The Held Tongue: On Hannah Bonner’s “Another Woman”

Hannah Bonner | Another Woman | EastOver Press | August 2024 | 73 Pages

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There is a kind of silence that amplifies the sound of blood in your own ear, that sensitizes you to the faintest hitch in another’s breath. This is what it is like to read Hannah Bonner’s debut collection, Another Woman. In poems that are whittled down to their bones––lines often pared down to two words, stanzas to a single line, poems populated by no more than a handful of crystalline images––every gesture, object, and eluded memory is charged with energy, whether that energy is erotic, precarious, stored trauma, or grief. The nervous system wakes, comes to alert, when encountering such compression. I find myself agreeing with Louise Glück, who said in “Disruption, Hesitation, Silence”, “I do not think that more information always makes a richer poem. I am attracted to ellipsis, to the unsaid, to suggestion, to eloquent, deliberate silence. The unsaid exerts great power.”

Bonner’s collection is a series of choice disclosures where the unspoken dramatically saturates the white space. This style of minimalist confessionalism places Bonner among poets such as Jean Valentine and Franz Wright. Though Another Woman’s narrative scaffolding is Bonner’s experience as the “other woman,” it would be reductive to place this collection in the same category of recent “affairs in verse” like Maggie Millner’s Couplets (FSG, 2023) and Rachael Allen’s God Complex (Faber, 2024). This is not just another affair novel in verse. Instead, it is an intricate tapestry, poems with deliberately-chosen recurring images (deer, stars, etc.) and words (“braced”, “split”…), each reaching outward and across themselves, reckoning with the multiplicity of womanhood, conjuring the voices of female figures throughout myth and history including Dido, Lot’s wife, Delilah, and Aphrodite, brimming on the edge of metamorphosis, orgasm, or breakdown, to reckon with the want, trauma, unfulfilled desire, as well as the daily precarity of women’s experience. Bonner’s aesthetic of restraint is more than minimalism; it is markedly feminine, borne out of survivorship and the eroticism of the unsaid. 

The deepest feeling always shows itself in silence;
not in silence, but restraint.

(“Silence,” Marianne Moore)

In this quiet space, an aesthetic of restraint creates a storehouse of energy brimming behind and between each uttered syllable. There is an electrification that comes from silence, as acted out in Bonner’s poem “From Lot’s Wife”: “I stopped speaking […] My heart // whips through me: ionized”. Restraint does not make the poem static, instead, it concentrates attention so acutely that you can almost see the nucleus humming at the heart of an atom. Bonner’s eye becomes attentive to the “half lit” moments, as in “Disclosures”: “white / peaches at dusk,” “the shirt, / now discarded,” “petals / closed, only to open,” where the eroticism of the unsaid flames around her. The “loose sand clinging” to her lover’s calves is enough to “quicken” her heart “to a melt” in “Black Mountain, Highway 9”. Everything––objects, flowers, fruit, qualities of light––becomes erogenous. Even walking alone in the unpopulated streets of the apocalypse, the speaker’s body “bristles like an orchard cast in color, / cleft through with want.” 

The body becomes awake and responsive––to the almost-touch, the almost-confessed, desire on the edge of fulfilment: “erotic as the pulse of skin before skin. / Like you looking at me […] barely a glance” (“Fireflies in July”). The briefest look only serves to intensify her senses, rather than frustrate them. To be brought to the brink. It makes me think of Hélène Cixous’ words in ‘Laugh of the Medusa’, celebrating the “sudden turn-ons of a certain miniscule-immense area of [women’s] bodies.” More than love or the lover, Another Woman praises the miniscule-immense. The scarce gaze, the faint figure outlined in the “initial blues / of evening”, the silence between lovers, the moonlight’s “quiet kick”. In these moments of suspension and anticipation, the body becomes “as vast as the silence // stretched between the man and the woman / in the poem” (“My Body is Not Your Politics”). The body, “filled with longing,” cavernous, expansive turns metamorphic, “still churning, still declarative”. Writing from the body, Bonner affirms woman's capacity to feel and be filled—to be filled again and again, almost infinitely, not only by lovers but by nature, and, most importantly, the self. Desire itself being the sign of life:

the wet

want inside me which whispers
spring is coming

(“To the Bone”)

This pleasure, or jouissance, runs contrary to the “male libidinal economy often described in terms of the capitalist gain and profit motive,” to borrow Elaine Marks and Isabelle de Courtivron’s language in New French Feminisms, meaning, it does not care about ends or closure. It is ever-replenishing, fluid, diffused, durational. Bonner does not exhaust in saying yes. “Where, you might ask? / Yes,” the collection begins (“Before the First”). “Look at the oaks / […] and say, yes. Yes,” the collection ends (“Remember This”). When the speaker frees herself from funneling desire into a male lover (“Better to be alone, she thought / afterwards, than beholden to another” in “Another Ending for Aphrodite”), desire finds new objects, plentiful. The hunger with which she views the world has only increased by the end of the collection––“the sun so low I could eat it” (“Addendum”). By writing from the body in this way, Bonner enters a feminist lineage where the woman reclaims “the body which has been more than confiscated from her which has been turned into the uncanny stranger on display,” refusing to suppress her appetites and desires (Hélène Cixous, ‘The Laugh of the Medusa’).

That is, we are taken to the body’s edge. The poem’s garments are shed, the speaker’s garments:

Look how the tacks tear
the skin: how delicate the thread

between tenderness and terror

(“Ruin”)

Here, the body’s vulnerability––the body as a site of risk as well as pleasure. Here, the thin line between intimacy and threat. Enjambment perches the reader on that fine thread. We feel fear’s precipice. This is where the unsaid exerts greatest power. This is the fault line of the whole collection. Of the collection, Louisa Hall writes, Another Woman is “pared down, but it is pared to an edge we feel.” Violence is never explicitly spelled out, but looming behind Bonner’s word choice with increasing frequency:

your hand
on my body when it gathered

another yield in the dark ––
more like the locust, than the buck,

at the wheat’s throat, more
whittling it open

(“Waking Without You”)

The addressed’s hand turns the speaker’s body into an object, a crop to be harvested. The addressed is a devouring locust; the speaker, something to be consumed. Threat, threat. A woman’s body, inescapably object. No one is talking about this in their reviews of Another Woman, yet it is what haunts the white space of these poems as I read them. “Night, Memory” is most harrowing, reverberating through the whole collection, weighted with an unspoken trauma:

There is never just one deer.
The forest clicks its bare branches

under a bristling moon.
The field strobes in slow motion,

the sky clean and clear
as a bloodletting.

I am here again
without the bottle or the blade,

my good hands empty,
doing nothing they are asked.

In the blue bedroom of my childhood
my uncle calls me by my given name.

Shivering in the doorway,
I am the bare one

braced like a star, or girl.

The damp field mutes the gallop
of every startled animal.

There is never just one
deer in the middle of the night.

Without describing any explicit act of violence, the poem is tense with danger. An unspoken assault haunts the page––so subtle that I had to message my poetry thesis group for confirmation of my theory. They felt the threat undergirding the language (“bloodletting”, “bristling”, “blade”), they felt the vulnerability (“bare branches,” “shivering”, “my good hands empty”, “I am the bare one”):

A: The word choices are also ominous

Bare bloodletting empty damp mute startled bristling

And she refers to bedrooms and uncles which is never a good combo in my experience

J: lmaooo so true

A: So I think it’s supposed to evoke different things in different people… maybe 

but I dare say for 99% of women it might be the same 

Our conversation functioned the same way as the poem: more allusion, another unspoken acknowledgement. There is never just one deer. The deer I fear becoming. The deer I know and love. Childhood best friend. Walking alone at night. First dates. Fifth dates. Family friends. Boyfriends. Unknown faces. Too-known hands. It makes me think of how slant-ness becomes a language and aesthetic learned and shared by women. We are sensitized to pick up on the clues. How do we speak about trauma? Often, we can’t. Sometimes, we can only talk around it. We are left with the residue of memory––the mise-en-scene of the night, its slants of light, bare doorways, blue walls. 

In Another Woman, the reader is given no closure, no certainty about what truly happened. Given only fragments, this is the “power of the unfinished,” to return to Louise Glück’s ideas in ‘Disruption, Hesitation, Silence,’ most truthful because “all earthly experience is partial. Restraint, removal, unfinished-ness all make for a more powerful piece of art.” I am reminded of the eroded torso of Christ hanging in the Met Cloisters in upper Manhattan: wooden chest and abdomen, a painted red wound on his side. We do not have the luxury (or escape) of looking at his long fingers, mouth, eyes, hair, or even the crown of thorns on his head. Instead, we are forced to look at what remains, to really look at the ruins of something. The wound that time could not erode. The wound, buried and locked in the body. The bones. The wound. Cannot forget the wound.

This applies to the poem, “Night, Memory,” a cornerstone of the collection. The poem’s form manifests a truth about trauma that goes beyond linguistic comprehension. The vulnerability of the child-self with her limbs pinned down and splayed, reflected in the line itself, hovering bare and alone in the white space among couplets, the poem’s only monostich. If Bonner were to write the night memory with narrative blatancy, it would “lose both the precision and the force that characterizes traumatic recall,” to use trauma theorist Cathy Caruth’s language from Trauma: Explorations in Memory. The unspoken-ness of the memory preserves the sensory effect of trauma, how it is something stored and silent in the body––something stored in present tense (notice “my uncle calls”, “I am the bare one”), replaying in the body and in the blue bedroom, even after the end of childhood. Without the obliteration of memory brought about by blade or bottle, what remains is the insistence of memory, even those suppressed. Which includes the tangible presence of absence––no protector, no witness, no sound echoing through the night.

By keeping things unspoken, Bonner resists the “fetishistic narrative” that gives an “imaginary, illusory hope for totalization, full closure, and redemptive meaning,” instead staying true to the lived experience of trauma, which is often unspeakable, ineffable, incomprehensible, fragmented, mutable (using Dominick LaCapra’s language from Representing the Holocaust: History, Theory, Trauma). The silence of night, the silence of the memory, is what is most harrowing––and what breaks the silence: the sound of deer tracks on the damp grass, the tracks of “every startled animal”. The quiet prey, precarious, fleeing, contrasting with the soundlessness of a body frozen in fear at the moment of violation. The girl, the memory, is exposed, torn from the flowing and passage of time, bound to the mattress that undergirds the present.

And now I cannot think of stars without thinking of bodies pinned against a surface or strung up “blind and shorn” (“I Was a Liar”). Nor without thinking of fireflies, “a surge of stars cellular though grasses” (“Fireflies in July”). Stars visible and consoling, or mirrors for the mind, their upward flurries of desire. This is the paradoxical miracle, and tragedy, of restraint––how it multiplies meaning rather than diminishing it. How we use the same language, same alphabet, to speak of love as well as violence. Violation. Star. Anticipation. Star. The lover’s voice, “like those stars / made immutable by their very stillness” (“A Passing”). 

Of all the symbolic recurrences in Another Woman, the deer is most polysemic. It is the witness and guard of the self (“There is the predictable // deer print tracking / the perimeter around the house” in “Still Life with Citrus in February”), it is the self (“all my life I’ve been licked and loping” in “This Morning”), or the split self, the past self, the prey or the predatory lover. Even empty space shapeshifts through the collection––what once was “cleft through with want” becomes a space for freedom, untethered to obligation. By the end, the speaker relishes the wind’s devourment, “like a whole life / left open” (“This Morning”). She relishes “space, allowance, stars.” There is freedom in the pruning, the stripping away. She transcends the deer:

I am the rupture
outracing the animal.

I am the blue torrent
arrowing through earth.

(“Rupture”)

There is never just one deer and there is never just one lover. Sometimes love comes from “No one on the path tonight,” as in “Addendum”. Sometimes it is only the wind, and the self, and the “shadows stretch[ing] forth, // beckoning like a hand.”