claudia-rankines-plot-page-76 ( )

A few years back, I was blown away by Rankine's collection, Don't Let Me Be Lonely. That book has lived in my head ever since I read it, and in some ways, it redefined how I thought about contemporary poetry collections. So, knowing that, you can imagine and take into account how high my hopes were for Plot...which didn't really live up to that other reading experience.

Another tightly themed and progressive collection, Plot centered on a journeyed discussion of pregnancy, childbirth, related individual choice/bodily autonomy, and artistic identity. Already, these isn't a theme that I'm able to connect to as much as I could connect with Don't Let Me Be Lonely, and it's possible I just wasn't the right reader for this book. Admittedly, I picked up the collection only because of the poet's name, not even bothering to read the blurb (if I had, I perhaps would have picked up one of her other collections). Rankine's poetics are as powerful and gorgeous as ever, but I found it more difficult to connect to this book than Don't Let Me Be Lonely. I suspect that's due to me as a reader vs. Rankine's work here, which is undeniably impressive.

In the end, this may well end up being a book I come back to or recommend, but I'm more anxious to explore more of her other work. ( )

Reading Rankine reminds me not to give oneself up easily. Her writing does not give itself up easily. Plot is ostensibly the narrative of a pregnancy and a birth; a couple, Liv and Erland await their son-to-be, whom they have named Ersatz (the substitute?). Liv’s is a pregnancy experienced from the inside, physically, emotionally, intellectually. Experienced also in the dialog between Liv and Erland, Ersatz’s parents to be. Unspoken taboos are spoken here. Doubts. Fears. Anticipations. “the mothering more forged than known.” The singular and the plural being. Who am I? Who is he? Am I the parent or am I the child, the mother, the wife, the lover? Liv is a painter obsessed with the death of Virginia Woolf, Woolf’s body as a sodden log, at first hidden, submerged, then beached, brought to the surface. As if the river gives birth to a death. In Liv’s more morbid thoughts, a metaphor for her pregnancy, “whose womb rhymes with plot,” as in the story, as in burial plot, as in conspire. What Liv says of the painting might apply to Rankine’s poems as well: “The subject must be erased though the painting is saturated by what was felt, what was seen by the erased face.” But then, there is what comes afterward, part of the plot or after the plot, the joy. ( )