ONCE READ AS RUIN by Katherine Gaffney
Last week we got to read ONCE READ AS RUIN, Katherine Gaffney’s poetry chapbook out with Finishing Line Press. It was a stunning read that honestly has paired very well with Michelle Ross’s SHAPESHIFTING and Kym Cunningham’s NEW MYTHOLOGIES. We’re on a kick of reading cutting work that mixes discussions of women, wildness, and intimacy, which is absolutely wonderful despite being unplanned!
Gaffney’s chapbook is arranged into three sections, well, kind of four, opening with a poem on its own titled “Like a Salmon (Or Fool in a Blue House). This poem sets up a lot of the major themes of Gaffney’s work within the collection: the fantasy of what life is expected to be: summer dinners, neat potted plants, and the reality of what it is: the debris of every day life piling up to a mounting threat, illustrated by mail stacked so high and thick on counters that you can’t see past it to the surface, clusters of post-it notes, the desire to rehome one’s dishes. The collection walks between the margins of our conflicting desires to find love, to feel connected, and our animal need to unburden ourselves and live independently. These poems are not something, as the speaker in the first poem so beautifully states, that one can leave alone, and come back to without them having moved or changed in someway. But these complicated shifts, no matter how surprising they are on the page, are also strangely familiar. Gaffney takes the personal and shifts it to the universal, speaking as all good poets do, in a language that feels both highly unique to an individual’s experience, and yet somehow a part of us all.
He says his grandmother, in old age, was like a salmon,
wanting to return to Czechoslovakia, “fuck, then die.”
“Fuck, then die,” is a thought I’ve had in our bed —
how a woman in a too-large oxford shirt communicates
sex, for me, translates to never getting off
my my-size shirt.
- ONCE READ AS RUIN, Katherine Gaffney.
While much of the poetry is about separation, about the break-down of romantic love when faced with the reality of loves, it’s also inherently about connection. About connecting with the animal, with the mythic, and with ourselves. Gaffney weaves animal nature and human nature together beautifully. In “All the Dear Beasties” the speaker of the poem develops the ability to hear the minute details of the natural world—snails slurping, the weight of cows—invading her domestic space as she grows into her expected maternal identity, causing her to ruminate on her own family as a dissolving pack. In the heart of the poem, the middle section from which the collection takes its name, “Once Read as Ruin,” Gaffney intertwines historical and mythical figures alongside a meditation on a female horse who resists being made to be beautiful despite the speakers attempts to wash her, choosing to dirty her image with mud and dust, just as Ebba the Younger and Wilgefortis uglied themselves in order to resist being conquered. Through the horse and historical women, the speaker examines the expectations put on both of their bodies and how to resist them:
A horse can denote victory or lust, depending
on tradition. But perhaps there is both victory
and lust in this horse, in these women.
A victory over lust
ONCE READ AS RUIN, Katherine Gaffney.
While there is something heartbreaking about the sense of separations in the poems, a loss of naivety, potentially, about what all the romance novels promise, there is also a sense of renewal. Of finding possibility in destruction, and a freedom in loneliness— a message that is perhaps all too prevalent and needed now:
What if he lies
on another beach somewhere and knows
that all he owns is his body and that the sand
is not his and he has no desire to make
it so and the palm trees are not his and yet
they drop coconuts for him, as the rain
falls for me and I open my mouth knowing
no one will turn the corner and interrupt my joy.
ONCE READ AS RUIN, Katherine Gaffney.
Gaffney doesn’t only examine interpersonal relationships within this text, but also includes some fine and sly observations on the consumer culture that peddles false notions of love and life to us. One poem takes place in a Longhorn Steakhouse, where the speaker is trying to see where the reality of their relationship fits within generic ideas about it, admitting that they are "so concerned with showmanship.” Another explores our fixation with excess, detailing a television show that takes us through homes with Gucci black walls and women who have hundreds of pairs of shoes, how we use these things to forget our true size. The speaker, however, contrasts this excess against the true immensity of the sea, and wills themselves to find the truth in that— to feel small and swallowed.
This chapbook is both smart and emotional, heartbreaking and hopeful, and juggling the material, consumerist world along side the natural and the wild, and yet nothing seems out of balance or out of place. The transitions are seamless, beautiful and meditative, and the voices of the speakers’ sharp, and stinging with vulnerability that never becomes too cliché or saccharine. It was a fantastic read, and we’d highly recommend it to those who love to wander down the intersection of fantasy and reality, cultural narratives and individual identities, lust and love, animal and human, while pondering what sets any of those binaries apart.
