Beanstalk

"With the ruthless wisdom of a fairy tale, Shelley Stenhouse catapults us back into the past in this gutsy, granular, cannily made book that reminds me of her description of Lake Michigan: dark, moving, mysterious." ~Edward Hirsch

In Shelley Stenhouse's stunning new collection, Beanstalk, a child spends an hour trying to keep the sun in the sky: "I stared / and stared at it, daring it to fall, / begging it not to." When a doctor says she might not regain her vision, her mother slaps her. It's an astonishing metaphor for the damage we do to ourselves when we try to shore up an abusive loved one. There's the torque of Dante's idea that we are punished for our misdirected love, but in Beanstalk, that's lacerating irony, not some divine plan. The book unfolds along the arc of a life. The immediacy is visionary-maybe the hypervigilance of trauma. The past is never quite over: "My mother died / in an orange room on this floor in this season-winter. I tried to help / with her eyeliner before she left for the hospice, but it was a sloppy job. / I remember her standing in her bathroom wearing nothing but dirty / pantyhose, her eye twitching, blinking up at the skylight / while I pointed the pencil." Even in extremis, the two gazes won't meet. Funky, playful, tragic, kinetic, Beanstalk is indelible. ~D. Nurkse