Walking the Fractal Garden

for spite and rosemary by Bridgette Valentine, reviewed by [sarah] Cavar

Bridgette Valentine’s for spite and rosemary is a multi-textured maze, whose labyrinthine imagery begins even before the opening of the book. On the cover, a purplepinkstained corset sits at center stage. Above it sits a title, lowercase, Courier. Behind the corset, a child prostrates themself before a small doll, holding it above their head like a prayer or a chair.

In fragmentary, emotionally-thick islands of text buttressed by multimedia interventions, for spite and rosemary intervenes in a literary landscape of straightforward trauma stories with poems about meaning-making amid ambiguity. It follows the tradition of Jody Chan’s Sick and Sara June Woods’s Sara: Or the Existence of Fire, who lean on moments of historical and familial speculation to piece together trauma-truths. A romance/fantasy author making her poetry debut, it is perhaps no surprise that Valentine utilizes these techniques so effectively, collaging a life out of fractal scenes.

The first poem of the chapbook, “LANDLINE,” begins with a thwarted recollection, boxing readers into a shared consciousness dotted with blanks: 

I can’t remember the name of my hometown’s preacher anymore. 
It feels so strange.
My last name is a neighbor
I don’t make eye contact with (9). 

From a series of opaque observations –– kudzu whisper, the moon performs its wash, wood rots tree and home alike –– we sense a profound displacement, a memory erased and improperly refitted. Nouns marry unexpected verbs, transgressing readerly expectations and pointing toward an ecology of longing and of grief, where a world that appears “natural” rarely works as expected. These images, whose contexts are often mysterious and whose implications are rarely direct, gesture toward memories displaced. Lost love is hailed not by name but merely the pronoun “you,” a silhouette into which Valentine and readers alike may cast our own longings. You is a person, yes, but also a life-source whose lips impart words that “melt…onto [our] own” (20). “You” is a muse and a frustration, a dreamlike character only approachable in the poetic medium.

But as dreamlike as for spite and rosemary may appear, it also bites. Valentine’s attention centers the visceral with her uncompromising imagery. Returning to the motif of “melting,” the author scrawls above a vintage photograph: “I want to bite the words out of your mouth. Let them drip down my throat like a pomegranate harvest” (22). These moments of delicious violence, too, are life-sustaining practices toward emotional catharsis. It is clear that the language of pleasure and hope, and that of violence and destruction, are by no means in opposition. Rather, these poems involve readers in a circular ecology of life and death. Indeed, Valentine’s collection offers a number of cyclical moments: in “Dandelion,” the speaker’s hair and body sport a tangle of dandelions, wrapping them in wishes: “you” possess a “voice [which] is soil that grows bulbs inside of me / over and over again” (14), a continuous regrowing as infinite as the dandelion’s face. The image remains close at hand through the final poem of the collection, aptly named “Ouroboros.” This poem, much like the collection itself, opens in a moment of trauma-induced upheaval, with successive generations forced to undergo the pain of the last: apple pies become a “cataclysm of yellows. / An upheaval of golden amber” (42). The speaker is “venomous,” just like the poem’s titular snake. Yet the snake’s coiled body, for the speaker, represents "a consolidation for an interstellar / karmic cleansing.” Even harsh bodies forged in pain reshape with the changing seasons. 

The final section of this chapbook is a story of grief, multilayered and many-headed and most of all, lonely: “how heavy grief is / when you don’t trust anyone else / to carry it with you” (31), the speaker notes, elsewhere remarking that “[her] grandmother’s scars / are engraved on the inside”  (29). The reader is left wondering about both the origins and implications of a grief so great it consumes bodies and landscapes, occupying entire homes and ways of approaching the world. Valentine writes of isolation –– a willingness to leave the griefbody as well as the griefhouse, and a bewilderment as to the where-next. Where does the grieving go when simultaneously ready to “move on” and deeply entangled with the stories and persons that created us? Within this contradiction, we find ourselves “sleepwalking” through memories of loved ones passed, dancing bloody through unworn landscapes and entering a poem that is also “A MOSS COVERED COFFIN” (35).

Throughout the collection, the reader has been ushered from summer, through fall, and winter: seasons of grief packed with rich reflections on love, longing, and loneliness. The speaker, craving love letters, describes this correspondence as “like binding / the summer solstice inside” (38), in stark contrast to her cold, dark wanderings beneath the moon. As seasons change, however, the speaker grows in courage and confidence –– even if neither are linear in form. Love and grief slip-change with one another, fracturing the speaker’s relationships to space, time, and personhood, and welding them in unexpected, and sometimes, painful ways. Not only is healing nonlinear ––despite co-optation by contemporary recovery narratives–– it is also perpetually incomplete, and even when “finished,” bound to show its fraying seams. 

When wounds and worlds close, the trauma that caused them remains clear. Within a world in which traumatized lives are expected to grieve on a restricted timeline, to be fixed and forced back to “normal,” for spite and rosemary refuses the notion that time is linear at all. for spite and rosemary is, literally, a perennial reminder that the winter of grief is an ever-present part of life, lingering with the speaker even in seasons dotted with growth and light. In these poems, loss come in flocks and haunts the corners of our love notes. Trauma is not solely a villain to be eradicated or problem to be cured, but instead, a living wound to be tended like the titular garden.

We are fractured, fractal, sick 

[sic]. 

These poems remind us that we are broken and vulnerable, and that trauma is often a companion in survival. Holding space for pain, we braid, garden, adorn our lives with love, writing letters that may never be sent, spinning wool until the wool is gone. As readers close the text, we are invited to harvest our spite and our rosemary, and follow Valentine through the light, into the dark corners of grief, trauma, and ambiguity. In chorus with the speaker, we assert with newfound, embodied knowledge: “I will keep myself warm” (40).