Heartbreak Haptics: On Courtney Marie Andrews' "Old Monarch"

Courtney Marie Andrews | Old Monarch | Andrews McMeel Publishing | 2021 | 96 Pages

Old Monarch, the debut poetry collection from Grammy-nominated singer/songwriter Courtney Marie Andrews, is a book of beginnings. Born in the Sonoran Desert of Arizona, Andrews grew to the heat of the sun, its constant presence, its perpetual rise. But the sun, which paces many of her poems, also sets the horizon’s edge, echoed vastly through the confinement felt both outdoors and in. 

The poem “Before It All” travels back to her youth and tells us of a mare named Freedom. Naïve in confidence, the horse would frequently break the garden fence and flee at nightfall. Finding kinship with this pursuit of opportunities, the closing lines read, “I broke free, time after time, / and you always rebuilt the fence. / Before it all, you loved me.” There is a tenderness of care felt within the labor of her words, from reconstructing the memory and outlining her fences for the reader. Meant to keep the young horse safe, the fence takes the form of both protection and control. This tension continues through other poems as well, as Andrews breaks herself out of and comes back into the relationships that lined her youth. This containment is reminiscent of the title Old Monarch, an insect whose first life challenge is to emerge from the cocoon. 

The collection as a whole, broken up into three sections, is written from somewhere between longing and acceptance. In “Regarding Nostalgia”, a poem about young love and heartbreak, Andrews writes, “Yesterday is safe to visit, knowing the outcome”. It is a deeply reflective poem, sad even, but relatable and truthful. Perhaps the genre of campfire stories emerged too for this very same reason: to escape the present and relive in glory. “Today is painful to remain in, / a blur of suitcase cobwebs in messy closets.” There seems to be a correlation between Andrews expanding her childhood horizons and the increasing frequency of her description of domestic objects. Often listed as a framework for memories, the material things, domestic and otherwise, that Andrews conjures up offer a sense of comfort through their own closeness to the reader—like the suitcase, which might not be used as often as hoped. Through nostalgia and cowboy blues, Andrews’ words become vessels. Or trinkets, tokens, ruminations on a past we wish to hold again.  

Heartache returns later in “Morning Meditation”, with additional attention paid to the perception of these objects through touch: 

Thirsty now, heart rate’s up as I yearn for your touch.  
Hands reaching, co-dependent leech, I need you, I need you,
so I know I am alive.

And later:

You better believe love gets two stanzas. Past your infidelity,  
heartbreak, anorexia, apple trees, dirty laundry, the darkest 
nights birth dawn hatching as I catch my reflection in the pond,
and finally accept my crooked teeth. 

In the absence of permanence, Andrews conveys a desire for the objects around her to offer some kind of hold or perhaps to bring her back to the present. These domestic matters, the infidelity, anorexia, dirty laundry, convey certain institutions like marriage and the nuclear family, but the manner in which Andrews describes them remains immediate and precise through her use of haptics. Derived from the Greek word haptesthai, meaning “to touch”, haptics within literature refers to the tactile perception of objects through semiotics. Implementing this tool in literature produces an effect for the reader. With this interactive awareness of the world around her, even when the setting is small, dark or cocooned, Andrews focuses not only on her emotional location, but clutches language itself. “Love gets two stanzas” asserts love as a physical presence while also making the reader aware of the form of the text itself. It has an interesting way of delineating the limitations of poetry, mantras and language as she tries to carve intangible things like love into a corporeal existence worthy of her emotions. Love in particular is translated greatly into non-verbal communication, so this emphasis on physical interactions with people and objects allows it to come across as lively and real. Like a leech’s embrace. 

This collection is relatable not because Andrews’ experiences, family circumstances, or geographical influences are necessarily common, but because she places her experience(s) so close to us—in relation to the reader, in skin-to-skin proximity. Storytelling is a craft long perfected by musicians, matriarchs, heroes. Old Monarch very much taps into the folklores of the American frontier, but its motivation diverges from these stereotypically male-driven stories. In “A Portrait of Madeline as a Woman”, Andrews describes a woman “too sure of men and their construction / of freedom: proving womanhood can belong to the days”. The stories being told in this collection are not of victory, conquest or horror, but of self-discovery and growth—more pedagogical in nature than as entertainment. As the protagonist and narrator, Andrews charts her life and the lineage of women and loved ones who shaped her, mixing the storyteller tone with that of the oracle. As she gets older, her settings change by way of the wings fluttering for freedom, but we are never told how old she is in these stories. Despite being a type of memoir, Old Monarch falls far from the ego. Instead, we see a progression in experience, wisdom and selfhood. If women “can belong to the days”, this book is the example of how every sunrise can be a new chance—a relentless possibility—for self-discovery.