A “new and selected” collection is a major milestone in any published poet’s journey because it provides an overview of the poet’s oeuvre. Margaret Rozga’s Holding My Selves Together: New and Selected Poems pulls close the writer’s personal histories as activist, lover of words, gardener, and optimist.
The book is published in Cornerstone Press in Wisconsin, where Rozga has lived all her life and for which she served as the state poet laureate from 2019 to 2020. Holding My Selves Together is divided into sections representing some of Rozga’s previous projects. The poems that readers haven’t seen before (or which we’ve read in anthologies, but never in a single-authored collection) deal with the fears, isolation, and anxieties of the pandemic. On a grand scale, this book leaves readers with the story of how the awakenings of early activism can inform a person’s encounters with the world for the rest of their life and future challenges.
Holding My Selves Together begins with a group of poems called “Alice Marathons” that riffs on Lewis Carroll’s classic Through the Looking-Glass. In Rozga’s poems, we see Alice turning, running, trying to escape and survive; she is powerful, curious, and on the move. The third-person narrator describes Alice’s quest and asks rhetorical questions: “Where’s home, where’s the garden?/Why do questions evaporate before/they’re asked? Why do they turn into riddles?” These poems immediately put readers into a topsy-turvy mid-motion space. Where is Rozga taking us?
The answers are revealed in the final “Alice Marathons” when Alice turns into an everywoman. Alice “runs three blocks on/her way to babysit my children, but she doesn’t sit,/doesn’t let them sIt[a]. She takes them to hunt treasure...” Then, a series of real-life women—whom readers local to Milwaukee may recognize—all become Alice, organizing communities and living out their essential public roles.
Rozga’s retelling of the Alice story contextualizes and elevates these real-life Alices as archetypes and role models. The final poem of this section follows the speaker’s daughter as she runs the Lakefront Marathon along Lake Michigan. Serving as yet another Alice, the daughter says, “The last six/miles...are the hardest.” One of the elements that conjoins all these Alices is their determination.
The next section takes its subtitle from the daughter’s words but plunges more deeply into real history. These poems describe Rozga’s involvement with the March on Milwaukee in the late 1960s when a crowd of civil rights activists, many of them young people, marched for two-hundred consecutive days for fair housing across the lines of northern segregation. Rozga also writes of her involvement in voter registration drives during Freedom Summer in the South and her return to that region half a century later with a new generation of young people from Milwaukee. These poems tend to be dialogue-driven, with some pieces even written for alternating voices. The polyphonic nature of these poems democratizes them. Rozga proves that the power of collective action can be articulated through a poem.
This section also showcases Rozga’s role as public historian as she names many of the people involved with these marches. Poems like “You Do the Math” and “Reporting the Numbers” showcase a quantitative emphasis, but Rozga is also self-aware of her qualitative strategy of storytelling as she writes about “the cast of characters” and “the plot.” Some of the poems contain borrowed text from the Milwaukee Sentinel and other sources. Many of them deal with mapping, an essential element in any discussion of fair housing, and a genre of information that combines both numbers and words. Along the way, Rozga connects the activism and divides of the ’60s with today’s Black Lives Matter movements and marches against murderous police. The result of all these strategies is a deeply communal and public experience of the marches.
The remainder of Holding My Selves Together skips ahead in the poet’s life to a different, more intimate focal point: a vegetable garden where, “on the verge of a word,” Rozga recognizes the garden as a through-line of her life. We begin to hear about Rozga’s parents and early childhood. She employs metaphor and analogy in using her garden as a springboard for thinking about justice and freedom. We also begin to gain insight, in this section, into Rozga’s daily poetic practice and are reminded that the iterative nature of writing can feel like gardening.
The final section goes deep into the theme of isolation and the familiar feeling of two recent eras: “before” the pandemic and “after” it began ravaging reality as we know it. Luckily, the poet uses the lessons she’s learned about community throughout her life to retain some hope and optimism. These pieces are also where the poet returns to language itself. For example, she considers a poem as an equation and repeatedly describes the act of writing. Rozga asks, “What is life without words?” Later, she writes, “A verb perches... Each a separate island. Until I begin to see an archipelago.” This is a beautiful and comforting metaphor, that we have the ability to see a draft take shape if we stop and pay attention.
Rozga’s poems convey strategies for using language to deal with grief. She writes of, “becoming a shadow/of the teacher I/used to be//from being/a whisper/of the voice/I used to have.” To find community, she builds a cento from the works of other poets. She also relies on lists and journaling to compose, and we see some of the results of these practices in the poems. How quickly things can change completely, Rozga reminds us, for better or worse or both. In some ways, the brain makes no real delineation between then and the now, not really. “No, couldn’t be, she said. Then.” Rozga has an increasing sensitivity to the fragility of time itself as she reflects on the past and the could-be’s.
Rozga undergoes the hard work of reflection as she holds selves from childhood and young adulthood against her 1960s activism and its recursions, and then, against her most recent selves of grandmotherhood. This emotional integration forces a person back to the difficult, surprising, and complicated parts of life. It is a kind of poetic reconciliation. “Some of us survive,” Rozga writes. She reframes this statement as a question, later, with “What can these names mean to you?”
The poems in Holding My Selves Together don’t just feel like a sampling from each of Rozga’s books with an addendum of new work. Rather, the collection is a meaningful survey of her life as a poet that highlights her central themes and lifelong concerns for social justice deeply rooted in place and community.
