Susan Rich’s masterful collection, Blue Atlas, (Red Hen Press, April 2, 2024) is a physical and emotional travelogue through a “land of deferred decisions.” In this collection, the reader is taken on a journey from North America to Europe to Africa, from the “before and after,” with a speaker grounded in a decision made 30 years ago. There is a wonderment when the speaker asks, “What can I do with the women who occupy my vertebrae, // take over my hips and tongue?”
I asked Susan about lineage, about politics, and about writing the body.
Jennifer Martelli: Blue Atlas begins and ends with walking. “This Could Happen” opens with “If you kept walking, you would eventually step outside of yourself.” The book closes with “the young girl who walked out, who didn’t lock the door.” As its name implies, Blue Atlas is a book of maps and national boundaries, but even more, about temporal and physical boundaries. You directly address our beloved Elizabeth Bishop in “Compass.” I’m thinking of Bishop who wrote about grief, travel, and disassociation. I loved the line, “her brokenness could orient her.” Again, I’m still thinking of movement—in this case, for the speaker, 30 years or more since choosing to have an abortion. I read so many of these poems as embodying a type of disassociation, this being of the body and not. How does this play a part in your book?
Susan Rich:
1001 thanks for your close reading, Jenn. I am learning things about this book from you which is such a rare gift.
My drug of choice has always been to travel. From the time I was nineteen and studied in the north of England at Lancaster University, until I was in my late thirties, I moved every year or two, usually to a different country: Scotland, Republic of Niger, South Africa—and many more places for short-term human rights work. Each new continent offered a blank page; not a revision of life as much as an intense, new start. I was comfortable as a chameleon. It was as if I were entering the books I had read as a kid.
As an adolescent, I gravitated towards novels of time travel and magical lands: Edward Eager, Norton Juster, Edith Nesbit, P.L. Travers and many others. I believed fervently in other worlds and as an adult I discovered you could enter them for the price of an airline ticket. I often disappeared into other families, other countries, other lives. I wasn’t particularly interested in the body except as an avenue for exploration. When I think of the romances I had in my twenties, what I remember most are my lovers’ voices. The differing accents and tonal riffs.
By twenty-one I had dropped out of college and taken on jobs as bartender, waitress, pizza maker—all while pursuing my love of words. I originally wanted to be a novelist and it seemed more useful to see the world than stay locked in a classroom. My interest in becoming a U.S. Peace Corps Volunteer is what led me back to complete my university degree. What an ironic turn of events: to return home in order to leave soon after for Niger, West Africa.
To answer your question more directly, I think disassociation is locked in my DNA.
JM: When I read “Post-Abortion Questionnaire Powered by Survey Monkey,” the line, “not etherized upon the table–,” I thought of Eliot, and then, I thought of anti-Semitism, which we’re seeing in full force now. The poem, “Mother Figure, Almost,” depicts a moment when the boyfriend’s mother says, “Your people have such beautiful skin, she cooed brightly // although I knew this was a butchering compliment–.” You directly address the Holocaust in this book, as well. Can you talk about generational trauma and the trauma of “butchering” the body?
SR:
I wrote a poem “Kerchiefs of Yellow Linen,” a couple of years back that’s since been published in the wonderful journal, The Account. https://theaccountmagazine.com/article/rich-21/ It will be in my next book and it’s the closest I’ve come to looking at generational trauma or to a term I’ve learned recently, Postmemory. Did you know there is an entire academic discipline now of Memory Studies? Isn’t that what we as poets have always examined?
As the poem documents, I had a recurring dream that lasted fifty years and began in childhood about intruders coming into my family home. This might be a good place to mention that the two dreams I mention here are my only reoccurring dreams.
My maternal grandmother was an important person in my childhood. She lived across the street from us in Brighton and then moved to Camelot Court, a public housing project built in the 1960’s. The women (they were all women) that lived on her floor were fellow immigrants and Holocaust survivors. She immigrated from Lithuania when she was 16 years old to live with her older sister. I remember overhearing “never trust ‘em, never trust ‘em,” spoken in whispers by her and her friends. I must have asked who ‘em was because I remember getting lectured by Mrs. Cohen that I should never trust anyone who wasn’t Jewish. I don’t believe I ever subscribed to this belief but there were unresolved histories all around me, told in fragments and silences.
JM: Another poet invoked and evoked is Sylvia Plath. I was jarred—in the best way—with the sense of displacement (I’m thinking of Plath during her last days in England—cold, ill, alone). Your brilliant poem, “Metaphors,” reminded me also of Plath’s “The Applicant,” with the rage and humor. I loved:
But where is the deadbeat non-dad?
Is he hiding in the hourglass, the dying tulips?
~
The abortion question is bone tired; multi-lingual and global;
it looks back on its past, its coat hanger…
Let’s talk about anger and exhaustion in such personal poetry. What is risked in this book by speaking so honestly about this experience: the loss of a relationship, an abortion?
SR: It’s a remarkable conundrum to take the personal experience that in your twenties you are most ashamed of, and then in your fifties to decide to write a book about it. I don’t think I knew what I was doing when I started this project. The book began with break-up poems. For decades, I had dreams that my ex-fiancé would come back to visit me to simply to assess whether he had made the correct choice in leaving. The dreams were wordless and would eventually end unresolved. Imagine how fun it was to wake-up from a deep sleep being rejected by an ex-lover again.
Since completing Blue Atlas, the dreams/nightmares have ended so there’s that benefit. Thirty-something years is a long time to hold a secret. I don’t recommend it. In some ways, I look back on my former self as a ghost presence. A younger version of myself that I feel buckets of compassion for; she was so alone. Maybe writing this book and bringing it into the world, allows me to finally care for her.
As you’ve mentioned, this is a crucial time for this book to be published. Many young women will not have as many avenues of choice as I had. However, for the speaker in this book who never got to make her own choice, that last sentence was difficult to write down. Within the Jewish tradition, if you save one life, you save the world. I am struck by the fact that I saved my own life.
JM: The narrative driving this collection is the speaker’s decision to have an abortion over 30 years ago. I think this is a vital topic: we should all be talking about this because the speaker had federal protections at that time, that we, in 2024 don’t have. I admired the voice, its nuance: neither completely regretful nor indifferent. Perhaps grateful to have the choice? I think these gray areas are best exemplified in your found poems, which provide context and structure for the emotional weight. As we talked about, “Post-Abortion Questionnaire Powered by Survey Monkey,” but also, “Outline For Freshman Composition,” both tell a story in form. Could you talk about this form?
SR: Technique? Well, I think in the beginning, it rose out of fear. I can remember a fragment of a conversation that took place twenty-eight years ago, when I was completing my MFA at the University of Oregon. I was meeting with Garrett Hongo, my thesis advisor and somehow (I have no idea how) the topic of my abortion came up. He emphatically told me, “that’s what you need to write about!” and I’m sure, just as emphatically, I let him know that wasn’t about to happen. But he went on to say, and this is the important part, that the story didn’t belong to me. And so I approached the writing of these poems from a sideways glance. I wanted to try find new ways to approach narrative; a form that would allow readers to experience very differently. Allow me to experience the trauma from afar.
JM: Abortion becomes a growing thing: organic, of the earth. Although the title seems to point to a book of maps (atlas), we learn that a Blue Atlas is a tree that has “neither flowers or fruits . . . it can reproduce spontaneously from seeds.” This is both hopeful and adamant. I love the title of the poem, “Arborist/Abortionist” as well. Explain the use of trees throughout this book.
SR: I love this question because it surprises me. The connection is instinctual, not intentional.
As I said earlier, I was searching for new forms and different narratives to use to tell my experiences of a coerced, second term abortion. I didn’t have the language, even after decades of silence. One reviewer has called the speaker’s situation “hopeless,” I was looking for a way to move towards hope.
The baobab tree inside the sex workers’ house in Mali in, “How Did I Love Him,” offers hope to me, same with the treehouse in the final poem “Attempting Speculative Fiction.” Of course, the blue atlas cedar appears throughout the collection. As you know, in Jewish, Muslim, and Irish cultures (as well as others) there exists an archetypal tree of life. It is meant to connect us to Heaven as well as to the underworld; the Tree of Life is additionally is associated with wisdom and a soothing tongue. These metaphors all work for me.
JM: This book has been so meaningful to me. When you refer to John Salvi and the carnage he wrought at Pre-term in Brookline, my heart stopped. This is where I had my first abortion in 1980. The speaker, 30 years ago, had federal protections about her choice we don’t have anymore. Again, the way you draw from nature, history, and literature puts this story in context.
SR: thank you for sharing your experience of having an abortion at Pre-term as a young woman. It takes away the power of secrecy. I hope that you had people to support you. It means the world to me that this book, which took ten years to write has landed with a reader who found it meaningful. As a fellow poet, you know how that fills the heart.
As I worked on this project, I did a deep dive into the history of abortion. I read whatever I could find on the the subject including Eve’s Herbs: A History of Contraception in the West, by John Riddle and Abortion: A History by G. Hovey. One article that I returned to again and again was Molly Farrell’s, “Ben Franklin Put an Abortion Recipe in His Math Textbook,” that appeared in Slate Magazine. I found solace in the fact that the practice of abortion has been with us from the time of Greek and Hebrew texts, and that even Founding Father, Benjamin Franklin advocated for a home remedy for “the troubles.”
JM: What are your new or on-going projects? Where can we read more of your work?
SR: Thank you for asking! I have two poems forthcoming in Plume for April: “A Series of Small Scandals,” and “Dear Telephone,” both pieces take an unconventional view of nostalgia in different ways. I also have a poem forthcoming in TAB, “Heartsway/Cityscape” and a poem recently out in Harbor Review. However, for the moment, I don’t seem to be writing; I think that often happens to me in the wake of a new publication.
However, I have been working on a 7th poetry collection that, is tentatively titled, Questions of Home. There are couple of different obsessions running through the poems that have to do with Judaism as well as my work in Gaza and the West Bank during the 1990’s, directly after the Oslo Accords. What a hopeful moment that was; I’m very concerned about what is happening there now.
Jennifer Martelli (she, her, hers) is the author of The Queen of Queens (Bordighera Press) and My Tarantella (Bordighera Press), awarded an Honorable Mention from the Italian-American Studies Association, selected as a 2019 “Must Read” by the Massachusetts Center for the Book, and named as a finalist for the Housatonic Book Award. She is also the author of the chapbooks In the Year of Ferraro from Nixes Mate Press and After Bird, winner of the Grey Book Press open reading, 2016. Her work has appeared in The Academy of American Poets Poem-a-Day, The Tahoma Literary Review, Solstice Literary Magazine (finalist, summer poetry contest, 2020), Thrush, The Sycamore Review, Cream City Review, Verse Daily, Iron Horse Review (winner of the Photo Finish contest), Poetry, and elsewhere. Jennifer Martelli has twice received grants from the Massachusetts Cultural Council for her poetry. She is co-poetry editor for Mom Egg Review.
