Desire to Remedy
Review of Kathryn Nuernberger’s Rue (BOA Editions, 2020)
By Ang Shuang
The titular poem of Kathryn Nuernberger’s third poetry collection, Rue, describes how the rue plant is both “the remedy for melancholy” and also “bitter, hence regret.” A collection about the loneliness of the human condition and the desire to remedy it by building connections with people inside and outside of the poet’s life, Rue folds into itself explorations in botany, feminism, and history.
The collection’s first poem, “It’s Like She Loves Us and Like She Hates Us,” sets the tone for the rest of the book. Taking the form of extended free verse, Nuernberger’s poem takes the reader on a journey through the landscapes of her mind. The poem begins with an epigraph by Diane Arbus: “Our whole guise is like giving a sign to the world to think of us in a certain way but there’s a point between what you want people to know about you and what you can’t help people knowing about you.” How this relates to Nuernberger’s speaker quickly becomes apparent: in this poem, the speaker both draws conclusions about her neighbor’s body language and self-reflexively says, “Sometimes I wonder if every character/ I meet is an allegory of myself.” It is this self-awareness that makes Nuernberger’s work so enjoyable; across the entire collection, poem after poem, she takes a scalpel and opens herself up to scrutiny.
In other poems in the collection, Nuernberger discusses the lives of other people like Rousseau, Columbine, and J. M. W. Turner in an attempt to use them as a way to find some deeper truth within herself. This self-reflection is enabled by Nuernberger’s fierce attunement to the emotions of others. Where there is distance between the speaker and her subjects (some of whom she finds repulsive), there is an empathy that bridges the gap between them:
I’ve read that torturers come to like their work and any
one of us could, because we don’t have a way to understand
another person’s pain and we really want to understand
each other.
(from “It’s Like She Loves Us and Like She Hates Us”)
One benefit of the extended free verse form is the continual expansion of Nuernberger’s poetic world in surprising ways. In “I Want to Know You All,” Nuernberger listens to an “ignorant blowhard” tell her about cross-dressing farmers in Missouri. While this conversation initially “made [her] laugh at first at the hypocrisy/ of this place,” the speaker quickly pivots into reflecting on how “it’s actually tragic/ how alone those farmers must feel.” She commiserates, “It’s ruthless/ out here, I know.” Reading her interview with World Literature Today, we get a sense that Nuernberger’s “I know” is genuine—she describes feeling a “sense of profound alienation living in a rural Missouri town with a very patriarchal culture.”
We get a quick snapshot of this when Nuernberger wonders if any of the sexist men she meets in her daily life (such as “the man in coveralls who mocks/ the foamy fern I like poured onto my latte,/ the one who calls me “hon” that condescending/ way”) could secretly feel as much of an outsider as she herself. There is a tinge of triumph here, as Nuernberger tentatively tries to tip the scales of power against the men she encounters, but it dissipates quickly. “Maybe you don’t come to town/ if you can help it anymore either,” she muses, sympathetic in that subtle use of the word “either.” Instead of being mocking or condescending, Nuernberger reiterates her recognition of the Other, emphasized by her use of direct address:
I want you
to know, whoever you are, as someone hungry
for variety in the human condition, most especially
my own, cross-dressing farmers, you light up
the fields up for me.
In both “I’ll Show You Mine If You Show Me Yours” and “I Want to Know You All,” Nuernberger describes gender fluidity as an act of defiance of the status quo. While she shows her support for it, she also feels almost envious of the boldness of such acts. In her World Literature Today interview, she shared that her marriage had over time fallen into patriarchal patterns. In her book, Nuernberger interrogates the dynamics of this relationship in poems such as “Things I Did Today Besides” and “Clear and Direct Discourse.” In these interrogations, however, we sense that Nuernberger is, above all, conflicted about how best to shake off the reins of social expectations. In the former poem, Nuernberger informs her husband that she wants to “revenge kiss a stranger,” but also adds in confusion: “Even though I don’t really want to, I / want to, so I’m making myself want to.”
Described as an ecopoetic collection, Rue is filled with numerous references to the rural landscape that Nuernberger resides in, as well as the flowers and herbs in the books that she reads. This is an affinity that runs deep for Nuernberger; whereas she often feels off-kilter in her relationships with others and must re-calibrate her feelings through empathy and analysis, her relationship with the natural world is more direct and useful. This balance is made clear in the poem “Letter Home,” where Nuernberger confesses: “I tried to distract myself with novelties like goats and eggs/ and flowers”—a distraction from her reality “in the quiet empty of that home two hours from anybody/ who likes [her].” In “Poor Crow’s Got Too Much Fight to Live,” an angry crow whose foot is caught in a chicken wire reminds her of childbirth, whereas “a long wave of kelp” stirs up memories of the daughter she lost in the poem “When We Dead Awaken.”
At other times, the connection between human and non-human appears less evident. For example, Nuernberger begins the poem “Hexagenia Limbata” by observing a bug on the table. Without any further explanation, her focus then abruptly shifts to noticing a man she knows who has just entered the bar, which is then followed by quick jumps into other aspects of her life: the transcripts of a sexual-assault testimony that she had read earlier that day, her desire to walk home alone in the dark, conversations with her father about the transvaginal ultrasounds she has had, and so on. There are a few narrative threads pulling the leaps together—the transvaginal ultrasound is conducted due to her miscarriage, the “emptiness inside [herself]” that Nuernberger says was a baby to her, which causes her to reflect on the fallibility of language, which, in turn, brings her back to the stranger in the bar who writes about linguistics. The poem then ends with Nuernberger noticing: “All the while/ that strange, unknown insect with a body like lace/ has been crawling along my arm.” Although the poem loops back to the bug that Nuernberger was initially intrigued by, it remains opaque, offering no clear link or meaning to the issues plaguing her.
Despite Nuernberger’s desire to gain a deeper understanding of other people, she is also keenly aware of the perils of uncritical sympathy, particularly when it comes to studying her heroes. She explores this theme in poems like “Whale-Mouse” and “The Bird of Paradise,” which follow each other immediately, hitting the reader like a quick one-two punch. In “Whale-Mouse,” Nuernberger first waxes lyrical about Carl Linnaeus, famously known as the Father of Modern Taxonomy. She explains that she loves him for “how/ every genus, every species becomes/ a metaphor for some other genus or species,” as when he named the blue whale, the “largest being in the sea,” the mouse whale. Yet there comes a day when her idea of Linnaeus shatters, when she learns that “Linnaeus/ also classified people into columns / of white, black, yellow, and red.” Nuernberger confesses that this discovery breaks “the mind of [her] heart.” The poem ends with Nuernberger wondering:
What do you
think? Can we love him anyway? Did we
ever really even in the first place?
By addressing and including the reader, Nuernberger renders the reader complicit, perhaps not merely in respect to Linnaeus. After all, when we read this poem in today’s zeitgeist, it is almost inevitable that we draw connections to other revered icons, or ‘problematic faves.’ Can we continue to love people like J.K. Rowling after her blatant displays of transphobic behavior? In “The Bird of Paradise,” Nuernberger directly cautions the reader against going easy on famous icons. Here, she interrogates John Stedman and Maria Sybilla Merian, “the great woman botanist and first ecologist.” Merian published books filled with information that she gleaned from the indigenous Surinam people, including the fact that certain plant seeds could be used as abortifacients. Nuernberger questions whether Merian was aware that her choice to publicize this knowledge would lead to slave owners “[clearing] their property lines/ of such plants that might reduce the propagation/ of their investment in human capital,” thereby contributing to imperialistic violence. Whether or not Merian knew this, Nuernberger asserts, does not matter: “There is a point/ at which giving so much benefit of the doubt becomes/ another exploitation and the conditional tense/ just a grammar for the naïve or the lying.” Gone are the hedging questions, the hesitancy of the previous poem; now, Nuernberger unflinchingly confronts her hero: “Maria Sibylla/ Merian was many things, and included among them/ is the fact that she could be self-serving and cruel.”
If there is a clear critique of historical violence, Nuernberger also extends her empathy to those who suffer it. In “The Birds of Paradise,” Nuernberger tries to imagine the indigenous woman who spoke to Merian, “her whose name the botanist never once/ bothered to write down in a footnote/ or journal or dashed-off letter.” While it is clear that Nuernberger is unable to truly picture what it is like to be someone else, particularly someone who occupies a different position of privilege than her, the poem is effective in presenting how different individuals relate to the same botanical objects—Merian, who was “upper-class and European in the Age of Empire,” records information about the plants for which she was paid well back home; and the women from Surinam who test and study the plants in order to use them. Although nature is bountiful, one’s relationship to it changes very differently depending on class and power.
Whether you’re a fan of nature, of challenging the patriarchy, or of exploring the intricacies of human connection, Rue has much to offer. In one of the final poems in the collection, Nuernberger tells her daughter: “Sometimes you’ll feel very alone… Other times you’ll be so wonderfully surprised by the strange bridges people manage to build out to you when you never would have expected they could.” This quote, to me, aptly sums up my experience of reading Rue—a collection surprising in its disproportionate impact.
Ang Shuang graduated with an MFA in Creative Writing from Sarah Lawrence College. Her poems have been published by Tinderbox Poetry Journal, the Rumpus, and the Asian American Writers’ Workshop, among others. She is currently working on her debut collection.