Review: Chelsea Dingman
On I, Divided by Chelsea Dingman
by Tyler Truman Julian
I, Divided, Chelsea Dingman’s ambitious new collection, is a masterful interrogation of pain, cycles of violence and desire. The collection makes use of those powerful standards that make Dingman’s work so engaging—mindful enjambment, attention to the natural world, and lyrical and confessional moments that ring true for most readers—yet the work also showcases Dingman’s continued growth as a poet and the creative leaps she makes to keep her poetry fresh and nuanced. The poems of I, Divided have all the hallmarks of what makes Chelsea Dingman a top-tier poet, but seem more structurally daring than her previous work. Playing with space, form, and even length, Dingman’s poems hone in on the marital drama that unfolds when a partner becomes ill and investigate the impact that past familial trauma can have on one’s present. The result is a spotlight on the lonely personal struggle of a woman in the face of personal illness. This collection is heavy, even dark at times, yet there is the glimmer of hope in Dingman’s motif of motherhood. The poet’s command of language adds depth to the images she paints. All of this framing creates a wonderfully moving collection, showcasing Dingman’s strength as a poet, but also creating work that if one can’t personally connect with thematically, they can definitely commiserate with and feel empathy toward.
I, Divided opens with a speaker whose marriage has soured. Her world is a hurricane-season Florida, and a storm is always on the horizon:
Sweat gathers between my breasts
& thighs. Every morning, I wake
to heartache—
the lilies cry from dry beds. You say: no life is without loneliness.
At a courthouse, the justice of the peace witnesses us
vow to turn off the lights
& put down the toilet seat.
You say you love me.
You haven’t yet handed me your heartache. Saw-
toothed. Looming.
You aren’t yet another version
of the lilies, lost to the ellipses between rains. (“How to Live in Holy Matrimony”)
The metaphors here are significant. The rains are not only the literal threat of inclement weather, but the husband’s unpredictable moods. There is threat here, but there is also devotion. The speaker hangs onto the husband’s words, oracular and strange, seeking meaning and prediction in them. She continues,
Consider the conditional if. What aches to be other than itself?
You used to call the rain
degenerative. Like any long sickness.
In some iterations, we don’t know each other.
The rivers are lonely.
A life is all that’s holy. (“How to Live in Holy Matrimony”)
Quickly, the reader uncovers the husband’s life as a professional hockey player has caused traumatic brain injury, resulting in dementia-like symptoms that impact his mood and memory. These moments of decreased function, the rainy days in the couple’s married life, cause loneliness, are degenerative to the point the speaker is left wanting safety, intimacy, and what once was. There’s no surety any of these desires will be satisfied:
The children cry when he stays up all night
and tears apart the house. They are afraid
for my life. I rise and rise, the winds
high. I pull the birds’ slight bodies into me,
cruelty the only country they’ve known.
I fear the rot the rainy season will leave.
In the retention ponds, a pattern is the wake
left by protected species that cannot flee. Past lives
hurricane in my head. No surface is safe
from weather. I’m careful. I take all valuables
down from the shelves. The kids’ pictures
hide in the cloud on my phone, along
with whatever devastation that downloads
while we sleep. (“Fractals”)
The unpredictability is the hard part. When charting the progress of a storm, one never truly knows when and how hard it will make landfall, and yet there is even a desire for that crash of thunder and rain: “Let the rain come soon and be done with us” (“Memorial Day”). This fatalism is balanced by moments of hope and beauty that remind the reader that all is not lost. Motherhood and nature connect frequently to let the reader know that even if this speaker must run, she and her children will survive. In “A Small Life,” she declares,
“And love is a kind of survival—
the river rushing past
that teaches the fields how
to pray. The small flowers
that erupt in spring.
Life always returns after a storm.
The second section of I, Divided clarifies this truth by moving the speaker out of the present rainy season back to a wintry, Canadian childhood. And while “There are few // words for loneliness / like a child’s,” in these reflective poems, the speaker explores the death of parents, alcoholism, and violence in detail (“While Reading Plato during a Lockdown”). What has the speaker taken away from the past that informs the present reality at home? In “I Remember, I Remember,” she reports,
I remember everything.
I remember living. I remember dying.
I remember dying to live.
There is a persistence in these poems that speaks to survival. That survival prepared the speaker for motherhood, and these poems give the reader a glimpse at what it means to be a mother: Explain disease, my young son says, how someone lives with pain.
I never got to tell my father: I miss you.
He’d already been gone for months when he died.
To live, I need to make meaning of the dark
again tonight.
What I mean is: I want to love the world
as though it’s something I’ll survive. (“After a Suicide”)
Self-preservation is complicated when you must take care of others, which is the reality of motherhood, and Dingman’s poetry navigates that complicated gulf between the desire for self-determination and domestic responsibility with ease. However, her work does not minimize the complexity. This is perhaps the genius of these poems. They feel emotionally real at their core, even as the desires outlined by the speaker compete with one another, a quality that especially rings true in the collection’s third section.
The third section of Dingman’s collection explores a personal medical diagnosis. Suddenly, the speaker is forced to deal with the repercussions of individual pain, rather than the fallout of someone else’s. This is further complicated by the political, female body. The poems of this section cover fertility issues, cancer and the loneliness of suffering. In this way, the speaker engages with more personal poetic mode, where questions become increasingly prominent and agency climbs to the top of the speaker’s list of desires. In a life spent resisting, surviving, what does it mean to give in? She asks, “did I ever tell anyone I’m not comfortable being touched // or did I let the world enter without using a door / in order to prove what I’m willing to surrender?” (“When the Wind Culls Its Name”). But she also admits, “I have to tell you: / nothing saved me from believing in the future” (“Occupation”). When you spend so much time caring for others, a husband, parents and siblings, children, what happens when suddenly you must care for yourself? Surrender can seem like weakness. Hope can feel weak. This is complicated but real philosophy, laid out by Dingman through her speaker, and the reader can’t help but feel its gravity. As if putting a period on it, the speaker reports on a dream she had about religion and power, saying,
I dreamt I was a god last night, but I couldn’t save anyone
from their suffering.
What good is power?
The roses are dying on their stems.
I am lonely. (There is no meaning in this.) (“Imperium”)
What good is power in the face of the chaos of the world? Dingman reminds us that we don’t get to choose our parents, that our partner could get sick, that we could get diagnosed with a terminal illness. Yet, she also reminds us that we persist, for ourselves and for others, because we have no other choice. In the collection’s final poem, “Economic Theory,” Dingman’s speaker makes this clear:
Always,
a man had all the power when I was young,
& didn’t have any money for food. There
isn’t a day in this life that I haven’t gone
hungry. But quiet in my kids’ mouths
means I’ll work twice as hard to feed them
full. The garden, under snow. Forever, breath
is an argument against failure. With Botox
& heady songs. Other rituals, like leaving
a conflict region, a woman invests in
by beginning. I’m tempted to say I begin.