[REVIEW] Paper, Cotton, Leather, by Jenny Sadre-Orafai

80 pages, $14.95

Review by Hannah Rodabaugh

Within this debut poetry collection, Paper, Cotton, Leather, Jenny Sadre-Orafai’s poems illustrate love and its byproducts within a ringing framework of grief. Grim or sentimental at times, this collection looks at how some people haunt our lives even after they are gone: a presence of absence that is ghostlike, yet strangely real. Following her disintegrating marriage and divorce, the poems in this collection run the gamut of images and/or conventions associated with a failing domestic partnership: wedding paraphernalia, ring fingers, in-laws, adultery, rebound relationships.

One of the things that interests me in this collection is the way that Sadre-Orafai fixates on ideas or moments or objects she finds herself thinking about over and over after her marriage ended. An example of this is how the name of the collection stems from the first three traditional wedding anniversary gifts. In “Record,” Sadre-Orafai writes:

It’s polite to record what we get each year.
Paper, cotton, leather.

The years measure, interpret
these gifts that do nothing but soak space.

The cake agreed to keep until we’re ready
to brave again. The gardenias that didn’t

faint, smashed into a book, the pages curled
tight, a grab at the stalks at last.

I look after its spine, expect it to tantrum,
heave to the floor, the year we’re waiting for.

I love how she creates this mythology of sophisticated grief around something as simplistic and antiquated as traditional anniversary gifts.

Many of the poems fixate on conventional trappings of marriage as a lens to discuss marriage’s failures. In “Residual Haunting,” Sadre-Orafai laments the missing additional weight to her ring finger as she goes about her day:

Fingers leave
spaces,
polite
pauses,
sighs around
her ring finger.

It’s too light when
she goes
for the spoon
he didn’t pack.
She’s stirring

natural artificial
sweetener
into black tea.

It misses
a ring,
a shield.

It’s almost as if the speaker in the poem cannot get away from her missing wedding ring. Its absence is a kind of siren song that pulls at the attention of the poem again and again like a nervous tick. In Paper, Cotton, Leather, many unimportant things—unimportant only in a past where they were uninteresting—suddenly become like small leitmotifs for trouble and loss.

One thing that caught my eye was some of this collection’s stranger moments. I loved the poem “Forecast,” which was a significantly grimmer “This Be The Verse” about marriage:

Safety comes first. Don’t merge
bank accounts. Don’t buy a house.
If you must, don’t put it in both
of your names. Never change
your last name. Don’t have a baby.
If you must, give it your good name.
Dot the i’s and cross the t’s in pencil.

I love it when a poem is a list of bad accomplishments, like an evil proclamation. A surly parent-nagging of don’t within the list framework becomes expansive under the repetitive structure. It is this vast horizon of don’ts, a horizon of limitation.

I also enjoyed “Forgiveness Act,” a what if piece about marriage that runs the list between doppelgangers to teenage romance to the circus:

My doppelganger would never let this happen. She’d
swap her frilled dress for your groom pants at the
altar. She’d fling her fickle body into cartwheels down
the flowered aisle, those hired-for-the-day instruments
sighing at her back like some flimsy net she
didn’t hear. No one in the audience would know what
comes next so they’ll grip their hands to fight their
own applause.

From this day forward she would remember every
grocery list in her head, eat slick doughnuts only to
be reminded of symmetry, let every first date feel
her up in the backseat before the date, trash old
tickets from movies and planes. She remembers
without them.

I love that the narrator’s parallel version creates a world where convention is so distorted in relationships that memory becomes enough to replace them. This is especially interesting in relation to the fact that this collection is about the ways memories of a relationship seek, and fail, to replace it. In a perfect world, the memory would be enough.

In some ways, the themes in Paper, Cotton, Leather are simple and everyday. They are not rarified viands or an intellectual treatise. And yet, they are satisfying to read because of their commonness. So often we pass by the simple or everyday as being unworthy of illumination. This collection seems to say that this is unfair to all the small moments in our lives, private moments, that though they are small still matter to us. It is, after all, in those small moments where our lives, our real lives in their monotony and sameness and simplicity, are lived. Might not we celebrate them too? The answer, at least from Sadre-Orafai’s perspective, is yes.

***

Hannah Rodabaugh received her MA from Miami University and her MFA from Naropa University’s Jack Kerouac School. Her work was included in Flim Forum Press’ anthology: A Sing Economy. Recently, her work has been published in Defenestration, Used Furniture Review, Palimpsest, Similar:Peaks::, Horse Less Press Review, Smoking Glue Gun, and Nerve Lantern. Her chapbook, With Words: Verse in Concordance, is forthcoming from Dancing Girl Press.