The End of Pink

by Kathryn Nuernberger

Winner of the 2015 James Laughlin Award, Kathryn Nuernberger's The End of Pink is populated by strange characters—Bat Boy, automatons, taxidermied mermaids, snake oil salesmen, and Benjamin Franklin—all from the annals of science and pseudoscience. Equal parts fact and folklore, these poems look to the marvelous and the weird for a way to understand childbirth, parenthood, sickness, death, and—of course—joy. Finding myself in a mesmeric orientation,
before me appeared Benjamin Franklin,
who magnetized his French paramours
at dinner parties as an amusing diversion
from his most serious studies of electricity
and the ethereal fire. I like thinking about
how he would have stood on tiptoe to kiss
their buzzing lips and everyone would gasp
and clap for the blue spark between them.
I believe in an honest and forthright manner,
a democracy of plain speech, so I have to
find a way to explain I don't care to have sex
anymore. Kathryn Nuernberger has lived in various corners of Missouri, Louisiana, Ohio, and Montana. Her first book, Rag & Bone (Elixir Press, 2011), was a love letter to backwoods junk collectors and all of the abandoned cabins in the foothills to the Ozark Mountains. An unapologetic dilettante, she has received research fellowships from the American Antiquarian Society and The Bakken Museum of Electricity in Life to research aspects of the history of science and medicine. She currently lives in Columbia, Missouri, teaches at the University of Central Missouri, and serves as the director of Pleiades Press.

Genres: Poetry

96 pages, Paperback

First published September 13, 2016

Reviews

[Paul · Rating 3 out of 5]

This poetry collection contains as much prose as it does poetry. Well, I say that, but it probably depends on your definition of the word ‘poetry’ as to how you make that distinction. Personally, I don’t think stream of consciousness prose chopped up into line-length chunks counts as poetry but that’s just me. Take the poem I’ve reproduced below. If I were to remove the line breaks, nobody would suggest it was a poem. Are line breaks all it takes for something to become a poem? Surely not. Anyway, I think I actually preferred what I would call the prose in this book to the poems. As ever, your mileage may very. How’s that for a ‘review’ that tells you absolutely nothing? I’m trying to create my own new artform. If I chop this ‘review’ into line-length chunks, would this qualify as a poem? I don’t really care.

Toad

My child is sitting cross-legged on the floor reading to herself.
Sometimes she is so full of need I push her to the floor.
Only once I did that and I don’t even remember the moment
right, but I was trying to wipe urine off my leg and she was
naughty like a squirrel and jumping and singing and her head
slammed into my chin, which hurt and even more than that,
it pissed me off, because she’s my beautiful child, but in that
button snap of a moment she was suddenly just one more person
and I pushed her away in a way that felt to me like setting her
down, but awkwardly, because of how she was also balancing
her feet on my feet as I tried to pour out a bowl of pee
from her little potty as a toothbrush dangled foaming
from my mouth. Somewhere in the mess of that morning
she’d become person enough to, in the space between us,
create force of momentum, and then I did not set her down,
but pushed her and she fell away from it against the wall
and was crying because I, her mommy, pushed her. And I know
this should be the poem about how I’m horrified at myself,
the poem about what in ourselves we have to live with,
but in that moment which followed two years of breastfeeding
and baby-wearing and sixty-nine hours of natural childbirth
and the haemorrhaging and the uncertain operation, after which
I pumped every two hours, careful not to let the cord tangle
in the IV. Even then when she cried and no matter what
and no matter and no matter and no matter and no matter what,
I held her all night if she cried so she would not ever know
someday you’ll cry alone, but I held her and ached and leaked
and bled too as long as it took. Of course there’ve been nights
since but sometimes it feels as if I’ve never been asleep again,
so when I say I pushed my two-year-old against a wall and I don’t
remember it happening that way but it happened and I did
and I’ve been wondering a long time now what the limit is
and when I would find the end of myself, and that day, which
was yesterday, was the end. And this day, when we played
hide-and-Sneek with Daddy, and touched bugs, and read
Ford and Toad are Friends twice together before she read it
fo herself as I wrote this, this is the day that comes after.

[Jennifer Kanke · Rating 5 out of 5]

Uncanny talk is a term we need to start using to discuss this style. Yes? Yes. A quietly brave book.

[Martin Ott · Rating 5 out of 5]

One of my favorite new poets - this book is a revelation.

[Daisy · Rating 4 out of 5]

My First Peacock

[Madison · Rating 5 out of 5]

called the collection "literal, actual perfection" in my journal (06/07/22). I get distracted after that point ranting in my journal about the situation with CMU and the kids (understandably so, and surprised I spent so long talking about other things, really, but impressed with myself), and then with the bigger distractions like the Ancestry stuff and the maybe 'my birthday isn't my birthday' and maybe 'my dad isn't my dad' stuff.

[S.W. Stromberg · Rating 3 out of 5]

I liked it all right. The first third didn't hold my attention. The middle was good because of my personal love of thinking about the average person in hell. The last third was okay.
It's almost similar in feeling to Lore podcast.

[Elizabeth Brush · Rating 3 out of 5]

I REALLY liked parts of this. some of it was poetry that I needed to sit down and really dissect to fully get, but some of it just totally resonated with me right off the bat. I call this feminist scientific poetry with a fairy tale sort of vibe. confusing, I know, but it works SO WELL.

[Shelby Rollenhagen · Rating 5 out of 5]

Phenomenal collection.

[Patricia Murphy · Rating 5 out of 5]

Brimming with imagination and surreal imagery, these poems explore modern femininity and the woe that is womanhood in a patriarchal society.

Some of my favorite moments:

I was told
my sole purpose was to be a joy to others.

if you think you might be buried alive, you will find
you already are.

the air is full of words that are ideas for lies.

[Michelle Hannon · Rating 5 out of 5]

I found these poems fanciful, beautiful, and visceral. I’m in awe of Kathryn's ability to draw such creative, offbeat, almost mythical images to represent common experiences and emotions.