Poetic Conversations ~ Despite the Scars: A Review of Jennifer A Sutherland’s Bullet Points

I was immediately intrigued when I saw the announcement post for a new poetry press, River River Books. Two experienced editors committing to two titles a year is a promising concept, and I immediately made a note to look into the first batch of titles once they came out; Jennifer A Sutherland’s Bullet Points came to me first, and it did not disappoint.

A question: How do you hold many separate traumas together?

First, safety.

Although described in its subtitle as “a lyric,” Jennifer A Sutherland’s Bullet Points focuses heavily on elements of narrative and drama. In a book-length poem of stark, mesmerizing monostiches the speaker builds the rhetorical supportive foundation to speak. In doing so they begin to understand survival of both domestic abuse and a public shooting. These single-line stanzas and the carefully constructed inner voice provides a landscape to allow a transformative understanding of survival amidst nigh-incomprehensible personal and cultural pain.

Second, disorder.

Sutherland’s roving speaker is both distant and close enough to appear emotionally unfiltered. The speaker is both scientific (legal perhaps?) in her description of the court case leading to the public shooting and emotional to the highest lyrical intensity. The lyricism shines when it comes to feeling and attempting to hold the aftershock of the events she has gone through. The reader is given starkly simple descriptions of the exterior landscape and setting, “Then we walked up the embankment and stood upon the bridge. Jersey walls along each side, not high but made of concrete,” (9.) These lines stand alongside sometimes jagged and sometimes clear as ice interior moments. “Travels lengths of nerve and bone. Explodes into blossom moving at the speed of pain” (7.)

You may already notice a certain rhetorical necessity when writing about Bullet Points. Any comprehensive analysis dictates to the reader that they must hold both x and y together. Thus the entire text is colored by a thin film of metaphor: not x only, not y only. Instead we experience the multiplicity of interpersonal relationships, histories, and traumas. These are all carried in a text that is art-making, cultural critique, and an attempt at healing all. This is a life.

Sutherland’s story lacks nothing for its multifacetedness. The complexities and dualities of the text are necessary not only for the reader’s understanding of the lyric, but for the speaker’s navigation of her own
trauma. Just as the book edges toward emotional catharsis it also pulls away, adds complication, another pain, another layer of relationship, history, interiority, and embodiedness. The reader’s understanding of
the text then mirrors the stages of navigation of grief, pain, and healing. Sometimes making headway, sometimes losing ground against the face of events so terrible it takes a book-length poem to name what they have done and what they continue to echo and do.

Third: the body must take the necessary shape.

Let me return to the monostich: one-line stanza.

Lyric: music, which is to say surprise, usually provoked by line breaks, but here is absent. It is as if the poet is saying to the poem: Like me, you must change and not change. You will end soon and you will go on.

Bullet Points seems to me formally as a fractal of ones, holding “manys.” One-line stanzas clasp their complications. It is a one-poem book both lyric and narrative, of deep interiority and an unyielding external landscape of violence. It asks “what must it have taken the writer to write this?” The poems speak to the poet, Like me, you are one body and you must hold these countless impossibilities. These monostiches are strange and contain a beat and rhythm that stretches out in some places and condenses in
others. The speaker merges with Sutherland’s poetics as she writes, “A stanza is a room. You can make it comfortable or you can make it live” (37.) Ultimately, this is not a book about comfort.

The book-length poem is the only form this poem could have taken. This is not only for its content but for it to exist as both art and testimony in the world. Sutherland’s poetic narrator speaks with a cutting honesty that given the events of the collection are terrifying in their quiet intimacies. Consider near the start of the poem, “There are things I need or want to tell you. I am trying. Please bear with me,” (5) and at the very end, “The reader will lose access to the context of my composition process. The text alone will offer clues to many things about me and the circumstances of the writing but will necessarily remain obscure” (59).

If it seems that I have made the mistake of positioning writer for speaker — know it is because of what this book demands. In this collection the typical expectations of the dramatic become blurred, the reader is made aware that the events of the book are explicitly nonfiction, and the author through her speaker is honest about the immense emotional work it has taken to render the experiences on the page. “I am writing all of this in a marble notebook,” the speaker writes, “Later on I will read through it and note where I switched from pen to pencil, for example, or where my handwriting became particularly frenzied” (58.)

Last: avoid the lies of catharsis, and of time.

The events of the book unfold beyond the point in time in which the various violences of the narrative take place. The ending is not the ending of the narrative, nor that of healing; but the moment at which the
speaker can begin to write about the experiences documented. This is not a completed healing, but another step along the journey. It is clear that the speaker will continue to process these events for years, but that the telling has been a necessary step as the scars form and fade, but never disappear.

Living through the violences of a public shooting and domestic abuse makes time take on a languid and immutable effect. Near the end of the book the reader is let into the speaker’s healing process. This involves both writing out the experience as well as regaining the ability to swim. Water is a theme and recurring image throughout the book; the aquatic is associated with the highest lyrical moments. “I swallow swallow swallow all the eels until they are inside my salty naked eye sockets” (35.) The speaker is not and will never be at a place of complete healing, at a place where the violences of this book can be left to the past. But the pain can be divided into smaller psychologies, and these can begin to heal one minor piece at a time. Despite the scars — little things can be regained.

How do you hold many traumas together?

You hold them, knowing you will fail to hold them. There is no endpoint.

We heal the wound. We continue to heal it until we die.