The words of Kate Asche’s poem “[Untitled]” (Poetry, May 2024) enact a sac-like image on the page. Leapfrog the spaces between them and they (the words) hang together as if magnetized, flowing into shattering assertions. A life is lost in this poem. It illustrates the power of conveying an ordeal by skirting emotive language in favor of a dispassionate, grievously minute telling. Or showing?

(In my excerpt, where there’s an ellipsis, imagine incremental spaces which contribute to bulging the poem into its circular aspect on the page.)

the sac
itself was … clear
and I cleaned it … like a window
and in the window … saw my baby
our baby … [birdlike
mouth open … nasal … area still
oversized … like a beak] … eye’s aperture blue-black
head thrown … back … and twisted beginning
to separate … neck brok
en in the contractions’ … violence …
[…]

The next-to-last-line, fracturing the word “broken” at a syllabic juncture, executes the most violent enjambment possible in poetry. Even the formality of a hyphen is dispensed with. 

Detail suggests the speaker has agency in this grave matter, is constrained to follow a procedure, and is painfully observant along the way. Note the pointed fallback from “my” baby to “our” baby. The emphasis on the shared origin of the failed life that’s being let go of recurs in the poem.

There’s much more than what I’ve cited. You have to see the poem to apprehend it. (Be prepared to look up some medical terms.) Surpassingly strange and explicit, it’s a lump-in-throat inducing achievement, graphic in multiple senses. Solid syntax which makes the words cohere across their spacing helps the reader navigate the form factor. The poem transmits indelible ache through language that embraces the unstintingly clinical.

The circle closes; the poem ends:

I handed this … singular life over
never saw my child
again

(c) 2024 JMN — EthicalDative. All rights reserved