What Comes After the After

A Review of Nicole Callihan’s This Strange Garment

“Everything is temporary” (3). The repetition of this line drives the first poem of Callihan’s stirring collection, perhaps even the language itself. It is predicated in the failing body that begins moving toward death at conception. Despite that conceit, these poems will outlive us all as if the act of writing them was the ultimate gesture toward immortality. The collection’s main concern is the speaker’s experience with breast cancer, from diagnosis to mastectomy to radiation to losing a nipple post-surgery down the shower drain. Yet, it isn’t spectacle that Callihan focuses her attention on. This is not a book about miracles, or resilience myths. It is a book about the silliness of the things we take for granted every day: ordinary fears made plain, lucid. Made of skin like paper, so delicate it can tear at any time. 

Callihan’s poems range from thick blocks of prose to spare, lithe lyrics that compress even the fear into lived experience. There is probably not a person living who has not been touched by cancer, either personally or through someone else. These poems are so tender in their representation of the illness and the speaker’s struggles with it they become accessible, and yet not. This contradiction is made apparent in the very specific experience of the speaker: in the detailed realities of a particular body at a particular moment in history, which are unique to her. The intimacy of the poems invites the reader to enter this experience as well, if only as a witness.

The speaker is a wife and mother of two daughters dealing with a cancer diagnosis and treatment during a global pandemic, who must also contend with bodily changes related to aging while healing from a mastectomy. The many concrete details of fraught interior and exterior landscapes create a resonant tension that is a throughline in the collection, “the bandage where the IV was inserted, the clouds crossing the /train window, the train, the window, even the beautiful expanse / of river that finally opened to me” (6). To add to that, people are dying by the millions during the pandemic. Callihan’s lens shifts from larger global concerns to focus on the very real humiliations of a person navigating parenting, homeschooling, safety precautions during the pandemic, and everyday trials, while living with cancer and its aftermath, where even noticing becomes a thing of value. The speaker observes:

“I imagine myself Picasso’s Weeping Woman. My blue teeth
        chattering, red bow, canary yellow ear, the fear.

The machine will read for bright spots.

Cancer being the brightest of spots. 

There are stars. All light is information. Or is it the other way around? 

Before surgery, I met Zoë and Caitlin at the cabin and Zoë
brought us jars of moonwater. You just leave the jar outside
on a full moon, then drink it up. It’ll make you live forever.
or want to. We drank some of it, saved the rest. 
 This, too, is a stage of survival” (32).

The tonal shifts between poems are not jarring, but instead mirror the ways one must read and react to a situation in the absence of control. There are moments of humor and fear and weeping and joy. The strangeness of the diseased body, the treatment, the pandemic, and the world before, or since the advent of the pandemic, all seep into the poems very matter-of-factly to confront the reader. Through white space or its lack, they either refuse to give the reader time to sit with that strangeness or they refuse not to. In a succession of short poems with short lines, the reader’s attention is arrested and held, as in the poem titled “Recovery Room 4:” 

“My body, the paper chair. I dig
for words, like fishing for a pill 
in the bottom of your purse.

The crawl space dream. It’s all plain 
as day. My voice is gone. Dirty elbows.
The underside of the sky.

The anesthesiologist calls my name” (53).

In this poem, recovery calls attention to itself, and perhaps to survival. In contrast, the poems before the surgery tend to move quickly, have longer lines, and fill whole pages, as if the speaker is trying both to leave as much of herself behind as possible while also compressing time during an excruciating waiting period. But it is the peculiarity of survival that might be the strangest garment the speaker must don. What to do once one knows with certainty that “everything is temporary?” What does that afterworld look like? What happens when one’s body is unalterably changed? What is lost and what is gained? The world of these poems, split into tenses in more ways than one, does not try to answer these questions, instead offering more questions: “we have all grown brave, haven’t we? / Brave and undignified. The end of summer / collecting like sweat on the backs of our thighs” (13).

Dealing with difficult subject matters, such as a mastectomy, for example, Callihan gives voice to important experiences in surprising and wonderful turns of language, with masterful precision so that it is both painful to witness and to look away from:

“Jen had written, wanted to send me something.
This was December. Oh shit, I wrote back,
one of my nipples just fell off. LOL” (66).

It seems freeing (or less exhausting) to say what one means, as if to mean what one says—about living or dying or cancer or shit or pus or blood or nipples or periods or the fear of never being desired again, of never desiring, of saying “desire” so many times it becomes “dire,” or how laughable many of these things might be if only one survives them—is not only costly to the person speaking who must give voice to a traumatic event and risk re-traumatization, but is a worthwhile expense when in fact “everything is temporary.”

Except, perhaps, loneliness, which can feel “like sitting on a toilet, wiping 
and wiping until you can no longer see the blood” (77).

Except, perhaps, poems. And books. And strangeness. And incidences of cancer. And the living. And death itself. Except the beauty of these poems. Their stark heart. Their clarity. Their failure to be anything less. My gratitude for finding them, that they found me.

May a cure for cancer(s) also render the disease temporary one day, if not entirely gone. 

Out Past the Sugar Maple 

Though I can no longer feel 
my breasts, I am so gentle with them, 
as if a beloved dog, dead— 

how tender you were when you carried her 
to the cleared space beneath the trees.(28).*

*Excerpted from Nicole Callihan’s This Strange Garment, (Terrapin Books, 2023)