Review by Carrie Nassif
Paula Cisewksi’s Ceremonies for No Repair is a gleaming explication of the existential futility found in the human condition. Set in the first six months of the pandemic, she addresses the pervasive isolation, longing, suffering, and loss - and still, and even, beauty…and yet, light.
Dear Whichever
God: want is a stupid drug.
p. 59, from the poem, Morning Prayer
This collection is dark and luminous in tone, and its visual art includes poem comics, experimental collages, and a series of chiaroscuro dandelion prints reversing pale figures and dark ground and vice versa. Her work feels the way those sorts of optical illusions do, how, in their simplicity, they are so unsettling…we don’t quite know what to focus on. There is no one solution, no single “gestalt,” only the uncomfortable jumping back and forth of our attention.
In the dreams I was always searching for something or hiding from something. Unclear.
Like waking life, it could have been a both/and situation.
p. 17, from the poem, Ghost of Human Contact [Stationed across a quarantine]
The dandelion itself becomes a motif of several themes: the prolific propagation of weeds, like that of the coronavirus and its resulting deaths, in the same way that hopelessness and hatred spread through the soil; the insubstantial and wistful seed puffs of hope in these poems being cast into the wind despite having been neglected, and which flutter almost lost and improbable; and also, the buttery reassurance of their yellow promise of summer and the healing of ancestral trauma. The author employs many languages to discuss these old pains:
…Broke
the chrysocolla into three blue
oceans on the floor.
p. 92, from the poem, Listened to Songs that Whole Era when It Never Occurred to Me to Sing Along
For context, chrysocolla is a blue stone noted for its calming and reassuring properties. This peace now broken three different ways: perhaps by the pandemic, by the resonating tides of the mother wound, and then by the multi-layered wake of violence that George Floyd’s murder would trigger in the author’s hometown. And then, it dawns on me that Cisewski’s book also houses three different forms of ocean. There are prose poems/journal entries from April 1, 2020, to June 10, 2020. There is a group of seven poems entitled Ghost of Human Contact, often tender and precise reflections of the long-term pandemic angst. Thirdly, the red string that ties it all together is a dandelion-chain chain-linked heroic crown of sonnets titled “Mother Corona.” Corona, of course, is about its meaning, “crown-like” in this arrangement of sonnets, and also hearkening to the coronavirus so-named for the shape of the spikes in the virus itself. The repetitively open form mimics the inexorable march of the pandemic, bisected by the speaker’s mother’s declining physical and mental status, by the parallel processes of illness and isolation in the speaker’s life and her mother’s, and in their reciprocal abandonment of each other. It elicits the ouroboros of how each mother memory lost brought about seven more daughter memories, each linked to the previous, tangled and circling, and each, another iteration of every other loss, all while the world locks down upon itself.
A
Mother
is a kind
of danger
to meet.
p. 33, from the poem, May 10, 2020
Cisewski explores several sorts of mothering failures, such as when the speaker’s mother experiences more and more confusion, made all the more acute when she is diagnosed with cancer and sequestered away from anything familiar in hopes of evading the disease during the pandemic. Then there is the inability of anyone to mitigate the sheer numbers of COVID-19 deaths cataloged in the poetry and footnotes, and also, the irony of her mother dying of the illness that her suffering in isolation was meant to spare her from.
An iris probably did not dream
All winter underground
To be beautiful enough
For cutting
p. 53, from the poem, Ghost of Human Contact [Yellow iris buttery]
She also explored the othering of failures in our devastatingly racist society, evident in disproportionate COVID-19 deaths among people of color but also heightened by the death of George Floyd and countless others from police brutality and the police brutality the protests of police brutality and the long history of this long history. This form recalls to the reader the elegiac “A Wreath for Emmett Till,” also a heroic crown of sonnets, written by Marilyn Nelson in 2006.
I reclosed the box and buried the lot in
the backyard beneath the lilacs. You’re welcome.
What else to do with anything so long in the dark?
p. 87, from the poem, Ceremony for No Repair
But this is a heroic crown of sonnets and who here is the hero? The Anti-hero? When is there no ceremony for repair? Perhaps the hero is the witness to this futility of grieving…the poet in her words, the readers via their attention and attendance at the scene, or may it’s just the vulnerable tenderness of being, of having a sentient experience in this world, that is all the hero we need.
the sudden light wore
our greeting like the dark
inside its crown.
p. 93. from the poem, Listened to Songs That Whole Era When It Never Occurred to Me to Sing Along
Paula Cisewski is a poet, artist, educator, editor, publisher, and curator in Minneapolis. Her hybrid book, Ceremonies for No Repair, is newly released from Beauty School Editions, LLC, and her poetry collection, The Becoming Game, is forthcoming from Hanging Loose Press in spring of 2025. She is also the author of Quitter (Diode Editions Book Prize winner), The Threatened Everything, Ghost Fargo (Nightboat Poetry Prize winner, selected by Franz Wright), Upon Arrival, and several chapbooks. Visit www.paulacisewski.com for more.
Carrie Nassif (she/hers) is a queer poet, psychologist, creativity catalyst/life coach, and photographer who lives near Taos, New Mexico. She is the author of lithopaedion (Finishing Line Press 2023) finalist for the Yes Yes Book’s Vinyl 45 Chapbook Contest, and the vulture girl: necessary and sufficient conditions, a speculative memoir in experimental poetry (forthcoming with Saddle Road Press 2024). Links to her recent work can be found at www.carrienassifphd.com