Wrestling with Angel Bones and Grief

Angel Bones, By Ilyse Kusnetz. (Farmington: Alice James Books, 2019)

Our writers group has wanted to read Angel Bones for a long time. I’d read reviews of it, how Kusnetz wrote the book knowing that she was dying. In fact, someone had heard her read poems from the book before she died. They were compelling and beautiful. I was expecting to be blown away by the poems. But, for the most part, I was disappointed. Or, perhaps, not so much disappointed but confounded by her attempts to weave her dying with quantum physics. Sometimes it works as in the poem “Message to a Quantum Entangled String.” She speaks directly about her death in terms of quantum physics, uses a musicial analogy to ground the imagery. She says, “Let’s start/with classical music, which physicists insist/can’t exist in four dimensions” that is a heady statement in a poem about death. But she immediately returns to her body and music, the “weight in my bones./Because the music resonates with my being. . .I want to take it/inside myself and remake it as part of my soul.”

I can’t imagine what is must have been like to write knowing that time wasn’t on her side. She pushes hard to make sense of what doesn’t make sense, to draw on what she knows—and she knows a lot about quantum physics—to take what is reserved for the sciences, the dry language of physical science, and breath life into it, almost plead with it, to give it life, and, by doing so, give her life meaning outside the ineluctable forces of cancer and death. It’s as if she’s wanting to invent a religion, some system, some sets of beliefs, to comfort her, to explain the loss of her brain and body ravaged by cancer. Her effort to reach for something beyond, something outside the conventional language of religion and of eternal life embedded in a savior is admirable. She seems to want to teach us how we can find in physics another way of entering the mystery of death. And in some poems, she succeeds. In others, it feels forced, not quite integrated. The scientific language doesn’t allow the intense emotional aspects of her last days to come across, to span the divide between angst and scientific terminology. In his book Coin of the Realm, Carl Phillips talks about poetry’s obligation to amplify experience so it resonates with others. It accomplishes this amplification through figurative language, a rich array of images and analogies that startle us into a newfound wakefulness to the world around us.

Yet Phillips argues that the poet has an obligation to create a bridge from the actual experience to the figurative associations that allow us to follow them across it, to see how one person’s experience can speak to others. If the language doesn’t build the two-way bridge allowing the reader to move between the experience and the language imagery, then, no matter how profound the subject, the reader is left on one side of the bridge staring across a chasm that prevents him from seeing what the poet means. That is what happened to me with some of Kusnetz’s poems.

The use of Einstein’s ideas of a space/time continuum, the reference to string theory, works sometimes but at other times the flatness and dryness of the scientific language, of the Latinate words, give a cool and passionless air to some of her poems. At moments when a living person is speaking about being alive while dying, the scientific language interrupts, seems almost inhuman, leaving the angst, her own encounter with death, with losing her lover Brian, and losing others who love her, absent. Instead of being in her body, she’s in her head, which, understandably is ironic since she’s dying of brain cancer. It seems that the focus on physics has left the vital humanity out of some poems that I wish were there.

I wondered why she used quantum theory as a metaphor. It has much potential since the deeper one reads about the theory, the more the mystery of how the basic elements which comprise all of creation is confounded by the way the basis structures behave in ways that contradict one another, a core unit, a quark being both a string and a particle, something that never seems to be still long enough to isolate what it is. Her efforts to use the language of physics seems to be an attempt to reach for the numinous, the ethereal, the divine in an age when God is absent. Wallace Stevens often spoke of the need for poetry to fill the void of a godless time. He believed that God as a figurehead, regardless of the religion, was a magnificent construct of the imagination. But in a time when that god image no longer made sense for many people, poets had an obligation to create a language of the world, a language of the earth, a language of feeling that spoke to that higher imaginative quest that we all have for the ultimate.  Perhaps, that is what Kusnetz is doing. She may be inventing a way to make sense, to pull together, a belief system without appealing to a conventional god.

If that is the case, I applaud her efforts. Yet when the language falls flat, I’m wishing she’d chosen another metaphor for our being. And, thus, the disappointment I felt in some of her poems is not in what she is trying to do as much as when her imagery fails to live up to her ambition.

But many times, she is masterful in her weaving science with her own existential crisis. In her poem “A.I. Existential” series, she challenges the reader with an abbreviated line and a cascade of enjambments, breaking the syntax, while, simultaneously, putting subjects in parentheses, ripping words apart, that drives the poems toward questioning what is and is not.

                              (are we)

                              uploaded  minds

                                             stranded

                              In cyberspace?

                              (do we) find a way

                              to   hijack

                              the brains of the

                              currently living  (31)

These poems force us to be what Phillips called an athletic reader.

                              If the book is a bridge, then I am interested in those who, of their own free will, would                                        cross it. I want even more than that. I want what I have elsewhere called the athletic                                    thinker, the one who sees difficulty as an irresistible challenge and who finds decided                                      pleasure both in the mastering and in the mastery of difficulty. The athletic reader                                   requires risk, require mystery, and comes with an openness to both. . . .There’s a                                              considerable amount of ground available between pandering to an audience and daring                                 an audience to try to understand what we have written. (“The Book as Bridge” Coin of                                          Realm,  (St Paul: Greywolf Press, 2004) page 195)

I’m willing to be challenged, as she does, in this series, but elsewhere, I’m put off at moments that requires a better bridge. In what would seem a tender poem “Why I Will Never Take My Eyes off You,” a poem written to her husband, she tells him

                              Because if I look into your eyes,

                              even a billion years after the original

                              quantum experiment.

She does offer some bridges, saying “whether this universe/is the Matrix, or a hologram, our patterns/ depending on one another to exist.” Yet the language here seems too dry and abstract—Matrix, hologram, pattern—to resonate. The scientific language intrudes. She does it in another poem, a lullaby, in which she says, “but your/ heart stretches to accommodate the thought/as if infinity were simple science, and we, two//pioneers of it—natural philosophers/ of the quantum brain.” Such academic language sucks the life out of a poem. It’s off-putting. If my lover wrote that about me, I would wonder what kind of relationship we were having.

But, even saying this about her book, there are other moments that are terrific, powerful, beautifully rendered, particularly when she speaks of her love (and loss) of her husband and of their life together.  In the poem “Inside the Brain of God,” she successfully integrates the abstract with the concrete, speaking about being “inside the brain of God” along with how her “tumors look/like stars. Or stars look like my tumors.” Her poem “Geologic” addresses her not having “a body anymore” and amplifies it own body with geographic eras and trace elements that come down to “the wild delight of wild things, my Love./I hope we’ll have that again.” She makes the connection. She builds the bridge time and again. In the long prose poem “The Explosion Museum,” she has a section “Twin Towers” in which she blends the bombing of the Twin Towers and her husbands at war in Iraq being, of people falling out of the towers, of his being thrown from the rear guard hatch, and making it all come together in their meeting and falling in love. As Phillips says, she asks for athletic readers who are willing to make leaps and straddle different types of language and associative hurdles to find the kernels of beauty in her poems.

Given that I knew this was a book written by a dying person, I wanted when I read her book to be carried away emotionally. I wasn’t expecting to be intellectually challenged and confounded by the linking of loss and quantum physics. Yet, once I saw that she wasn’t going to die easily and that she was fighting to relate all she knew, all she understood about this world, and find how it might, and did, connect to the life after death, I was willing, even when what she was trying to do didn’t work for me, to leap with her, to find that what she has to say is both memorable and lovely.