2 September 2004 | Vol. 4, No. 3

"Tender Hooks" Refuse to Soften: A Review of Beth Ann Fennelly's Tender Hooks

by GENEVIEVE BETTS

Tender Hooks
Beth Ann Fennelly
W.W. Norton & Company, 2004
Hardcover, ISBN: 039305862X
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History's typecast of "the mother" breeds thoughts of the bored housewife, entertaining herself with embroidery, pastel aprons, and flip hairdos. Herstory relates a more honest and complex definition of the mother, much like the work of Beth Ann Fennelly's poems in Tender Hooks. This truth emerges through her surprisingly unique language and humor. She refuses the act of sentimentally sugarcoating with many motifs that challenge this possibility, like pregnancy, miscarriage, labor, and breastfeeding. Many times, this occurs by way of the binary soft/sharp. Even in her opening poem, "Bite Me," Fennelly acknowledges the danger of sappiness with this duality as she addresses her new daughter with the lines, "You who are all clichés of babysoft / crawl to my rocking chair." These first two lines create a striking contrast with the abrupt title. In this same poem, she shows her robust accuracy while appropriately opening the book with a birth.

And Lord did I push, for three more hours
I pushed, I pushed so hard I shat,
pushed so hard blood vessels burst
in my neck and in my chest, pushed so hard
my asshole turned inside-out like a rosebud,
pushed so hard that for weeks to come
the whites of my eyes were red with blood,
my face a boxer's, swollen and bruised,
though I wasn't thinking then
about the weeks to come

Fennelly moves directly from this beginning poem into a collection that explores the role of the real mother. For the author, modern day sub-roles like mother as breast feeder, unmoderated mother, and mother as feminist emerge under the context of the general roles that motherhood encompasses.

In her poem "Latching On, Falling Off," Fennelly focuses on the act of breastfeeding in four parts. These various stages range anywhere from the functional to humorous romantic attempts. In the third section, "After Weaning, My Breasts Resume Their Lives as Glamour Girls," she juxtaposes factory-working wives with her breasts.

So I'm thinking of how,
when World War II had ended,
the factory-worker wives

were fired, sent home
to care for returning soldiers,
when my husband enters the bedroom—

Aren't you glad? He asks, glad,
watching me unwrap bras
tissue-thin and decorative

from the tissue of my old life,
watching, worshipfully, the breasts resettle
as I fasten his red favorite—

Aren't you glad? He's walking
toward them, addressing the, it seems—
but, Darling, they can't answer,

poured back into their old mold,
muffled beneath these lovely laces,
relearning how it feels, seen and not heard.

Much like the wives, Fennelly acclimates to functioning in a progressive sense. Like women initially joining the workforce to fill the places of men and to further women's roles, she joins the breastfeeding force to further the growth of her baby. Both the wives and Fennelly's breasts must transition from their practical role (which surfaces here as more masculine) into their traditional feminine role, to appear physically enticing under "lovely laces" and to be silenced as inferiors for the sake of men and society. For Fennelly, breastfeeding breaches this utilitarian use and enters into the territory of expression, a way for her breasts to play out a dialogue between her and her child.

Another form of silencing exists within her only prose poem "Waiting for the Heart to Moderate," where Fennelly extracts her title Tender Hooks. This occurs at the beginning of the first stanza, as well as the appearance of the poem's main metaphor.

Adults had a drink, they said, to take the edge off, so that's how she came to understand growing up: erosion. She was all edges, on tender hooks, which is what she thought the expression was. Once she described this to her mother, and her mother assured her it would pass. It kept not passing. In a few years, she'd lie to her mother, drive to the city, and wait in line beside the dance club, hugging herself beneath her growing breasts. What would this studious girl do, once she got inside? Climb the risers and dance in a cage.

Fennelly introduces the young, somewhat oppressed female character as a "studious girl" trying out a new rebellion in the form of dancing. Under the restricted conditions of her mother, she finds a moderated freedom. She dances to freely express herself, but does so only within the bounds of a cage. The girl doubles in age by the second stanza, but not in maturity, and her own transformation into a mother becomes apparent. "Even having the baby hasn't moderated her as it might / have. The sitter comes over, and they are wearing the same outfit. She knows her social- / worker sister would call this inappropriate." The metaphor of dancing in a cage further parallels within the lines, "She is still the chimney with its fire going, and the sparrow trapped in the / chimney." Her desire to have a more exciting life dissipates, due to the fact that her entrapment still exists.

At the end of Fennelly's third and final stanza, the poem is not neatly wrapped up, but leaves the reader imaginatively questioning. After the mention of the speaker's ongoing restlessness as a mother, she draws attention to a small but astonishing distraction that comes from her child.

What helped: yesterday, she held her teething baby across her chest, and the child first gummed her collarbone and then bit, really bit, so hard the woman yelped. Six red crescents from the child's six teeth. For a moment, nailed to the here-and-now. And she loves the here-and-now! So why does she still want to dance all night? Why does she still feel music booming in her breastbone? Do others guess that something wild paces in this cage? She fears that, to free it, she might do something stupid.

In a small way, the baby's unexpected and painful bite helped draw the speaker away from her distracting youthful flippancy. It is by no means a cure, though, and she remains a caged beast. Even the inner "music booming in her breastbone" paces, suffocates behind a cage of ribs. Although Fennelly portrays motherhood in a realistic but mostly positive manner, she has trapped the speaker in her poem within the binding role of the mother.

Fennelly's longest and most determined poem, "Telling the Gospel Truth" appears in ten sections. She writes of the Bible, Mary, advice for writers, the missed rituals of church, miscarriage, and regenderizing religion. At times, some of her work is done as a revisionist poet, retelling Biblical stories within the poem. This happens with the birth of Jesus in section four, visualizing Mary's labor and the scene that surrounds her in the most realistic way possible. "Are you picturing her naked? Let her be naked. / Let us write in the animals, but not kneeling, and if they roll their great eyes skyward / let it not be like saints in paintings / but like bored executives rising in elevators." And of the labor, she writes, "Let her squeeze his other hand harder than she needs to. / Let her wonder who is screaming, / let her wonder if she's dying, / let her take the name / of her own sweet son / in vain." Fennelly's version of this recorded event perhaps portrays the actions with better detail and more realism that the Bible itself. By her revising this story, she gives the reader direct justification for the Biblical challenge that she presents in section eight. Of the Bible, she asks, "Is it possible to mend a cloth so often / nothing's left but the mending?" By going through the act of rewriting Jesus' birth through ultimate realism, she validates asking this question. Has the original text of the Bible been translated so many times, that it has lost all original words and concepts? Her solution:

so likewise I decided
          to stop picturing God as a white-haired old man
          stop singing Him in hymns
picture instead a genderless breeze
who valued women and animals and gays and birth control and masturbation

Fennelly decides to make her own choices in life. If the appropriate options are lacking in present society, then she creates her own ideas and belief systems. Whether these reflect such general poetic themes, like beauty, or more detailed and complex subjects like giving birth and religion, she makes her own rules. Her ideas about motherhood include many nontraditional elements, surprising her readers with an immaculate and usually humorous choice of words and phrasing. Fennelly's work does more than push motherhood past the sentimental; she revises the mother.

Beth Ann Fennelly is from Chicago and received her MFA from the University of Arkansas. She was the 1998-1999 Diane Middlebrook Fellow at the University of Wisconsin, and she has received grants from the Illinois Arts Council and the National Endowment for the Arts. Her poems have appeared in the American Scholar, the Kenyon Review, Michigan Quarterly Review, Shenandoah, and TriQuarterly; they have been anthologized in the Pushcart Prize 2001, the Penguin Book of the Sonnet: 500 Years of a Classic Tradition in English, Poets of the New Century, and Best American Poetry 1996. Her first book, Open House, published by Zoo Press, won the 2001 Kenyon Review Prize.