by Christopher J. Greggs
I stumbled on Indictus on a whim. Two poet friends in my MFA cohort had mentioned in passing that the Lit Grad Reading Group they attended had made it their last book. Dark, risky, and theoretical—they said the collection was up my alley. The book arrived later that week. I decided to casually read it on my commute to campus.
But there is nothing casual about this collection.
The opening sequence, “Man Hole,” is a 43-page epic that imagines a world in which the woman speaker engages with the male body in ways that are often utilized by patriarchal male archetypes:
I make him to touch my strong arms as I spread him open with my knee./ I give him bloomers. I give him diamonds. I give him my desiccated brainstem/ and ask if he’d like to go home now. He digs a hole in the ground and climbs in/ and this makes him mine forever.
A few pages into the sequence, we find clear echoes of stereotypical sexual male aggression and are presented with men with “hundreds of holes” for penetration. But for good reason. This isn’t merely an attempt at inverting heteronormative gender and consent dynamics. The theatrical urgency and need for men with “holes” becomes clear as we learn of the rape of the speaker and learn of their “lover” who takes the speaker’s “clit in his hand like a shitty little bird and asks, ‘where is your goddamn agency’” And no sooner than this, we realize that this sequence is aimed at finding a way into agency, even if it means reverse engineering the anatomy of the sexes. Finding a way into agency means finding a way into the physical, mental, emotional, and spiritual vacancies within men. Each vacancy is a hole through which every man is “the empty border” the speaker sits inside. The very premise stirs up a searching within me. As a cis-het man, what does it mean to have a hole or holes? The speaker answers: “To call a woman a hole is to suggest immediate use./ To call a man a hole suggests grave incivility—”
It is here that I find myself exposed by the work of Natalie Eilbert. I know where I stand.
I know where I need to grow. Moving through “Man Hole” and its many movements isn’t simply an exercise in rhetorical poetics or the deft confessional, but an aesthetic gymnastic of line and image. The book itself is shaped in a way to accommodate Eilbert’s long line. Lines, themselves, that contain movements of lyrical improvisation: “reanimation, as was pain from an Arctic fox’s tongue, as was thistle from the throat of a snow” As such, “Man Hole” moves as a fever dream of reciprocation and memory as cyclical gestures toward agency.
These poems put Eilbert in conversation with poets such as Donika Kelly, Sylvia Plath, and Ai—all writer’s that aesthetically and conceptually engage in the poetic and emotive generosity of interrogating trauma through their work.
And as anyone who has endured the traumatic can tell you, you either are trapped by the harrows or transfigured by them. And as such, the victory of nomenclature is brief for Eilbert’s speaker:
And yet./ My visions cannot be undone, so I think it must be that in order to full function again I have to/ reverse myself. But I grow older. Memory is not static. It is like a box of smoke carried in sweaty/ arms across a river that, to flow, must flood. And so I flood. I envision the men who carry/ me away.
What does it gain us to be able to name the gun, only to suffer its bullet? What does it mean when the gun offers its apologies?
In “The Rapist Joins AA” we witness the speaker’s rapist go through the steps of recovery. His apology via email becomes the inciting point of this poem. The speaker has managed to compartmentalize the trauma. A coping mechanism that floods over. Here we see the power of the subjunctive. The active erasure of memory as a method of survival. But what does it mean to choose to forget a thing but to acknowledge the happening? The inevitable failure of denial. The speaker and reader trapped in the contradiction of disavowal. The “deleted…breasts.” The “deleted…night.” The engrossing labor of forgetting that allows for a past where the speaker “arrived home safely.”
The rest of this section, titled “The Men Fall Away,” is composed of shorter poems that push into the contemporary moment of the speaker as they are triggered back to the memory continuously. Highlights from this section, from where many incredible poems sit, are “Genesis,” “Testament with Water Under the Bridge,” and “In Truth I Wish Him Harm.”
“Eden,” the last poem of this section positions the speaker “interact[ing] with the symbols of confession,” This poem contains perhaps one of the bravest lines in the manuscript, “What if I told you that I enjoyed it at the time?”
The speaker continues: “I was seven. Or I was six. I was thirteen. I was fourteen. / I was twenty-three. Would you disabuse me? I told you my alibi:”
And isn’t this the position survivors find themselves in? Surviving the unimaginable only to endure a lifetime of interrogation, all the while managing the physical dissonance between sensation and consent?
“Liquid Waste: A Postscript,” the third and final section of the book, feels much like a postscript—an artifact, post-devastation. While not the most arresting part of the collection, this segment of the book manages an essential denouement: “into flower form. I auto bio graph my cud, I chew. / I carry myself across the room in secret worship.” Here, these poems contribute the final pieces to Eilbert’s monument to agency after a loud violence—an invasive terror.
To which Eilbert’s pen responds with a louder rage.
