Barrelhouse Reviews: Posthuman, by Risa Denenberg

Review by Lauren Davis

Floating Bridge Press / Fall, 2020 / 48 pp

Posthuman, the finalist for the 2020 Floating Bridge Press Chapbook Award, is a sonnet cycle of eighteen poems. For every three pages of sonnets, there is a new page filled with white space and fragments of the first lines and phrases from the succeeding poems. These fragments coil down the page. Visually, book designer Michael Schmeltzer creates the effect of climbing a spine. And just as with vertebrae, Risa Denenberg links each sonnet to the next by its own ligaments—or rather, vocabulary and imagery. These connections are natural. They are the work of a poet that is as aware of the body as she is of a body of poetry.

I’ve always admired the way Sylvia Plath sets a tone with just a table of contents. Scanning her titles in the restored edition of Ariel, I already feel heavy. Her word choices are painstakingly plucked from the shadow self. I know where I am being taken, and I go willingly. “Barren.” “Secret.” “Death.” “Dead.” “Daddy.”

Denenberg’s Posthuman creates the same effect. The vocabulary in the table of contents is swollen with grief. “Perish.” “Drowning.” “Death.” “Nothing.” “Mother.” Where Plath looked to the father, Denenberg directs us to Mother Earth, the landscapes of our lives, the hungers we fill and leave unfulfilled. And let us not forget the bees. Denenberg closes her first poem with, “The bees / were pleased that no one stole their combs.” Plath ends Ariel with, “The bees are flying. They taste the spring.” In each poem, we hear hope, or perhaps strength.

I only bring a giant like Plath into this review because the comparison is specific, not general. Denenberg is not Plath. She is not channeling Plath. Denenberg is channeling Denenberg, a poet of warning, of universal grief. But clearly both poets have tapped a collective consciousness where certain images preside. They have brought them to us because in them we find healing, hard truths, light.

The profane and the profound live in these sonnets. Denenberg asks us to consider the “wandering Jew,” “a chaste kiss,” and later “Pabst Blue Ribbon and Twinkies,” “our homes with shit.” She redirects our gaze to what we are, what we are becoming—a world where “the clouds know there is no heaven.”

Throughout Posthuman, the speaker moves between the singular “I” and the universal “we.” Every page contains candor. Even as the reader is outside looking in, the door is wide open. For example, when Denenberg writes of a love for a pet cat—“Everything I know of love I learned from Tyg”—this emotional truth delivers as easily as a fact. “I still want a chaste kiss now and then,” a last line of a poem reads, reminding us of our own calm desires.

Not everything here is straightforward, though. Denenberg’s relaxed use of form is a type of subversion. These are not your mother’s sonnets. Yes, there are fourteen lines in each. Yes, the poems often contain a volta. But if a volta exists, it falls where it wants—the ninth line, or wherever else it feels at home. Denenberg has woven together centuries, tangling time periods. The antiquated meeting the modern mirrors how our impact here on earth is not so easily erased. What we do now does not go away. “Time is late to prepare for our common fates,” she writes. Our fingerprints permanently stain the planet.

Denenberg tells us her grandson taught her the word “posthuman.” What does a posthuman world look like? In the article “What would happen to earth if humans went extinct?” Live Science contributor Emma Bryce explores this question, writing:

…that idea has been especially pertinent, as the global COVID-19 pandemic has kept people inside, and emboldened animals to return to our quieter urban environments—giving us a sense of what life might look like if we retreated further into the background...The planet might eventually become lusher and more diverse—but we can't dismiss the effects of climate change, arguably humanity's most indelible impact on the planet...[U]ltimately, despite climate extremes and the immense losses they can incur, “nature always finds a way,” [author and journalist Alan] Weisman said.

After Denenberg tells us where she has heard “posthuman,” in the next line she mourns “the loss of Mother Earth.” Humans—with our hands and eyes on scholarship, mortality, wealth—have wasted the land. It is not by mistake, then, that Denenberg has dedicated this book to Mother Earth herself.

Posthuman is a celebration of the feminine, of the matriarch. At the same time, it is a book that is, unfortunately, both a warning and a prophecy. The cracks are showing. As Denenberg reminds us, nothing is permanent. In so doing, she reminds us of the value in each breath, each blade of grass, the “last lover’s face.” “Go ahead,” Denenberg writes. “Name one thing worth living for.” May we always rise to this challenge.

Lauren Davis is the author of Home Beneath the Church (Fernwood Press, forthcoming), and the chapbooks Each Wild Thing’s Consent (Poetry Wolf Press, 2018), and The Missing Ones (Winter texts, forthcoming). She holds an MFA from the Bennington College Writing Seminars, and she teaches at The Writers’ Workshoppe and Imprint Books.