These Are a Few of My Least Favorite Things
Really Serious Literature
$20.00
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Reviewed by Pat Kelly
There is no telling where the act of self-reflection will lead you. Things usually hidden are pulled into the foreground, revealing connections. Underneath those connections are the systems that shape our worlds, both personally and communally. And systems, from the limbic to the capitalistic, are at the heart of These Are a Few of My Least Favorite Things, the complex and cathartic debut poetry collection from Shannon Frost Greenstein.
As the title suggests, this is not to say that levity cannot also be found along the way. Often it is absolutely necessary to the process of emoting, defining, and questioning those experiences. When reading and re-reading these devastating, intelligent, brutally honest poems, flashes of comedy serve as release points from pain and anxiety. The back-sliding cigarette between dark moments. The search and failure of finding the right words between silence. What it feels like to not look away when the bandages are removed from our bodies and the bodies of the ones we love. Whether those bandages cover scars, tattoos, or are just symbols for the internal and unseen, Greenstein does not blink.
There is another system that haunts this collection: epigenetics. How environmental factors can affect us without altering DNA and how these alterations can be inherited. In this way, a singular person or an entire culture’s worth of environmental experience can imbed itself deep within us. Greenstein’s poems are reflections on the awareness of this system and its inheritable traits. How we are left with the knowledge that we can regret our past decisions, but this regret does not retroactively change the present or future. In “I Fucked Up My Metabolism, and Now I Have Regrets,” she acerbically acknowledges that what she initially thought of as just an idea or ideal in her head was actually a series of active decisions over a period of time:
I wanted to be thin.
*
But that’s a lie.
I didn’t want to be thin; I wanted to become thin.
The expanding of the word ‘be’ to ‘become’ suggests this agency. That it wasn’t just a way of thinking, but also a way of acting. Later in the poem she correlates her personal regrets with the potential threat that she has passed on these epigenetic traits to her children. In “USA Gymnastics,” she recontextualizes her childhood perception of heroics with newer knowledge that abusive systems were often behind such moments. She writes, “So we sacrifice our children / To the altar of the Olympiad / And wonder why they end up broken.” The poems as a whole are an intricate web of these kinds of connections. Singular and collective decisions are the silk that weaves a vast social pattern that both satiates and traps us. It is within this patchwork structure that our children experience life.
Her poems also reflect heavily upon mortality. “Things to Say to Your Husband after his Cancer Comes Back,” is both beautifully intimate and devastating in its interchange between comfort language and inner monologue:
[...]your words like butterflies in a net, and when the sun streams through the honeycomb fibers like a fake promise, it will be almost like they’ve escaped, like they’re out and free and you know exactly what to say in this terrible moment of mortal terror, except they’re actually still caught in the net so instead you have to try again.
In “To the Med Student Whose Anatomy-Class Cadaver Is My Best Friend,” this intimacy shines as an elegy to a childhood friend who committed suicide. Greenstein expertly relates the tiny, singular moments that form a friendship and also offers a guide map for deriving understanding and empathy through the inspection of the physical: “Please see her tattoos. / Please see her journey.”
This type of empathy is a key component to the funnier moments within the collection. A personal anecdote of realizing too late the mistake of eating mushrooms and watching Requiem for a Dream shows the trajectory of how these experiences are the origins of her understanding in “Ode to That Guy on the Interstate Going Fifteen MPH and Obviously Tripping Face.” There is a beauty to this type of relating, because it causes us to see the multi-faceted way our past decisions affect our current and future ones and that, yes it can be quite depressing, but it’s not all bad. There can be sincerity and comradery in our bad decisions.
Greenstein also shows where this empathy can break down and turn you on your head in perhaps her most powerful poem, “My Body is a Coffin for Dead Children, and Other Things: For Kelly.” Here the collective themes throughout her poems are both affirmed and contradicted as a woman describes what it feels like to have suffered through eleven miscarriages. The realization that, though complete empathy is sometimes impossible, the poetics of language can bring us to the threshold of an understanding. The haunting line in the title is like a prism altering the refracting light of her prior reflections. That the anxiety of the way our past decisions are carried into the future through our children is overshadowed by the opportunity we get to remove these inherited things through our own nurturing. Epigenetic traits exist as growths on top of our genetic code, but they are reversible. The singular way we choose to live and relate echo into the collective, into our cities, our court systems, our children.
We all have a list of things we hate about ourselves from our pasts. What Shannon Frost Greenstein has done in this collection is show, without pulling any punches, that there is beauty to be found here and, more often than not, it is how we best relate to our fellow humans:
and I return
to the machine
with gratitude
that I have been granted the privilege
to lean in
to sit with
to share
to be sad together
because it’s better than being sad alone.
Pat Kelly is a writer from Harrisburg. He creates poetry and fiction that explores the dark fringes of humanity and its impact on time and memory. He is currently working on his first collection of poetry, Buried Litanies. He also occasionally rants in blog form for Raven Rabbit Ram.