[REVIEW] Bath by Jen Silverman

REVIEW BY LILLIE GARDNER

A bath can be a lot of things, and Jen Silverman holds a magnifying glass up to each of these meanings and incarnations in her gorgeously wrought poetry chapbook Bath, available May 24^th from Driftwood Press. Silverman writes about baths that are baptisms, baths as floods, baths in dreams, baths of dust—all while holding the reader in literal baths of words (the poems are entitled “Bath 1,” “Bath 2,” and so on). From the opening’s pairing of a Bible quote about iniquity with a defiant “don’t fuck with me” line from Joan Crawford, Bath holds the reader in spaces that boldly confront the meanings of redemption, rebirth and love.

The chapbook consists of eleven poems that are set in cities around the world, from American towns like Iowa City and Louisville to faraway places like Cairo and Cuzco. The words stretch across time as well as space, with nods to ancient pharaohs, sacrifices and gods, and images of Egyptian stone bathtubs and the streets of Alexandria that “are sheets of dust and ochre.” Silverman’s encompassing worldview also includes the future. Characters on New Year’s Eve “set ourselves towards the people we wish we were” and one poem’s narrator dreams of “talking to children / I haven’t had.” In a particularly compelling passage in the chapbook’s final poem, Silverman describes how all times coexist, concluding with the lovely line, “and my partner is a bright horizon that has yet to arrive.”

A sacred, biblical tone permeates Silverman’s writing, particularly in “Bath 2” when the narrator waits in Cairo for a flood:

The locusts. The plagues. The pharaohs,

long-dead and staggering over the sands from beyond.

But no gods showed up to punish us.

And yet the poetry is unmistakably contemporary. Silverman’s tone is often casual, even blasé, with lines about relationships like “the sensitive ones will leave your bed and go / out into the cold, hearts bruised, and what can you do” and “Oh, he has panic attacks / all the time now.” Other moments are emotional and poignant, such as the way a father’s love for his daughter “becomes a weather-system / of love.” The poems are resplendent with powerful images, including “the wind / flakes like mica, our skins glitter, / our hair is jeweled with sand.” Silverman beautifully intertwines the moments in love and heartbreak that hold us inside them with the weight of an ancient past, revealing the fragility of humanity in between. In “Bath 2,” she writes:

We’re not so special.

Just a story so old it has escaped its meaning:

How things of one fabric fall to pieces.

The eleven “Bath” poems are divided by a contrasting poem between “Bath 6” and “Bath 7”: “The Devil Dogs My Steps, But If It Weren’t Him, It Would Just Be Someone Else,” a four-part poem about the Devil visiting the narrator with an unexpectedly nonchalant, whimsical reckoning. “The Devil peels potatoes,” begins the third section. “He’s throwing a dinner party. He / invited my landlord and all my exes.” Unusual images abound, including the Devil lingering at CVS and sitting in a hotel sauna. Throughout this poem and others in the collection, the narrator expects punishment—desires baths to wash away sins and make redemption possible—but doesn’t actively seek it out. In “Bath 4” the narrator echoes Mary Oliver with “You do not have to be good,” and “Bath 10” includes a reference to its characters’ “lack of shame,” suggesting there is not much that can be done to eradicate living with sin.

Bath is a journey of relationships ending and going, of water and dust, of the containers that hold us and release us. With stunning syntax and captivating characterizations of times and places as well as people, Silverman considers the redemption and purity that humanity aspires to, and ultimately explores what it is to be submerged in it all.

Lillie Gardner is a writer based in St. Paul, Minnesota. Her writing has appeared in the Delmarva Review, Long River Review, Sentient Media, Funny-ish.com and more. Her screenplay American Virtuosa won Outstanding Drama Pitch at the 2021 Catalyst Story Institute and was a Top 3 Finalist in the Big Break Screenwriting Contest. She reviews books for EcoLit Books and writes for Feminist Book Club.