"You Must Wear Your Rue With a Difference," by John Hodgen

You Must Wear Your Rue With a Difference

John Hodgen Rue: Poems by Kathryn Nuernberger, BOA Editions, 2020

Hard to view any artistic expression now without the lens of virus, or protests in the streets. Mona Lisa needs a mask and there’s a lot more that’s shocking here than the gambling going on at Rick’s Place in Casablanca—now the cops have their knees on people’s necks. Hard to know also what to make of poems published this year just prior to our present upheavals, how to read them, what they can say to us with everything so changed.

Such is the case with Rue by Kathryn Nuernberger, a poet living with her family in Minneapolis-St. Paul. But look closely.

These are poems of immense power and vision fully focused on systemic issues, cultural oppression, both personal and universal, and fears so noxious and extensive they virtually demand an ecopoetic perspective.

To write poetry that speaks to power on so many levels demands an intelligence both fierce and accessible, and a voice that speaks with uncompromising clarity. Listen to her in “I’ll Show You Mine If You Show Me Yours,” its title alone suggesting a challenge and an honesty devoted to a shared way of seeing as she describes watching a man in a coffee shop. “I was looking him up and down / like a woman who has been reading Rumi

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and also a tome / on the history of bear cults in Europe.” That’s a voice and a perspective one could listen to readily under quarantine or on the way to a rally. Hear Nuernberger in “I’m Worried About You in the Only Language I Know How,” as she witnesses an emotional young woman at a bus station near a park who is suddenly driven off by three men in a black van.

Nuernberger finds herself looking at her own daughter in the park and saying, “Every time I look / at this little girl of mine, I can’t believe how much I have to lose.” When she pairs that line with her shared worldly advice to her daughter, that if she should ever need help, to “look for a mother with children,” it becomes a poetry of heightened advice and wisdom to which we all could adhere now.

Rue, filled brilliantly, almost relentlessly, with hard-won, clear-eyed wisdom, is a stunning book that includes poems born from “ethnobotanical expeditions into the archives,” and “abortifacients” that exist amidst the “defiant beauty of the tall grass prairie where we found our lives.” Yet the core strength of Rue lies in its humanness, its vast honesty and courage. The title itself suggests Ophelia’s rueful mad scene in which she perceptively hands out flowers to deserving recipients with complete awareness of each flower’s hidden meanings and powers. There are also poems about office micro-aggressions, “the handbook to save our marriage,” love-making and longing, and lives lived like the phases painters go through. There are poems about her existential rage at an OB/GYN in Logan, Ohio, who assaulted her, about a 1902 movie starring “past-futuristic philosophers” who went to the moon, and, upon arriving, did as everyone does in a moon movie, turn immediately to look back at the earth they had left. In another poem she confesses how much she loves “Carl Linnaeus, who invented the Systema Naturae,” and, tellingly, even sweetly, confesses how much she needs us to love him too.

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Wisdom needs watering, and sometimes struggles when it goes up against loneliness, but this is a book filled with wildflowers of wisdom. Line after line present itself as sudden epiphany, a model for thoughtful living. One could build a church around some lines, rooted in pain, yet offering themselves freely to the light. To wit, just a few: We’re so many versions of ourselves. We try this, we try that.

Money is a symbol. Books are a symbol. The office is a symbol.

If you feel like you’re in love, you have to either remember or forget that a feeling can only last a little while.

I can’t carry a feeling this heavy and beautiful for someone by myself. I have to give it to you.

It’s too hard to want and fail, to feel the rough edges of the person you’re supposed to be trying to be when you’re trying to figure out how to be yourself.

Words never seem to live up to the promise they make us.

Sometimes you’ll feel very alone.

Other times you’ll be so wonderfully surprised by the strange bridges people manage to build out to you when you never would have expected they could.

Ultimately, wisdom may not be enough, even when we’re starving for it in a world gone so painfully awry. Aeschylus says wisdom comes slowly, drop by drop, and Randall Jarrell says it equates only with pain. What wisdom needs more than anything is a voice strong enough, one with beauty aplenty, beauty that meets the measure of Aquinas’ qualifications of wholeness, harmony, and most crucially, radiance. Kathryn Nuernberger’s voice has that extraordinary radiance. Her poems shine and continue to shine. Rue is one of the most fiercely honest and courageous books of poetry I’ve ever read. Her poems are a

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brave and enriching garden in this new wasteland of chaos and noise. I welcome her to the conversation and eagerly await the poems she’s certain to be writing right now. We need them.