Barrelhouse Reviews: The Saint of Everything by Deborah Keenan

Reviewed by Sara Dovre Wudali

Lynx House Press / March 2023 / 64 pp

Three times the speaker of the poem “Hospital” has suffered through quarantine. But not just suffered through: she has “lived for days and nights.” It is a particular way of marking time that readers—having all just lived through the pandemic—have experienced in a close, personal way. We can imagine the hash marks the speaker makes on the chalkboard in her mind: another day, another night, another day, another night. It is a bleak vision of solitary, sterile suffering.

The poem describes a torturous childhood scene. The speaker is quarantined, her head and shoulders in a plastic tent. Thus confined, her human contact is limited to painful touches to her extremities: injections and blood draws. Her head rests, not on a pillow, but on ice. Though the speaker is a perfect patient, the nurses are emotionally distant:

Blood taken from small veins hidden in closed elbows.
When told to extend my arms, I obey. I am awfully good,
Though it does not make the nurses love me.

The care being taken is all clinical, detached. The only physical touch that roughly acknowledges the need for emotional care comes when the speaker’s mother appears. The nurse “shakes my leg to rouse / me” to see her mother. But the mother, “the face I love and wait for,” is not allowed into the room. The speaker sees her through layers: the plastic tent, a door, a glass pane.

“Don’t cry,” the speaker instructs herself. She has internalized these instructions on how to be good, and the trauma of the solitary, sterile hospital room (and by extension, of the reader’s collective experience with quarantine/lockdown) becomes a “garden” whose soil grows a particular harvest, the list of which perhaps moves from weed to flower: “Claustrophobia / fear, loneliness, bravery, stoicism.”

The word “garden” reads as ironic, given the bitter nature of this harvest. But the last item the garden has grown is “the animal ability to abide.” And because of this beautiful final item on the list of what the quarantine harvests, the metaphor also reads as sincere. The shift in language from a matter-of-fact list to a lyric one, with the repeated short a sound in that last phrase, rings like an attempt at self-soothing, swallowed crying. The short a sounds move across one’s ear like quick pats on the back. There, there. Don’t cry. Instead, “abide.”

And it is the poet’s choice of final word here, “abide,” which cracks this poem open. Abide means to endure, to suffer without yielding, to wait without letting the act of waiting chip away at oneself. And how do we abide? How do we tolerate painful loss and confinement? This “animal ability” struck me strongly on my first reading of The Saint of Everything. I had been thinking about grief and hardship—some friends had just lost their 26-year-old son in a work accident. After several years of pandemic loss, this grief piled on top of other griefs collected in my body. Just as Keenan asserts, the lesson in how to bear it all comes from animals. The day we had a new roof put on our family’s house, our cat hid from the terrifying noise in the basement. When I went down to check on him, he stood up to greet me, accepted a treat, and then heavily folded his legs under himself and lay down to wait. It seemed as if the essence of his cat-self, his cat-I, had retreated deep into another dimension of his mind. He was abiding.

This is not the only poem in Keenan’s collection to mention abiding. In “Making a Map of the World,” the speaker’s goal is “[t]o carry the lamp without complaint.” But in “Two Stones,” the impulse to abide by oneself does harm. The speaker of “Two Stones” is as “awfully good” as the speaker of “The Hospital”:

And because of how you were raised, you are eager to please.
You seem to be a volunteer—yes, please let me carry both stones.
That is how they see you, that you are someone who wants to carry both.
It doesn’t matter that these two stones are killing you. That you know it.

The stones are burdens given to the speaker, but also accepted. Women are taught to abide. Taught to carry.

Luckily for the reader, in this collection, the burden of abiding is shared—with the magical strangers, animals, and pantheon of saints that populate its pages and lift spirits just by existing. Keenan’s poems contain an abundance of oddball characters: the thief who teaches you how to live by rearranging your house, the tiger on the lawn, the doll free to leave the collage she appears in, the ghosts of dead painters. The work these strange characters do is mysterious. “The Lion in the Dunes,” for example, is lost, “filthy with sand” and in love with the wind. But when I try to read beyond the image, Keenan resists me, reminds me that my attempts to make the lion be anything other than a lion are about me and not about him:

[…]He is not
aware of being a
symbol of anything,
no hermetic truths
swirl around him.
And though he is
part of the book
of the world,
he doesn’t know that.

Whether the poems concern the saint of sleep, hard-working and “far from home”; or the saint of childhood, whose main job seems to be the refusal of sleep; or the saint of maps, who can’t help the lost because “he is not the saint / of patience, not the saint of wanderers / who refuse his help,” Keenan’s humor and imagination buoy us beyond abiding. And for those who are stuck with the stones they have been given, there is the Saint of Everything, who, though overworked and harried with the long list of those she protects, is also very much the Saint of “Those Who Abide.”

Sara Dovre Wudali is a writer and editor from Saint Paul. Her work is forthcoming or has been published in literary journals such as under the gum tree, Wild Roof Journal, and Blood Tree Literature. She is the editor of the hybrid anthology chapbook, All You Need Is One Avocado.