Review: Chloe N. Clark
On Chloe N. Clark’s Your Strange Fortune
by Tyler Truman Julian
America loves a good scary story. We teach “The Lottery” in schools, knowing Shirley Jackson is calling us to question authority. We read Octavia E. Butler’s “Speech Sounds” as a way to draw attention to the voiceless, the power of communication when the world seems devolved into chaos. We turn to Station Eleven by Emily St. John Mandel when a global pandemic strikes, Gold Fame Citrus by Claire Vaye Watkins when temperatures rise, and The Between by Tananarive Due when we are called to reckon with racial injustice in our country. The Gothic is a means through which we can look critically at our present moment by juxtaposing it with the dark and frightening. For example, Shirley Jackson wrote a less regional Gothic that used the supernatural and the strange to draw attention to unbalanced power dynamics in marriage, ill-constructed gender roles, and, as in “The Lottery,” the powers that maintained them in the post-war United States. More broadly, speculative writing, of which the Gothic, modernly, is a part, asks us to look forward, to speculate on what the strangeness within our lives can and should create. Regardless of nomenclature, we turn to “scary” stories for guidance when we have questions about ourselves and where we live. From there, they spur us into action.
But, what of poetry? Poetry, by nature, is more immediate. It seems to address these questions head on, finding, especially in our present digital age, a platform that elevates individual poems into politically galvanizing acts, shortly after being written. On the flip side, readers frequently lift poetry into an untouchable place, inaccessible and elitist. Given these extremes, the need for the Gothic (or any genre) in poetry could seem unnecessary. Yet, if writing a “good scary poem” is so unnecessary, then why did James Merrill use a Ouija Board to write the poems that most openly explored his homosexuality and won a Pulitzer as Divine Comedies in 1977? Why did writers in the 1800s turn to classical myths to elevate the mundane into a more critical space of engagement? Why have we seen an ever-growing use of the speculative in poetry? The novels and stories mentioned above seek to take one person’s (the author) personal response to a problem or societal ill and make it relevant to a larger audience through universal feelings of fear, discomfort, and, at times, humor. Poetry’s goal of universality and connection is the same, and Chloe N. Clark’s collection, Your Strange Fortune (Vegetarian Alcoholic Press, 2019), achieves these goals and puts them in stark contrast with the failure of communication that impacts the speaker’s personal relationships and our society as a whole. And Clark does it with Jackson’s flare for the quietly uncomfortable, Butler’s penchant for science gone wrong, and a contemporary re-appraisal of old myths in the vein of St. John Mandel, Watkins, and Due. The poems of Your Strange Fortune weave a complicated ghost story to track a speaker’s personal development through the apocalypse. Yes, the poems tell us, there is an apocalypse, but Clark cleverly, movingly uses the apocalypse (and surviving it) to highlight how the tragedies of childhood impact our self-worth as adults and how reconciling this trauma with who we are in the present moment allows us to break the cycle of pain and create something better. This is at the heart of Gothic and speculative narratives: There is a brighter future if we are brave enough to face the darkness in front of us.
For the reader to see a better future for the speaker, as well as society in general, Clark’s speaker asks us to engage with a higher consciousness, to see ghosts and ancient heroes in our everyday life and memories. She asks us to reflect on the places we call home and how they shape us. The first poem in the collection introduces us to the speaker’s hometown, where “There was a woman / kept hands / lined up in jars / along her walls” (“Automatism; or What to Visit in My Town”). These hands are recognizably those of members of the community, and they are for sale, though no one buys. What question is Clark’s speaker positing other than, Do you see this cruelty? Are you a part of it? Thus, Clark forces immediate, global reflection, inviting us into the macabre world she has crafted. The speaker then offers her own reflection of who she was as a child and who she is as an adult looking back on a childhood filled with loss. In “Mirrors are Practically Useless to Me,” she begs for escape, for a way to assert her independence from a fraught homelife and an unsympathetic town, a complicated question to be sure. She takes on the persona of an escape artist and appeals to the fairytale of Hansel and Gretel to say,
we all wait with breath held, with eyes unblinking, and we
disappear slowly, tying the ropes around our wrists, dipping
backwards into the water, pretending we know the answer to the
riddle, the answer is smoke and
(“Mirrors are Practically Useless to Me”)
Clark’s speaker does not offer an answer directly, choosing to end on an incomplete thought. But, given the title of the poem, the preceding invitation to reflection, Clark is asking us to contemplate our failure to react to violence and trauma and how this failure impacts the present moment, personally, in the lives around us, and in society as a whole. The speaker is already haunted by past loss, has already done this type of reflection, so she waits for us to fill in the blank. What fire preceded this smoke? Three poems later, she makes this crystal clear: “Apocalypse was just / the fact of life” (“I Believed Not in God but in Gods as a Child”). In this way, mirrors are of no use to her, even as she holds one up for us.
How do we move forward now? Clark’s speaker seems to ask us. Now that we know apocalypse is not some great thing, but instead, everyday sadness, how do we change our trajectory? She practically begs us to supply an answer, even as she offers one, a critical one. In “The Escape Artist Ponders Mortality,” she tells us,
My hands are tied
you say
my body is captured
and there is nothing
I can do to escape
You are always saying lies
built upon facts
there are so many chains
you wear and that wear you
Underwater, even, you are a half-truth
(“The Escape Artist Ponders Mortality”)
The next several poems show us how the speaker has come to a place where she can call us, the visitors to her hometown, out for our negligence, our inability to communicate honestly with one another. She shows us the loss of a kid-sister, the loss of love, and as a result, a life filled with ghosts.
So, where does she want honesty? Clark’s speaker wants honesty about grief and emotion, about the sadness that has shaped our lives. Until we are able to be honest about our pasts, we will never make meaningful connections. She tells us, we will only “send echoing / hellos down long abandoned / tunnels where the only answers / …will come from ghosts” (“Hum”). These poems are the speaker’s attempt at connection, at honesty. They are the attempt at escape.
We are witnesses to this escape, and as a result, we are expected to be better, to create a truer, more-connected future. She tells us,
…push
forward, promise to keep
moving, seeking, dreaming,
imagine that there is something
left that we have to give
(“Please”)
The Gothic expects criticism. The speculative expects change. Poetry expects connection. Chloe N. Clark expects all three. She challenges us to interrogate our lives and the moment in which we live to create a future in which “the past / could be reborn” and we could whisper “to the not / yet born grow / grow / once upon a time you would / grow” (“Fairy Tales & Other Species of Life”).