Were-Jag by Suzette Bishop intones, “Were-Jaguar/Where-Jaguar/Wear-Jaguar.” This is where we are: what was, what’s gone, the mask fashion creates. What does it mean to make commodities of ourselves? Three voices entwine in this long collage poem, a journaling voice, a vintage women’s magazine voice, and an encyclopedic voice describing the jaguar and its sacred place, “An eater of hearts” who doesn’t care about being pleasing; “They can roar but not purr.” The speaker of the journal sections mulls over the meaning of her memories, dreams, messy relationships, and female family members who can’t maintain the façades expected of them.
Bishop’s jagged edges where these voices unravel into each other sometimes provide answers, warnings, predictions, “Your own civilization will end.” Or a better understanding of our jaguar selves, living by scents, instincts, “A girl runs to catch the ball, her lithe body swinging through the air,” perhaps a memory of jaguar-like litheness. By contrast, the magazine erasures insist we look cool, unruffled at all times, a still ornament in artificial light, while the speaker of journal entries remarks about a party where “all the women are in costumes; I feel out of place.” In the midst of hacks about how to accessorize a black dress, how to hide falling apart, the magazine voice startles with a revelation about how to be an artist, the importance of having the right tools, being an observer.
“Suzette Bishop creates an astonishing tapestry in her long poem, Unbecoming, tracing the illness, ME/CFS, with threads that form a fabric of testimonials, symptoms, advice, scraps from the Sleeping Beauty tale, and magical thinking. Bishop’s mélange of texts harrowingly enacts her journey consisting of disbelief and dismissal from others as well as the betrayal of her own body. ‘Sleeping Beauty finds webs around her like a cocoon,’ she notes, and with multiple voices she pulls us into her struggle along with the stubborn resistance from her soul and mind, enlightening us with her wisdom and expressiveness.”
Molly Bendall, author of Turncoat and Watchful
“This chapbook was an arrow directly aimed at my heart, and it pierced it through. I cried and in the end we triumphed. The lines in this poem cut deep, but the scars left behind heal, and I only wish I could write so eloquently. Suzette Bishop is a fairy full of magic.”
Cynthia Dougherty-Bernal, author of Looking into Infinity and Bleeding on the Page
“Suzette Bishop’s lyrical and authoritative chapbook, Unbecoming, is a compelling and devastating account of the very real suffering of those with ME/CFS. In just a few short pages, Bishop thoroughly and convincingly illustrates the indignities and downright dangers a sufferer must navigate when she is invalidated, gaslit and disappeared by the world around her: The institutions, experts, family, employers, and cultural narratives we’ve been ‘taught’ to trust and need for our physical and mental survival. The stigmatized ME/CFS sufferer is robbed of ‘That glorious word ‘valid’,’
Bishop’s technique of twining the various narrative threads of research, individual experience, and the fairy tale Sleeping Beauty demonstrates the speaker’s attempt to remain intact and coherent while pushing back against disintegration and ‘existential despair.’
At times the narrative form breaks down and words sprinkle down the whiteness of the page. Like an SOS, the sparsity of words forms a Morse Code of dots and dashes, which seeks someone who understands the distress signals.
Breaking the sections into ‘Phases’ and sharing poignant reminders of activities and identities no longer available to the ME/CFS sufferer (‘my horseback-riding gear hung by the door, unused, but still smells of horse’) serve to point out that this is a degenerative and progressive disease.
The impact on the reader is visceral and immediate.
With each ‘Phase’ of severity, the reader senses that the speaker has moved past screaming to be heard and is now exhausted, speaking in a whisper. In that whisper comes a new clarity, like a diamond crystallized under extreme conditions. Her words are culled down. Hard won.
The absolute destruction that ME/CFS wreaks in a person’s life is demonstrated here with clarity of purpose and strength of heart. By book’s end, the speaker asserts, ‘I’m not minimizing’ and ‘Sleeping beauty wakes.’ When all is said and done, there is, unexpectedly, hope.
That this piece exists at all is a sign of hope. We should all recognize the need for such hope, as we face the possibility of our own vulnerability striking unexpectedly: ‘How thin the border is between health and illness . . . between able-bodied and disabled . . . between career and unemployment . . . between control and disjuncture.’ With Unbecoming, Bishop calls us to recognize our own humanity and the vital need for compassion both for ourselves and others. A message, while going ‘back to the beginning of the human species,’ couldn’t be more timely and necessary.”
“Bishop’s phantasmagoric writing doesn’t adhere to common form or convention. She walks through her spirit world, using a knife to ‘cut the wires’ that blaze in ‘stolen desert’ as an unapologetic, multifaceted orator of truths. Bishop’s Eyes of Some Robbers stares down the ultimate monster, those collective, oft-ignored harms.”
Candice Louisa Daquin, Managing Editor, Lit Fox Books, author of The Cruelty
“With poems ranging from her childhood to her most recent years, this collection delves into the multifaceted nature of grief, despair, and inner strength. In Eyes of Some Robbers, Bishop endures the many faces of harm–personal, professional, societal–but leaves her readers with hope. Bishop has managed to synthesize it into a collection of profoundly personal poems.”
Mario E. Martinez, Editorial Manager, Bilingual Review/Revista Bilingüe, author of NEO-Laredo and The Chickens That Are Not Her Chickens
“Each poem is crystalline. Chiseled and distillate. As with much of Bishop’s work, there is a deeply ethereal, evocative quality, aptly enough based on a fairy tale. And just like with a fairy tale, the reader is entranced, all the while knowing that danger lurks. Frankly, each poem is a deceptive little explosion. So lovely readers won’t know what hit them. As I read, there were moments when I was literally knocked back in my seat. It was that physical an experience.”
Since I wrote about a Debra Hensley-Luczycki print in my last blog, An Art Walk Through Our Home: The Smirking Heart https://suzettemariebishop.com/2019/02/18/an-art-walk-through-our-home-the-smirking-heart/, I thought I’d write a poem response to a second print by her. Debra surprised us with this print which she gave to us as a wedding present. The print is appropriately titled Something Old, Something New, Something Borrowed, Something Turquoise.
Tim Tracz, a photographer, was kind enough to allow me to choose one of his photos for the cover of my first book, She Took Off Her Wings & Shoes. I tackled the difficult task of making a selection, finally narrowing it down to two photos. To me, they were the ones most mirroring my poetry collection. One photo collage, however, was in a landscape orientation and, unfortunately, wouldn’t work for the portrait orientation of the book’s format.
Still, the collage image with a woman reading in the woods stayed with me.
Both the image I chose and that second one were gifted to us by Tracz and hang in our kitchen.
He also sent us other magical prints I’ve hung by string lights in our staircase.
For this blog, I wrote a poem inspired by Tracz’s photo of the woman reading.
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