaker considers that she, in helping her brother with the bear, is also attempting to help her brother love himself.
One of my favorite moments in the collection appears toward the end of Dressing the Bear, where two poems seem to be in overt conversation with each other. The ending of the poem “Roll Call” has this line: “Go now. You are the river in need of a new name.” (78). Then the very next poem, “The Birds, They Too, Are Clean,” starts out with these lines:
I take it back—the last line of the last poem, the go
now. I agree to quit my want of spectral grace & trouble
with your death no more. Now I am busy being alive,
busy bending my brain towards the mercy in the obstacle. (79).
The speaker is fully aware of her chosen words on the page, and even the ordering of information in the collection: what is said and when, what readers have gleaned from that information, and a suggested way of living. In a book about a person’s addiction and incarceration, about death and mourning, it’s an awareness and restraint, and a respect for what goes unsaid, that I found most endearing and fresh for a collection, at a time in contemporary poetry when some poets are all too concerned with performance and appearances, rather than their craft and art, and the humanity behind the creation of that art.
“The Birds, They Too, Are Clean” ends with perhaps the most authentic and honest words about the nature of grief: “Yet, you’ll never leave me, he says, it never ends. / The birds are washing their feathers with the water from their eyes.” (79). Grief, as Leary suggests, is not something that can be easily resolved of declared away. Instead, grieving is a process that never truly ends, but only temporarily subsides before returning in unexpected places. The birds in the last line of the poem seem to indicate lost potential, their wings used not for flight, but washing away and away. It reminds me of these beautiful lines from an earlier poem in the collection, “A Man Does His Apologizing out in the Wilderness,” where birds, despite having wings, represent an inability to grasp freedom:
[…] You thrive
in convincing me we are the bird, each of us a wing—our bodies back-
to-back in fetal position & tangled into a single spine, our limbs
curling into hydrangeas. It is a curse to be turned to stone, but you are
a god exerting the greatest effort to remain idle. (23).
The more I progressed through Dressing the Bear the more I realized how similar it is to three other poetry collections I admire on the topics of grief and elegy: Matt Rasmussen’s Black Aperture, Laura Apol’s A Fine Yellow Dust, and Joan Kwon Glass’s Night Swim. These collections, among my very favorites, approach grieving the loss of a loved one from a fresh lens that authentically drives their poetic subjects forward. They don’t perform grief; they live within it. Leary’s collection fits well among this firmament, becoming yet another unique book about grieving’s perseverations in earnest honesty. I highly recommend Dressing the Bear to readers who have ever felt such a profound loss in their lives, since the book’s refusal to perform pat elegy renders each poem a soothing, healing read.
Susan L. Leary is the author of four poetry collections: Dressing the Bear (Trio House Press, July 2024), selected by Kimberly Blaeser to win the Louise Bogan Award; A Buffet Table Fit for Queens (Small Harbor Publishing, 2023), winner of the Washburn Prize; Contraband Paradise (Main Street Rag, 2021); and This Girl, Your Disciple (Finishing Line Press, 2019), finalist for The Heartland Review Press Chapbook Prize and semi-finalist for The Elyse Wolf Prize with Slate Roof Press. She holds a B.A., M.A., and M.F.A. from the University of Miami, where she taught Writing Studies for 15 years, and is on the editorial staff at Iron Oak Editions.
Daniel Lassell is the author of Frame Inside a Frame (Texas Review Press, forthcoming Fall 2025) and Spit (Wheelbarrow Books, 2021), which won the 2020 Wheelbarrow Books Poetry Prize, the 2022 Midwest Book Awards for a poetry debut, and the 2021-22 Reader Views’ Gold Award and Inside Scoop Live Award for the Most Innovative Book of Poetry. Spit was also shortlisted for the 2021 International Book Awards, the 2021 Best Book Awards, the 2022 Eric Hoffer First Horizon Award, the 2022 Eric Hoffer Book Awards Grand Prize, and the 2022 Sheila Margaret Motton Book Prize. He is also the author of two chapbooks: Ad Spot (Ethel Zine & Micro Press, 2021), which received an honorable mention for the chapbook category of the 2022 Eric Hoffer Book Awards, and The Emptying Earth (Madhouse Press, 2023), which was a finalist for the 2024 Medal Provocateur Award. He grew up in Kentucky, where he raised llamas and alpacas, and now lives in Bloomington, Indiana.