[REVIEW] The Glad Hand of God Points Backwards, by Rachel Mennies

Texas Tech University Press
79 pages, $17.56

Review by Ryan Rydzewski
 

“What good is storytelling,” someone asks the speaker in Rachel Mennies’s first poetry collection, The Glad Hand of God Points Backwards, “if I can’t tell you stories the way I want to?”

The question implies an elusive truth in the stories we tell each other—stories altered, perhaps, by embellishment, by the unreliability of memory, or by lies of omission; stories modified to spare their receivers pain. But what happens when we stake our identities on such stories? What if those stories define not only ourselves, but also our culture and where we come from? Does the avoidance of pain really outweigh the importance of truth? What good are stories about our past, after all, if we can’t lean on them with confidence in our present?

The winner of Texas Tech University Press’ Walt McDonald First Book Prize, The Glad Hand of God Points Backwards tackles these questions by peeling back thick layers of memory and family history. The speaker, a Jewish woman in modern America, attempts to reconcile her grandmother’s stories with the historical facts available to her, and ends up relearning her own identity in the process. Mennies’s poems—steeped in religion, Jewish history, and carefully chosen imagery—are both straightforward enough for clarity and sparse enough to leave room for implication.

The collection’s first poem—“How to Make Yourself Remembered”—stands alone at the outset, preceding the five sections of grouped poems that make up the rest of the book. The poem reads as a sort of epigraph for The Glad Hand’s journey. “Bury household objects/purposefully to perplex an excavator,” the speaker instructs. Later, when those same objects are dug up and displayed in “an American history museum,” we see that the past has imposed itself on everything; even a simple spoon becomes imbued with story: “the spoon/will cradle a weight unasked of it before.” But the story is destined to be flawed—it was obscured from the very beginning, back when its impetus was buried “purposefully to perplex.”

To trace stories back through generations—in the speaker’s case, all the way back to Nazi Germany—and to find mystery and uncertainty even in their origins is to begin to understand the magnitude of Mennies’ challenge. The Glad Hand’s speaker does not shy away from the inevitable failures she encounters in her search for truth. Some of the book’s best poems, in fact, abandon the search altogether and instead allow readers to dwell in peaceful, resigned unknowing. Truth, it turns out, is as elusive as divinity: “I can tell no more,” the speaker admits in “Grandfather Loses His First Wife,” “because the truth/stops here, rests only/with our God, the/collector of stories.”

That God doesn’t give up stories so easily. Perhaps the most haunting aspect of The Glad Hand of God Points Backwards is Mennies’s tragic rendering of a higher power so passive and silent he’s almost pitiful: “Between you and me,” God says to Frank Lloyd Wright in “The Creation of Temple Beth Sholom,” “I’ve been a bad father/lately.” God floats across Mennies’s poems like a specter, both withholding his knowledge and ashamed of his absence as he watches from the wings. Again from “Grandfather Loses His First Wife”: “Above, God kept a humble/distance, knowing/the worth of His promises.”

This problem—a seemingly unreachable truth—pops up in intriguing formal ways throughout The Glad Hand. In one of the collection’s few prose poems, “Philadelphia Woman,” a man on his deathbed confesses to his wife: “Tell them what you want…but I need you to know. I need you to know…Her name was. It was.” By leaving out crucial nouns, Mennies reveals the power of what goes unsaid—invisible words do the very visible work of censor and omission. Like God, even the speaker’s direct links to the past fail her. In “The Storytelling Disease,” the speaker’s grandmother remembers:

…the story I told you about your grandfather that leaves out the parts
that make me upset and that includes parts that I’ve added
so you don’t ask questions about the past…

…when you find love you will see marriage is easy if you know the right
stories to tell

Here we see the speaker’s family history—the stories she’s believed all her life—begin to break down in real time. As The Glad Hand progresses, mystery becomes all but impenetrable, and so the speaker asks a new question: why do we reshape stories until they’re “right”? Perhaps by understanding the motives behind such alteration, we can come to a different (and more universal) kind of truth.

Honest, brave, and generous, Mennies’ poems reveal the speaker’s experiments with reshaping her own story. “Easier than I’d thought/to shrug off identity’s/warm jacket,” she says in “Huevos for Seder,” a sectioned poem that fills the book’s entire fourth section. “It hangs nicely from the peg.” How quick we are to forget ourselves when it suits us—such forgetting is part of the human experience. From “Yahrzeit”:

Memory: we learn to braid it into plaits
and bake it for hours. We take it
by the ears and bless it,
grind it to a headstone’s polished slick,
bury it on its heaviest side
into the earth.

In the end, of course, we always end up remembering—though the memories we dig up often look different than when we buried them. They’re shinier and easier to look at. They’re lighter because they have to be. “We fuel up on these tiny histories,” Mennies writes in “The Gossips.” “We block out the dirty tired world, its weary beds and tables. We live in parallel, dwell in the stories we have to learn to tell.” I might’ve dismissed this notion as escapist at first. But on the heels of Mennies’s violent and vivid details that illuminate the horrors her characters endured—from Kristallnacht to deathbed adultery confessions to forced exile—I found myself consuming each family story through a lens of gentle empathy.

And that, perhaps, is what her characters wanted all along.

***
Ryan Rydzewski lives in Pittsburgh, where he studies creative nonfiction in Chatham University’s MFA program. His writing has appeared in Hippocampus Magazineand the Atticus Review. He’s at work on a history of a 19th-century rebellion that once made his hometown of Erie, Pennsylvania, the most detested city in America.