Barrelhouse Reviews: If Some God Shakes Your House by Jennifer Franklin

Reviewed by Anastasios Mihalopoulos

Four Way Books / March 2023 / 120 pp

Jennifer Franklin’s third full-length book of poetry draws a vibrant contour of motherhood, choice, and political dispatch, intercalating ancient wisdom with our contemporary moment. In a variety of poetic modes, Franklin elucidates the meaning of autonomy, as well as its absence, pushing to the deepest root of what it means to choose.

 The collection, titled after a line from Antigonick, as translated by Anne Carson, orbits about the title figure from the Sophocles tragedy and the Oedipus Cycle. Antigone, a classic martyr, defies King Creon’s edict that her brother, Polyneices, who died in battle, was not to be buried and that anyone who tried to bury him would be condemned to death. She takes on a role of luminary defiance. She chooses her fate and buries her brother, only to find that Creon seeks to waive his statement. He gives her several opportunities to evade the death he promised, while nevertheless ignoring her right to choose.

Drawing resonance from this mythic conflict, Franklin offers her own songs of resistance, abortion, motherhood, and love. Franklin, as the speaker, reflects on her own decision not to have an abortion despite experiencing severe hyperemesis during her pregnancy. Throughout the collection, poems return to Franklin’s daughter, who suffers from severe seizures and significant disabilities. Franklin works to illuminate both the struggle and the beauty of motherhood as she cares for her daughter:

I visit a friend I haven’t seen in years,
and confide how afraid I am

for my disabled daughter when I’m dead.
Her husband tells me my daughter

 is happy and oblivious and she
wouldn’t know if she were being raped

as if she has less sentience than a dog
chained to a pole in an overgrown yard.

In this poem and others, Franklin offers a vulnerable yet fierce examination of the surrounding world. She leads us to grieve, and to transubstantiate that grief into power, just as Antigone did.

Franklin organizes the collection with three subtypes: a loosely repeating cycle of persona poems titled “As Antigone—”, sonnets titled “Memento Mori,” and prose poems each titled after months of the year. She draws on other voices as well, including Susan Sontag, George Orwell, Emily Dickinson, and Simone de Beauvoir.

The persona poems, in particular, rely upon an elegant elision. These poems blur the ideology and emotional gravity of ancient Antigone with Franklin’s personal biography. The series of poems functions to generate ambiguity with a combined voice of Antigone and the speaker. Franklin applies the centuries-old voice to contemporary instances such as sitting in a cancer center or her father breaking the rack on a billiard table. Franklin writes:

If you think I wasn’t angry
at his betrayal—you’re wrong.
Fury moved through my body

with the gravity of a waterfall.
I cut my ankles under my dress
Where no one would see.

I snuck out of my room at 3 a.m.
wearing ripped nightclothes
under my wintercoat, not knowing

what I would tell my brother
of this ruin…

Occurring near the center of the collection, this poem fuels the dual perspective. One may interpret the “ruin” and “betrayal” as that of Creon in the play, or that of figures in Franklin’s life.

The careful breaks and enjambment in these lines demonstrate Franklin’s attention to cadence and breath. With a modern Antigone as anchor, Franklin generates a lyrical and piercing meditation on death and love. Death, not as something to be avoided, but rather acknowledged with memento mori. As with the myth of Antigone, Franklin unfolds and heightens the breadth of memento mori through a series of sonnets. These capture various moments from day-to-day life and then, as all sonnets do, turn us to a new notion, in this case, of death and how we live in its echo. In “Memento Mori: Northern White Rhino,” Franklin examines the last two living Northern White Rhinos in captivity:

Unaware of their doom,
they pass their last days eating
and napping. Each time they lower
their heavy bodies down to rest
they sleep, tusks touching. Love,
what do any of us have but this?

Franklin’s keen gaze takes us to a level deeper than grief. She transmutes an image of extinction into one of intimate love between mother and daughter. This deft reimagining appears in other poems such as in “Memento Mori: Mother after My Treatment.” The poem begins with a description of her mother in the garden, but the garden soon becomes a metaphor for Franklin herself. “When she returns to her garden, it fills her with sorrow/ She didn’t know it would become wild so soon.”

 These poems are saturated with images of Antigone, autonomy, and the diaphanous film that stands between us and death. Through poems contemplating the catastrophe of Pompeii, global warming, and the relationship between mother and child, Franklin weaves a compelling and needed narrative for us all. If Some God Shakes Your House leaves us with a reformed image of love and death, as does “June 24, 2022,” which responds to the repeal of Roe v. Wade.

Dickinson wrote “To attempt to speak of what has been, would be impossible. Abyss has no Biographer—” My daughter crumbles like a rag doll when she seizes—her heavy body limp in my arms. I watch us from above, our forced and permanent Pietà. Can you see the Truth? The Child isn’t the one who is dead.

 This final image conveys both the ferocity and the devastation of the mother. Through this tragic image, as well as the persona of Antigone, Franklin offers a voice of vibrant resilience even as some god continues to shake her house.

Anastasios Mihalopoulos is a Greek/Italian-American from Boardman, Ohio. He received his MFA in poetry from the Northeast Ohio MFA program and his BS in both chemistry and English from Allegheny College. His work has appeared in Blue Earth Review, West Trade Review, Ergon, The Decadent Review and elsewhere. He is currently pursuing a PhD in Creative Writing and Literature at the University of New Brunswick.