(Elixir Press, 2018)

REVIEW BY PETER H. MICHAELS

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Erin Hoover’s debut poetry collection Barnburner is replete with powerful and timely character-studies. Each character, whether a bad boss, a junkie, a peer on a different path, a boyfriend, or a mugger is examined with the same mordant empathy Hoover is incredibly adept at employing. The epigraph reminds us that “a ‘barn burner’ [is] one who destroyed all to get rid of a nuisance.” This book takes a piercing look at addiction, corporate life, variations on female identity, privilege, and sexual violence against women. Hoover’s assault on the most problematic corners of a capitalistic and patriarchal society lives up to the title Barnburner.

This collection’s honest, even scathing tone is established immediately in the poem “The Lovely Voice of Samantha West.” Hoover juxtaposes the hollowness of working at a call center with the honeyed voice the speaker learned to employ successfully: “The call center made me an / expert in my voice’s currency, what I could / do with its pitches and pauses, my larynx / flexing around the rarely varied words. It / was work.” (3–4). Hoover understands the ugly parts of life and her own awkward relationship with this flawed world.

This dissection of lived moments slices throughout the collection, and even is addressed directly in “Why Don’t You Have Kids?” A poem where the speaker acknowledges that her own self-reflection on a loaded and complicated question from a friend both memorializes and distorts her thoughts. “I’m certain, when doctors open / my corpse, / they’ll find this story in all its versions. / With forceps, they’ll pull apart / the question women are asked, press / the strands of my answers onto slides” (24). Hoover understands that truth is both found and lost under this close inspection: “But this is / the wrong way to look” (id.).

That looking glass stare is pervasive throughout Barnburner, and is found in poems like “Livestock,” a poem which begins with Neil Diamond calling the speaker’s mother a “fat girl” (32) and ends with pigs inspected at something like a 4-H contest. While this is not a subtle comparison, the skillful progression of lines leads to an eviscerating ending “But no matter / how perfect the form, we ask— / as if it can’t be helped— / what the animal tastes like” (33).

Hoover wants to slice and taste into bitter and brutal truths and accomplishes this time and again with lines like “I hear my mother tell my nephew / what she once told me, in what / I know now is denial: No one wants  /  to hurt you” (34) from “Tiniest of Shields” a poem confronting the inescapable aftershock of violence, even in small towns.

Arguably “Takedown” captures Hoover’s ability to examine and obliterate the worst parts of our patriarchal society with lines like: “the best methodology / for devaluing a woman is to strap her body / to the cum-stained mattress of your mind” (54); “I didn’t know rejection,  for some men, is a mother, and when she opens her legs, / she births monsters” (55); and “I want / more for her than pussy shots and the vengeant // glow of an LED screen, a choice beyond / predator or prey” (57). “Takedown” is not without its own self-awareness: “every cool girl styled an allegiance to corporate punk / by threading the same studded white belt through / her skinny jeans” (54) and “We girls were the first professionals / of the profile pic, guilded in Photoshop” (id.). This is typical of the poems in Barnburner, which look both inward and outward with equal severity.

The strength of the poems in Barnburner is their unflinching retelling of dark moments. In “The Valkyrie” the speaker confronts an ATM mugger: “me / banking on him as the kind to shove a girl / down a flight of stairs” (74) and her own demons: “I put my hands on his neck and squeezed, / said, No one will even notice you’re gone / in the stony voice I usually reserve for myself” (73). The speaker in “If You Are Confused About Whether a Girl Can Consent” walks to work the day after an evening with large time gap: “the night and its events / were projected on a screen behind me, / outside my field” (47). Hoover is unafraid of this type of societal inspection and self-reflection. Hoover proves time and again that she is that “Somebody,” able to “turn up the lights” (15).

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Peter H. Michaels lives with his family in Southern Maryland. You can reach him at http://peterhmichaels.com