An Emotional Banquet: On Emily O’Neill’s ‘A Falling Knife Has No Handle’
With honesty and intimacy, O’Neill’s poems emphasize just how intertwined cuisine is with human interaction.
Emily O’Neill
Poetry | 104 Pages | Reviewed: Ebook
978–1–936919–62–8 | First Edition | $18.00
YesYes Books | Portland, Oregon | BUY HERE
Some books feel like they were written with a specific atmosphere in mind, like a rainy day or in the dead of winter. Reading Emily O’Neill’s A Falling Knife Has No Handle is the first case where I had the opposite reaction. O’Neill crafts her collection in such a way that the poems bring an atmosphere to the reader. Like slipping on virtual-reality goggles and suddenly being transported somewhere else, A Falling Knife Has No Handle feels like sitting in a restaurant or a bar and people-watching. The speaker of the collection appears without so much as a scrape of the chair to announce her presence and speaks to the reader without putting any unnecessary emphasis on the act of storytelling. The poems read with an honesty and intimacy that recalls the vulnerability of getting drunk, a sensation equally felt by the drinker and by those she is with. As a result, the reader is forced to ask himself whether he is a listener or an intruder to the self-sufficient poetic world that O’Neill creates, a question that forms the fluctuating epicenter of the collection and remains unanswered:
you know Dad is dead by now & so is Capote
& the friend you bought their drinks and the bar too
but you’re still listening / so it’s not maudlin(from “It’s Too Dangerous to Tell the Truth All at Once”).
Food is at the center of A Falling Knife Has No Handle. O’Neill presents the reader with a literal and emotional banquet that is an exploration of abundance in all its forms, where physical and material sustenance is often a sign of internal deprivation. For O’Neill, food is never just an image or a sensorial experience, but a link that connects individuals to each other and to reality even in times of distress, placing more emphasis on the social and cultural constructs around food than on its physicality. A Falling Knife Has No Handle is a celebration of food even in its darkest and saddest moments, at which point one appreciates it for all the possibilities it continues to offer even if they are not taken by the individual. The collection constantly reminds the reader of this, stating that
bear meat grows up from berries
& people too / we all clusteraround the hot light / call liquid bright
when it stings the tongue / call the mind
a trap closing & recognition its trigger(from “The Brain Is a Hungry Organ”).
O’Neill throws her reader into the deep end from the beginning with poems like “Preparing My Own Death,” which catches the reader off guard with its cyclical and repetitive nature, and “The Cooking Hypothesis,” which dips its fingers into the meditative and personal aspect of cuisine. There is always a lingering sensation that one has left the last spoonful on the plate, the intention of finishing it constantly interrupted by the unseen poetic hand that whisks each poem-plate away to be replaced with another. There is a sense of coming together in A Falling Knife Has No Handle, made possible by the constant shifting between private and public, feeling hungry and sated. The poems become ingredients that are gradually added together, flowing and transforming to become a delectable dish that is then placed before the reader and which he now must confront. O’Neill’s collection is peppered with sharp tastes as well as familiar yet overlooked sensations, and it becomes the reader’s task to make sense of them, to consider his own response to poems like “It Belongs in a Museum,” where the speaker argues that
couples visiting museums
must seem married / must hold each other
in the eyes of God, or George
Washington / immediately beside a horse’s ass[.]
O’Neill is a master of capturing this unspoken protocol of behavior and objects, not only making it visible by making the details come to the forefront and take precedence, but also by presenting the matter as an ongoing exploration, a question rather than an assertion. The poems ask the reader as well as themselves whether and when it is all right to read into details in order to extract personal and social truths from them. The reader is able to slip into the speaker’s skin in these moments of uncertainty so that the question becomes two-fold:
I spend too long wondering
if a split bottle of wine meanspeople are fucking / but it’s not something you ask
(from “The Rope Is Just for Decoration”).
O’Neill’s poems are a puzzle that takes shape over time and several rereads, just as some details of a story you were told over drinks do not sink in until you are lying awake at night later. They are an assemblage of sensations, thoughts, and sights that you jump across, and it is only when the jumping is done that you are able to, and want to, go back to take another, bigger look at them. “Kitchen Note: Severe Seafood Allergy, Seat 2” encompasses all the voices, approaches, and ideas that O’Neill puts forth in the collection, the most intimate but also the saddest piece in A Falling Knife Has No Handle. It echoes back to the web O’Neill so carefully began to spin from the very beginning, reminding its reader that pleasure and satisfaction on the level of immediate gratification is never confined to the individual, just as all ingredients must be present in order to create a balanced dish.
Spend some time with A Falling Knife Has No Handle. Savor it; let it sit and breathe before coming back to it for another try. O’Neill’s poems explore the most fundamental unit of human existence by emphasizing just how intertwined cuisine is with human interaction, suggesting that it is a key to better understanding emotions and situations that may be difficult to put immediately into words. The collection is an ode to our desires, an offering of poetic satisfaction that comes with a warning and a lamentation, proposing a change in perspective, that
we should all slaughter a pig
at least once / be sure
our stomachs make sense from start to finisha way of thanking
what we bleed(from “A Way of Thanking the Pig”).
