Review of Marion Deutsche Cohen’s Stress Positions
March 10, 2021
In her recent book, Stress Positions, Marion Deutsche Cohen invites her reader on a journey that is at once both keenly intimate and boundlessly universal: the experience of living with debilitating pain. Through the lens of her own pain, Cohen also explores the larger threats and injuries of the world, in all their frightening forms.
Stress Positions is a collection of poems, short prose, and pieces that fall somewhere in between, divided into two parts. In “Part I: Lessons from The Back Pain Book,” Cohen details her struggle with a painful “nerve/disk” problem in her back that interferes with, well, nearly everything. In “Part II: We Who Merely Know,” the author considers the worst examples of how people treat each other, from the Holocaust to various forms of torture.
In the reality Cohen describes, it seems anything is possible—even one’s body becoming not one’s own, and even one’s worst nightmares coming to life. Or worse.
Cohen introduces this notion with the collection’s opening piece, “Kafkaesque,” which asks, “Why not muscles, in one’s sleep or one’s waking, turning against one? Why not our bodies and our brains betraying us and ours, making us mere variations of human? Why not?”
The author describes her experience in vivid terms in “It Gets Worse”:
I can’t help envisioning my back.
It’s filled with metal, heavy metal.
It’s all one piece, a single stiff board in there, a suit of armor.
It’s no longer my back, it’s somebody else’s back.
In this highly accessible collection, Cohen is open and straightforward as she shares with her reader the components of her ordeal: confusing interactions with doctors, frustrating experiences with medications, grueling struggles with sleep.
Unsurprisingly, the narrator’s condition affects her relationships—perhaps most notably, with husband Jon. In “Jon #2,” she describes how her malady disconnects her from her partner: “I am, now, a separate species … I do my own nights, alone in my body.” And in a piece called “No Sex for Now”: “This thing is isolating. My body must be reclusive, mine and mine alone.” Cohen even questions her relationship to the universe, asking, “Why do the powers want this for me?”
But the relationship at the heart of this work may be that of the narrator to her body, which seems that of prisoner to captor. “I’m handcuffed to my back,” Cohen says in “Walking.” And she refers, in “Mozart to the Rescue,” to “your own body kidnapping you.”
The effect on the narrator’s sense of identity is profound. In “When the Going Gets Tough, the Tough Go Shopping,” she describes managing her pain well enough to attend a sale at a thrift shop. “I knew I was not quite a citizen,” she says. “I knew I was a mere visitor.” Repeatedly in the book, she refers to wanting to be a citizen again.
Particularly affecting is the poem “The Agony,” which eloquently communicates the degree to which the narrator’s condition comes to dominate her worldview.
There’s no such thing as not having back pain…
Objects have back pain.
The universe has back pain.
In Part II, Cohen writes about phenomena that—if we’re lucky—we merely know about, versus experiencing firsthand. Here, she contemplates a range of horrors, some of which she reads or hears about and some of which are conjured by her own imagination in dreams: holocausts, capital punishment, being buried alive.
In the poem “Never Too Late,” she reflects that it’s not too late for her to live the rest of her life “blind, paralyzed, or in constant pain/or kidnapped off the streets.” She concludes, “It is never too late/for the rest of my life to be too long.”
A standout in this section is “The Heart,” which opens with the lines, “I haven’t the heart to tell you about the newly uncovered modern-day/backwoods abortion clinic.” Cohen notes that many disadvantaged women lost their lives at the facility. The poem ends with:
The newspaper with that article was lying on the kitchen table
and I wish somebody who loves me had been around at the time
somebody who hadn’t the heart to let me read it
to learn more than I already know.
Stress Positions is an honest and courageous exploration of what it means to be human, and what happens when that humanity is disrupted. In particular, it examines the role of, and our relationships with, our bodies. The book also shines a glaring light on some of the most disturbing ways humans mistreat each other. The result is an engaging, enlightening, and thought-provoking read that will stay with you well after you turn the last page.
Abbey J. Porter writes poetry and memoir about people, relationships, and life struggles. She holds an MFA in creative writing from Queens University of Charlotte, an MA in liberal studies from Villanova University, and a BA in English from Gettysburg College. Abbey works in communications and lives in Cheltenham, Pa., with her two dogs.