Barrelhouse Reviews: A Rupture in the Interiors by Valerie Witte

Reviewed by Heidi Kasa

Airlie Press / October 2023 / 80 pp

In her second collection of poetry, Valerie Witte writes that people are “parts volcanic: a rupture in the interiors.” Physical disturbances result in forming new layers of earth, as physical and emotional tremors form, heal, and re-form human bodies. As the poems accumulate, readers attain the sense of a doll’s deconstruction and construction: doll after doll is ripped and repaired, patiently, in many small stitches. There’s no mention of dolls in these poems, though, because the skin Witte is concerned with is our human skin.

The challenge of living in disrupted bodies calls for witnessing and action. Weaving—the second subject in this book, after skin—is how people witness and take action. Witte has woven different speakers throughout the book, and readers piece together patterns she’s laid out to form their own picture. Witte, practicing language poetry, repeatedly uses words and images about weaving to further connect the collection.

| So twined and untwined, thrown
already unto herself—unwound |

 Reading A Rupture in the Interiors is a delightfully tactile experience, similar to viewing an artist’s book. Artist’s books often include tangible aspects, such as handmade or found materials and textures or interactive elements. While Rupture exists in a standard poetry book format, readers’ senses are fully involved in the themes because of Witte’s attention to structure and word usage.

That structure recreates the connection of bodily intimacy. The book consists of nine parts, each sectioned into four to six short poems. Brackets enclose the opening poems of each section, giving them a closet-like space of their own, or the sense that they are a voice underlying the rest of the section. Witte stitches each poem together with vertical bars (pipes), which both divide and connect. The layers in each poem are similar to skin layers; these short forms provide the feeling of looking at magnified cells. Witte pushes us to examine, together and close up, what makes up the skin of each part and what folds together as a whole.

| These walls relaxed
to patterns | of pores, beads or shells a set
of instructions | Disordered | where we find comfort, only

Witte does not ask the reader to be a scientist, however. She nudges us to examine the interior, the emotions given form in these poems. The poems explore the delicate relationship of bodies—the surfaces and interactions and procedures—to inner selves, and what resonances those tremors have in the external world. Witte pulls apart the reader’s relation to their own skin, hair, and body and then sews it together again (a doll, repaired).

| we try binding
the mouths of wounds |

| Could her injuries
sustain her |

As one of the strongest formal elements Witte plays with, the dividing bars in the form suture fractured parts that never quite come together, because they do not resolve in expected ways. These bars leave room for the reader to stitch herself into the poem, or to contemplate the space between these joined words and phrases.

A map of bones, deliberately altered | Then skin
became boundary, a natural gum | Holding herself together
when fiber was forbidden |

Italicized phrases often link to a character of “She”—an individual threaded story and speaker/voice, and also a personification of the larger idea of “woman” as a whole. The poems describe one person’s fragmented experience within a cloud of a generalized woman. How women’s bodies are seen and understood in society adds another layer to the work.

| She was starting to disappear
herself |

| She wanted
to preserve: pickling, what she buried |

| Always
the only girl, once removed, gel washed away, a faintly rendered mark |

| Punished
for the capacity to give: birth though she would never |

Witte tunes language, as well as structure, to her advantage. Clever wordplay abounds, and the book knits similar sounds and images throughout, repeating and creating different patterns—reminiscent of C.D. Wright’s strategy in Deepstep Come Shining. Following the themes of skin and sewing, many lines echo “s” sounds. In the example below, Witte uses consonance to repeat the “s” sounds, assonance to connect “whips/and twigs,” and rhyme to connect “tips | by whips.”

| Starred or a plum blossom, seven sharp tips | by whips
and twigs | 

Witte also uses line breaks to broaden readers’ understanding. The line below is deceptively simple, but reads deeply.

| She couldn’t pass a mirror without
reflection |

At first glance, this line tells us everyone who passes a mirror sees a reflection—a literal truth. And yet, by choosing to break the line between “without” and “reflection,” and deleting the article “a,” readers ponder how the meaning of “reflection” can contain a subtle change here. Perhaps Witte is writing about a literal mirror, or perhaps she refers to people who take it upon themselves to be personal mirrors to women’s bodies.

Witte’s word choices link to the tangible feeling this book’s structure evokes. The echoes, words, and images often carry or describe a texture, so readers have the sense they are holding a blanket as it’s being braided.

| surviving the spindle merely
to pivot |

| spongy, thus susceptible

Operations and sutures are on the surface of these poems, but trauma and beauty shimmer underneath. Witte calls our attention to the results of what marks us. Skin and the body in the physical world have concrete forms whose solidity makes us think they are permanent. Yet we all know bodies change. Even a tangible form of woven or sewn cloth, such as a quilt or a rug, changes when used. What marks us and our objects can sometimes stain us. Whether the ultimate result is positive or negative, however, remains mysterious. Witte uses line breaks here to extend the possibilities of meaning.

| when we outgrow
ourselves, a divide within which everything
depends, a greater area for corroding |

Living in a human body is complex and nuanced. Acknowledging these subtleties is a way of embracing full existence, including life’s enigmas. Witte writes:

| so we can never
quite convey the secrets of our own embroidery 

Perhaps Witte is right: we can’t communicate fully about how we are made. Yet with A Rupture in the Interiors, she perceives these secrets, examines them, and explores them with a poet’s five senses. This book is a beautiful dress meant to be imagined rather than worn. It carries a radiance unlike a physical dress, because it’s sewn not from fabric, but from the experiences of outer skin and inner resonances.

Heidi Kasa is the author of the fiction chapbook Split (Monday Night Press, 2022). Her poem "The Bullet Cures" won the 2023 Poetry Super Highway Poetry Contest, and her flash fiction collection The Beginners won the 2023 Digging Press Chapbook Contest. Kasa’s work has been a finalist for a Black Lawrence Press award and shortlisted for a Fractured Lit award. Her writing has appeared in the Mixed Bag of Tricks anthology and the journals The Racket, Meat for Tea, The Raw Art Review, and Ruminate: The Waking, among others. Kasa works as an editor and lives in Austin. See more at www.heidikasa.com.