Allison Blevins, Cataloguing Pain

 

When my legs slowlyparalyzed—heavy rain, wood, stone—I spent hours holding tight to the kitchentable trying to lift each knee into the pressing air. An editor once asked inan encouraging rejection letter why the manuscript had to be so depressing. (“CataloguingPain as Marriage Counseling”)

Andso opens Minnesota-based Allison Blevins’ latest collection, Cataloguing Pain (Portland OR: YesYes Books, 2023), the first poem in an opening ten pagesequence of one short prose stanza per page. Following Slowly/Suddenly (Vegetarian Alcoholic Press, 2021) and Handbook for the Newly Disabled, A Lyric Memoir (BlazeVOX, 2022), Cataloguing Pain holds echoes of Torontopoet Therese Estacion’s recent poetry debut, Phantompains (Toronto ON:Book*hug, 2021) [see my review of such here], both of which approach details toarticulate living with and through relatively recent physical disabilities,from the experience of living with chronic pain to the physical needs and requirementsof the body. As she writes as part of the sequence “Fall Risk”: “I want to askyou // to touch me, but it is Wednesday—shot day—and you’ve already loaded /the injector, swiped in outward concentric circles, pinched my stretched // andmarked skin between your thumb and forefinger. / I want to fall less in love withyou.”

“Itrack pleasures through color and sound.” she writes, as part of the sequence “ACatalogue of Repetitive Behaviors,” “When we wake the morning, our love is likean alarm blaring—pink-orange-morning-blues swirl and striate like cream incoffee. Love wakes the body like cologne lingers on the neck: this chair aproposal, this shirt a birthday surprise dinner.” There is such an intimacy tothese poems, and an interesting way that the narration occasionally shifts fromthe main narrator to the voice of their spouse, offering the poems a broaderportrait of how the changes affect them both, from pain into care, fromparenting and pregnancy into attempting different ways to expand their small family.“My wife writes a letter to our son every year on his birthday.” she writes, aspart of the sequence “A Catalogue of Repetitive Behaviors,” “In the days afterthis diagnosis, the rhythm of footfalls and the running washer across our housekeep me awake and safe. I hear the clocks’ ticking in every room. I know thesmell of her neck so well—lift me from the bed, help me with the socks.”Or, as the final poem in the six-part sequence “During the Days After MyOfficial / MS Diagnosis” reads:

I can’t casually discusswhat is coming for me. Our marriage won’t survive you explaining long term careinsurance again. Today, in your group: a cousin in diapers, paralyzed child,incoherent texts from a sister in an assisted living facility, blind mother ofsix. Tonight, I will kiss our sleeping children in their beds. One last kissbefore I turn off the living room light and walk across the house to ourbedroom. I’ll brush my teeth. I’ll undress. I’ll climb into bed.

Blevinsfocuses on the form of the prose poem, including the prose sequence, to holdher accumulative insights; utilizing the form as needed, whether as bluntinstrument, emotional force or as something more fine-tuned and precise, evenliquid. “You ask how I feel.” she writes, further into the opening sequence, “CataloguingPain as Marriage Counseling,” “This is a trap. If I say my body hurts, not inmy skin or fascia but in the spreading of pain along my nerves from my mother tomy daughters. If I say inside me pain learns something new: how to web into thesmall and wet, loiter in the old rooms of diving and blue. You will reply, I’msorry. I’d rather argue.” The poems in Cataloguing Pain areremarkably powerful through their subtlety, and deeply intimate across an arrayof notes, effects and difficulties catalogued alongside all that still remainspossible, whether despite or through, pushing this as a collection that readsas fiercely optimistic, structurally dense and emotionally open. Everything aboutthis book offers it as required reading.