Tag: [SD]

Meet Our New Intern: Scott Sorensen

I like to think I’m unique from the rest of my family for going into writing, but I know I was raised on it. My dad used to read my brother and me poetry before bed every night from Garrison Keillor’s Good Poems anthology. I don’t remember any of the poetry, but I do remember there was a section called “Yellow” that was entirely composed of poetry about pee. My brother and I thought that was just fantastic.

In eighth grade, I fell for a girl who was into poetry. She showed me a couple poems she wrote and I wanted to relate to her, so I wrote a few poems of my own. That girl moved onto business and is now so terrifyingly smart that she’ll have the world under her thumb in a couple years, and I’m still writing poetry. She’ll make money but I can make words sound good. So really, who’s the real winner here?

The poetry club my friend and I founded in high school solidified the love I’d caught from that middle school crush. Every poem we read at meetings would come with a “lore dump,” where we’d say what life events inspired that writing. People talked about suicide attempts and their parents’ divorces, and we also talked about our first kisses and the way our girlfriends’ dads stabbed us with pushpins while putting our boutonnieres on for prom. If you’re reading this, Mr. Wagner, I know that wasn’t accidental. Poetry made us vulnerable in a way that just wasn’t acceptable anywhere else, and that feeling of security is what I strive for in every writers’ workshop.

My freshman year of college, I wrote a poem about how lost I felt on campus. My favorite line, “I am tired of being courageous in a town I do not recognize,” might be the most honest thing I’ve ever written. I performed it at a campus open mic and I had random people coming up to me for weeks afterwards to tell me how much they related to my poem. Life is like watching a horror movie with men: everyone’s scared but nobody wants to admit it. I’ve performed at every seasonal campus open mic since then, writing about whatever has bugged me most that term. My only requirement for myself is that I tell the truth.

My favorite author (okay, actually my idol to an unhealthy extent) Kurt Vonnegut’s brother said “We are here to help each other get through this thing, whatever it is.” Writing is my way of doing that. I will never take my country to Mars or make gazillions on the stock market, but I know how to make things make sense for a second. I think that’s just as valuable as any other gift I could give this world.

Scott Sorensen is a junior at Dartmouth College studying English while performing standup, writing for the Dartmouth Jack-O-Lantern satire magazine, and helping edit the Stonefence Review. Scott dreams of becoming the first Latvian man to win an MMA championship, which is pretty unlikely given the fact that he is not Latvian and has no idea how to fight.

Sundress Reads: Review of lithopaedion

Intimate and sorrowful, Carrie Nassif’s lithopaedion (Finishing Line Press, 2023) captures readers in the small, dark womb of motherhood, taking us on the slimy and tender journey to birth and be birthed.

This poetry collection opens with an echoing burst of emotion. The speaker introduces an unnamed subject which they constantly and vaguely refer back to as “you.” The descriptions of this character as a wincing toddler with a “clenched tooth smile and pin curls,” along with other parts including the “tang of [your] injuries,” “paw at them curious,” “flimsy husks,” and “grimy coins,” lead readers to feel protective, almost maternal, over the character (Nassif 1). Only at the end is it revealed that the poem is addressed to the speaker’s own mother. And so it begins: the thirty-four page roller-coaster ride through heartbreak and sweetness. Nassif’s flashes of compassion and endearment sharply contrast whetted moments of conflict to create a stunning collection which seems to reflect on itself as it reflects on motherhood from the perspective of a daughter. 

Each poem is a punch to the gut; so quick in its succession, Nassif’s lithopaedion barely leaves room to recover before grabbing readers roughly by the collar to stand for the next poem. In “the unmothering,” Nassif describes the speaker’s innocent curiosity surrounding their own birth. The speaker of the poem is wise, describing scenes of birth as only a mother would know, such as, “how your beats would wane,” and “feather breath on ours” (Nassif 5). The poem ends with, “then twisted rubber bands so tight around / we fell away unnoticed” (Nassif 5). Nassif begins the next poem by saying, “you who had been so content to rest within my ribs would come convulsing from me on hands and knees” (6). The transition flows so smoothly; if heard aloud, we may wonder when the last poem ends and when the new one begins. Not only is lithopaedion thematically rich and consistent, the speaker’s perspective is, too. Even when the poem is seemingly from a child’s point of view, the speaker’s narrative distance dominates elegantly with the sage reflections and intimacy that only comes with age. 

The collection unabashedly climaxes at several points. The conclusion comes too soon with several poems towards the end finishing their own movements strongly; readers are led into gutting false ends. Each ending leaves readers wondering if what Nassif presents afterwards could possibly top it. “Iterations of collapse” concludes with:

         if even liturgical messengers are tempted to reach

         then who are we not to bleed for the fruit? 

         Eden be damned 

         the orgasm so worth the childbirth (26)

This allusion to the Bible is the first in the collection. The themes of sacrifice and pleasure that Nassif plays with throughout the collection are encapsulated perfectly in these lines, due, in part, to the allusion. Again, Nassif plays with the passage of time, taking us to the conception of the child. Here, the post-birth reflection meditates on the speaker’s personal pleasure, detached from motherhood. The lack of personal pleasure enjoyed by any woman in this collection goes mostly unnoticed until this point, serving as a metaphor for reality. In a few short lines, Nassif has presented us several purposes and interpretations, just one example of many in lithopaedion.

Nassif’s carefully crafted ending leaves us with no doubt that she is a master of diction and a greater master in the art of affliction: “reverberations of afterbirth spiraling within us all” (30). Here, Nassif describes motherhood as it is endured by women who become mothers after first being a daughter. As the speaker in these poems is flawed and suffers greatly, struggling to find space to forgive themself for some far away sin, the speaker also takes on the biggest burden of all: forgiving their own mother. Through motherhood, the speaker seems to find a freshness in empathy. It becomes more difficult to admit that mothers cannot bear everything and easier to understand why their own mother suffered as she did. Nassif’s vulnerability on the page shows us that mothers never stop being daughters and motherhood rips daughterhood away from women, both at the same time. To be a mother is to give and sacrifice. What better way is there to encapsulate this experience than through lithopaedion?

lithopaedion is available for purchase at Finishing Line Press

Hedaya Hasan is a Palestinian writer and designer based in Chicago.