[REVIEW] What Is a Domicile, by Joanna Penn Cooper

66 pages, $14

Review by Lauren Gordon

In her debut full-length prose and poetry collection, What Is a Domicile, Joanna Penn Cooper asks, “Are we all sad walking mistake-filled balloons?” The prose is part documentary and part New York school, where the ephemera of an urban landscape is in juxtaposition against the slow passage of time. The prose poems move from fall to spring like molasses; there is nothing frantic about the prescience of Cooper’s experiences moving, living in New York, being in a relationship, and becoming a mother. “I wonder at everything,” she writes, and it’s true.

Cooper’s voice is static, even when her reflections are not so much passive as they are internal. It lends to that remarkable documentary-feel as if the writing occurs in real-time with the reader audience. In the poem “On the Delicate and Non-Delicate Movements of Weather and Time” she writes: “At 2 a.m. the humidifier sounds like crickets and then I know I should move to the country,” but later in the same poem: “What do you expect? One lifetime is very short, but it’s hard to realize when it’s happening.” The autobiographical framing is where anxiety becomes formalized, where the “we” gets applied to the universal experience of being. It’s a neat trick. You don’t have to be a mother or live in Brooklyn to be able to relate.

Dreams also operate as gateways to understanding humanity, and these are the pieces that are a little quirky with their surrealism and tone. In “November Dispatch,” the title piece, Cooper writes:

“In the dream, theories of home and of structure are something I can learn. The seminar is called ‘What Is a Domicile?’ I will absorb the history of the dwelling place and develop the ability to infuse place with ritual significance. A structure in which to reside. An atmosphere both fluid and contained, which grounds and fades the ghosts. We all live there together.”

This poem comes after “Slow Crescendo,” where a pregnant Cooper sees an ultrasound of her baby and writes, “You are in love with someone you just met.” The body becomes the domicile, in this sense, but it’s more than just the physical house – it’s the spiritual house, too. The phenomena of ghosts and boyfriends and unborn, unphotogenic babies fill up the space Cooper is organizing. The surreal isn’t used to further articulate reality, but like a witching wand slowly drawing out the water.

What Is a Domicile is practically a study in Somatics, where the mind is distinguishable yet everything relates back to the bodily moment, like in the last poem, “April 22^nd Poem”:

“So, that’s what mothers do:
Teach human strength and frailty. That impossible confluence.
I’d find a less direct way to say this, but the baby’s awake.”

The transformation occurs individually and collectively. We’re all pulling at the petals of our crowns when we read these prose poems that have been boiled, soaked, and sugared. One minute our sandwiches are falling apart in our hands and the next we’re studying the hands of a newborn for a month. There is no prerequisite required to appreciate the craft of Cooper’s poetry, because the book relies heavily on the experience of just being alive. She lets you know through her humor, her wonder, and her curiosity that the domicile is what you make of it, and that we all live there together.

***

Lauren Gordon is the author of “Meaningful Fingers” (Finishing Line Press), “Keen” (Horse Less Press), and “Generalizations about Spines” (Yellow Flag Press). Her reviews have appeared with Coldfront Magazine, Web Del Sol, The Volta blog, The Collagist, and Rain Taxi.