Book Reviews: Falling Forward and Body of Water

by Pauline Uchmanowicz, February 26, 2009

Heavier and more deeply personal in content, but at the same time stylistically sparser than Body of Water, Rebecca Schumejda’s debut volume Falling Forward follows in the tradition of confessional poets, though its autobiographical content remains modulated by skillful crafting. A singular, assured persona emerges in the book, a grim interrogation of the vicissitudes of marriage and motherhood. Schumejda, too, employs inventive spacing, as with lines in “Trick Candles” that resemble zigzagging flights of stairs, creating a sense of falling—forward as well as backward. And while her particularly remorseful brand of surrealism tends toward the quotidian as opposed to the ethereal, it succeeds at defining universal truths. For instance, in “Heat Wave,” one of several poems contemplating the specter of divorce, she writes that faith “is no more comforting / than the secondhand / walking the perimeter / of our sanity.”

Neither religion (“The people in hell want ice water”) nor childrearing (the cynical “A Mother’s Mantra”) will redeem the seemingly doomed figures that populate Falling Forward, especially not mothers who drink, gamble, or otherwise avoid parental duties. Even the cosmos appears to offer scant comfort, given the couple in “Wedding Waltz” who become estranged newlyweds, desiring not to linger in bed but to escape it, tossing and turning all night as “Above, the moon, / a visual eulogy, / mourns the loss of stars / spit down at [them] like tiny seeds” (“Five Ripe Tomatoes”). With her unblinking look at life’s most intimate moments, Schumejda is a courageous new poet.

Rebecca Schumejda will read from Falling Forward on March 7 at 6pm at Alternative Books in Kingston. (845) 331-5439.