Edited by Jerry Williams

176 Pages

Overlook Hardcover (December 31, 2009) ISBN-13: 978-1590202821 $10.17

 

 

A series of things went wrong at the start of this review. Email was lost. Mailmen were lost. The tea-cup poodle at the shop where my P.O. Box is located attempted to swallow and lose forever the book, It’s Not You, It’s Me. But with all that went wrong with its delivery, Jerry Williams’s anthology of breakup poetry made it just in time for my first relationship counseling session. I held the little black book—feeling a mix of dread and exhilaration. If I were to name the thing I do best, it would be breakups—and by best I mean I’m an evil monster with razor-sharp-love teeth. Nothing goes untouched on my way out. Doors are ripped off hinges. Glass breaks. Bicycles fly. In my desperation to keep things together, everything is ripped to pieces. And now, in my hot hands, was an entire book on the only subject I am an expert on—the end of an affair. 

 

In an attempt to take this book as a cosmic joke and not some bleak premonition for my relationship, I decided to read It’s Not You, It’s Me as it is structured. The poems are arranged into three sections: One Foot Out the Door, In the Middle of the Storm, and The Aftermath—therefore I would read the book over the course of three days: the day before relationship counseling, day of therapy, and the day after. I resolved that if Jerry Williams was brave enough to write a book about the hot center of love, then I could risk reading it in the thick of my own love problems.

 

I expect love to come after the whole of me—to swallow the flesh and crush the bones. This idea of being consumed is somewhat appealing for me. To be reduced to the raw pulse of sensation—to be undone until there’s nothing cohesive left—seems liberating. The word breakup implies liberation. A breakup is to disperse—to disperse is to spread—spread like wings—to vanish. I’d like to believe a break with my partner would also allow an escape from my broken self. But Jerry Williams’s anthology warns that breakups are not as clean or complete as I wish them to be. 

 

The first section of It’s Not You, It’s Me ends with Mark Strand’s poem “Giving Myself Up.” In Strand’s poem the persona gives up his body and all the expectations it holds. The persona asserts to his other, “you will have none of it because already I am beginning/ again without anything.” To begin “again without anything” sings with a delicious temptation—it reads as the apple-baited-lure back into singleness. But Jerry William’s complicates this idea of clean breaks by skillfully placing twenty-two poets before Strand. These poets include Robert Hass, Tony Hoagland, Kim Addonizio, Ai, and many other voices capable of foreshadowing there is nothing clean about a breakup.

 

As the poet Ai points out in her poem “Reunions with a Ghost,” “acceptance, resignation, / certainty that we must collide from time to time” is a part of any love affair. There is no taking off a ghost. There is not a single lover my body has been able to forget—the absence of their touch as present on me as their warm bodies once were. There is no escaping love—there is no breaking into a wholly new self.    

 

 

Why is everything so much goddamn work? After an hour of learning “how to communicate,” the Doc gives me a test to see if I have ADD. I haven’t been able to finish the thing—the test is fifteen boring questions long—and I have a whole section of It’s Not You, It’s Me, begging to be read. Finding names for my monsters will have to wait.

 

This second section of Jerry William’s anthology contains a group of poems about the hot climax of breaking up. Interesting to me is how bodily sadness can be—lips throbbing, fluids running, heart pounding, muscles flexed—it sounds more like a sex scene in a steamy romance novel than suffering. Unexpected eroticism is an element in many of It’s Not You, It’s Me poems. In the poem “Dancer Holding Still” Linda Gregg writes, “…She is not waiting. / She keeps from knowing the grief of separation. She thinks the love will not kill her. His love / is powerful in her, the way metal loves heat.” Gregg’s poem, while verging on the erotic, is about the inconsolable sadness a woman feels for the loss of her husband. If not exactly sexy, there is something undeniably visceral about how a person enters and then exits another’s life.  

 

The sadness found in a breakup has an element of the sublime to it—human desire seeming to be endless—desire being the closest thing we have to understanding the divine. In the poem “The Pure Loneliness” Michael Ryan writes, “loneliness in another can’t be touched, / like Christ’s voice at death answering Himself.” Ryan’s poem urges me to accept how not even our most powerful icons can escape loneliness. Loneliness leaves no one untouched.

 

So between therapy and poetry, what have I learned today? I have learned: neither counseling nor gods will save me from loneliness. Loneliness is as tethered to the human condition as love—loneliness and love having a marriage without end. I have learned to envy such concentration.

 

Inevitable is the shifting of light during the course of a day. At this moment, the sun is in the uplifted arms of a Joshua Tree—its desert leaves stretched like unfurled switch blades. Joy is present in how the J-tree can touch the sky with its sharp-edged fingers without hurting the warmth of the day.

 

Soon light will move into the large face of my living room window. My floor will appear to be on fire without burning. Light is an intimacy that appears safe because of distance. This is the sort of love found in the third sections of Jerry William’s Anthology. The poem “Half-Life” by Bob Hicok leaves me breathless as I read,

 

I sense there was a period when our lives

overlapped, doing all the maintenance

couples do to pretend that skin

doesn’t end where skin ends but is the beginning

of planets and music, of everything, that’s all we want,

everything. It’s good to imagine you out there,

not thinking of but sensing me as a shadow

might feel the air through which it glides,

good to put down my fists, to no longer fight

that I will always be pregnant with you.

 

Light, same as love, is fueling—an energy that gives without reason. But love is never how we plan it—we never get to choose what direction our shadows are cast—or who will impregnate the wombs of our heart.

 

To be under the influence of “everything” means that the soft touch of sunlight must also hold the potential of cancer. And what is cancer but a cell refusing to die—a being’s refusal to alter its original form? It makes sense that the substance of flesh would mirror our desires. We fight against the inevitable shifts of energy. We’re broken to pieces in our struggle to maintain things as they are—the broken pieces are small enough to be examined completely—to be experienced as everything. There is never a perfect wholeness, but there are moments submerged in the joy of light.            

 

Perhaps the most endearing section of It’s Not You, It’s Me is Jerry Williams’s introduction. He discloses his own breakup monsters—bares his own love teeth. It’s Not You, It’s Me proves that when it comes to love anyone is capable of the monstrous. This anthology of breakup poetry is cathartic. People love. People lose. People love past loss.  

 

What a relief to know I am not alone in my hideous love-self. Thank you, Jerry Williams, for this insight—it may be just the thing to save my relationship as well as many others. This book is a source of love—a kindness not to be taken lightly.

Nicelle Davis lives in California with her husband James and their son J.J. Her poems are forthcoming in Moulin, The New York Quarterly, Two Review, and others. She’d like to acknowledge her poetry family at the University of California, Riverside and Antelope Valley Community College. She runs a free online poetry workshop at: http://nicelledavis.wordpress.com/.