"Excavation," by Janet Jerve (North Star Press of St. Cloud, 73 pages, $12.95)
Janet Jerve's debut volume opens with lyrics on familiar themes: aging parents and childhood scenes. It is the second section that reveals Jerve's mettle as a poet: she is a master of structure.
In this section, she narrates the speaker's mental breakdown and recovered memory of sexual abuse by her father. The form breaks: words scatter across the page and poems segment or compress into short lines.
The poems welcome new language. She wakes, "miserable, shucked"; and lives in a "quaking bog body." In "Breaking Down," she uses absurd MC Hammer lyrics to describes "the voices in your head … all playing chicken as they race / down Main." MC Hammer morphs into the image of a hammer: "through the clutch / of his unwanted touch. / Father hammer." Sound replicates the chaos of her father violating his parent role.
Jerve uses repeated phrases to send the reader back to first section. This structure functions as a metaphor for recovering memory; the reader revising their initial interpretation parallels the speaker's realizations about her past.
The third section moves from personal to communal:
"I imagine the darkness that separates all women, / that connects them to absence, to stars / that have shifted over time with the speed of aggression / to the knowledge there is no beauty in dominance."
Instead, the beauty comes in the speaking against and through dominance with poet's tools: structure and form.