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Issue No. 1
Tenderhooks
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Tender Hooks, Beth Ann Fennelly. Hardcover, $23.95 ISBN
0-393-05862-x Beth Ann Fennelly’s newest
book of poems brings the experience of motherhood to roost in even the least
maternal of minds. Raw, un-flinching visual language sears her images into
the backs of one's retinas, like an afterimage of the sun. But tempered with
that almost acidic imagery is an elastic, fine-gauge and delicately
constructed verse reminiscent of Sexton or Plath.
Written alternately as a commemoration of her daughter’s birth and as a sort
of poetic scrap book of several mothering events in a woman's life, the book
opens itself enough to let the reader squeeze in, and then traps them in the
pages. In ‘Bite Me’, the opening poem of the book, the reader
is dropped smack in the middle of the delivery room. This is not the delivery
room from sitcoms where the father waits in the hallway, listening to women
shrieking and cursing their husbands – this is the real delivery room. Such authenticity and frank-ness surrounding
the realities of child-birth are rarely seen in print, much less in poetry,
and while it is at first disquieting to the point of being slightly
repulsive, I found myself drawn to this woman who tells her daughter “I
pushed, I pushed so hard I shat”. This un-cluttered and visceral language is
what makes Fennelley’s work so engrossing. It is with these utterly simple and concrete images
that Fennelley's “Tender Hooks” operates in the
reader’s mind like a very skilled surgeon, splicing sounds, textures,
emotions and words together to create a synthesis of experience. Her work
appeals to the entire human body and all that it is capable of measuring and
feeling. Her work is almost tactile, and speaks with such fluency and grace,
like a southern - Jillian Meyer |