Jillian Clasky
Michelle Brown, SWANS
Windsor: Anstruther, 2023. $19.95
Much of Michelle Brown’s second poetry collection, Swans, takes place over a single night out shared by three friends in their late teens or early twenties. The rest of the poems orbit around countless nights like it, dipping in and out of memory and, along the way, writing a mythology of girlhood that gives voice to a swath of young women whose emotional lives are often dismissed as frivolous. This is a book about the girls “who watch from the shore, / dip [their] toes in and think [they] invented flight.” It is also about the men who would denigrate them and harm them and “bend [their] necks into hearts,” but it never loses sight of the women at its core. Reading Swans feels like teetering on the cusp of something inarticulable while relishing in all the exuberance of girlhood, without irony or inhibition, just before it’s gone.
Swans takes seriously the complex emotions of young women, from the seemingly trivial and humorous—“A duckling is as similar to a swan / as two ducklings are to each other, // said Aristotle, who’d never had / to dance beside a prettier friend”—to the intensely painful. In a poem titled “Passed Around,” the speaker recalls, “He slid a finger under my bra like he was opening a letter / … / Look: I didn’t know it was wrong that night.” This memory, recounted years later in an assured voice, is held at a distance but still steeped in sincerity. The insecurity inherent to girlhood, and the awkwardness of embodiment, exist on a similarly earnest plane: “Swallowed, I’m here trying not // to embarrass my young self, / undone by even my own hair, // my own shadow’s curve.”
Brown refuses to hierarchize the book’s wide variety of concerns; the archetypal Party Girl’s drunken euphoria is not ignored as the backdrop to the violence she experiences as a result of the body she lives in, or dismissed as its cause, but treated with equal seriousness. Brown thus avoids the tired tropes endemic to narratives of sexual assault that position the speaker as a tragic victim, instead emphasizing the cumulative nature of the violence her speaker navigates, its ubiquity and its mundanity.
At the heart of Swans, though, is a celebration of female friendship in all its softness and viciousness, of the inextricability of the girls who “pile into a backseat, / heads in laps, teeth out, [their] driver desperate to rearrange [them].” Sometimes these girls envy each other, often they hold each other through their pain, and always they love each other “the way they want // to be loved: flung-open / door, bonded for life.” A related thread explores the speaker’s romantic feelings for a close female friend, and the book excels particularly in these moments. This girl’s boyfriend, we learn, “could only write letters” where the speaker could “cartwheel around,” could “[d]ive in holding [her] hand, holding [her] down for a minute.” Brown’s use of childlike imagery here deftly and playfully conveys the confusion that can come with any sexual awakening, but specifically a queer one—the desire to retreat, to run away from those new feelings. As she traces the speaker’s uneven journey from naïveté into awareness, she gives us moments of quiet devastation that play on and upend clichéd imagery of female friendship in the context of a potential queer relationship: “Someone other than you found me / inconsolable in the bathroom,” she writes.
Many of the poems in Swans are composed in one-line stanzas, with white space around each line. The visual effect of this form makes the lines feel both isolated and relationally rooted, like a mosaic of sharp, glittering moments not dissimilar to the hazy recollection of a drunken night out. And instead of letting go of those memories, which might seem insignificant on their surface, Brown positions her lyric voice, in “Closing Time” and throughout the collection, as a kind of metapoetic “historian” of these girls’ shared experience, as “[t]he one who won’t leave.” What, she asks, is her pain worth—and what is it worth if she fails to communicate it? When a professor asks her whether she’ll publish a poem she’s written about her assault, she muses that doing so might be a way of “putting things down” and “leaving them there.” In Swans, then, Brown attempts to concretize that haze, to make somehow articulable the beauty and pain of girlhood.
Swans collapses this night and the years that follow into a single temporal strand, unmoored from linear chronology. In the middle of the book, however, when Brown paints a picture of the speaker on an Alaskan cruise with her wife, she does dip into the present, and—simultaneously, and with purpose—into cliché: “I’m over the hill now. / I come bearing gifts.” The language here, when compared to the specificity and clarity of Brown’s lyric voice through most of the collection, suggests that some unique vibrancy characterizes the “shimmering shimmering season” of youth, that it can never be recuperated. But by the end of the book, the speaker quietly comes to appreciate the passage of time instead of craving complete recuperation, precisely because these poems allow a different kind of memorialization. “To write it down,” she declares, “is just enough.” But that writing itself, in Swans, unlocks the power of what poetry does best, allowing us to see anew the overlooked, dismissed, or obfuscated.
Jillian Clasky
is a poet and fiction writer from Toronto. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in journals such as PRISM International, Room, and flo., and she was shortlisted for the 2023 CBC Poetry Prize. She recently graduated from the University of Ottawa, where she co-founded and served as editor-in-chief of Common House Magazine.