Boston Area Small Press and Poetry Scene: 02/16/2020

Poet Carolynn Kingyens

Before the Big Bang Makes a Sound by Carolynn Kingyens. Kelsay Books, 2020.

Review by Ed Meek

Although we have all recently been made aware of the growing disparity between the rich and everyone else and the heretofore unremarked class-system we’ve all been toiling in for years, (see Parasite) there has also come to light of late a number of works that remind us of our common struggles. Big Little Lies, Curb Your Enthusiasm, Marriage, Sanditon, The Slave Play, etc. Carolynn Kingyens debut book of poems, Before the Big Bang Makes a Sound explores the world from the point of view of a married, middle-class mother of two who, like many of us, encounters illness, questions faith, is concerned with gender roles and sexism and the way class plays into these issues.

Don’t let the title fool you into thinking these are poems about Stephen Hawking’s universe. The title comes from a poem called “High Anxiety.” Who among us isn’t anxious today? If you live in a city you are probably not too far away from a “dive bar, / an F-bomb away / from spontaneous / combustion… where “a thumb hovers / over an invisible trigger, / before the big bang / makes a sound.” There are a number of good poems like this one that examine how class struggle overlaps with sexism.

Kingyens grew up one of seven children in North Philadelphia and even though she now lives in Manhattan and drives an Audi Q5, she has not moved too far from her working-class roots. In “No one is Immune,”

…a house built on shot

glasses, pill bottles

and ash trays will age

a body strangely—

broken biology,

Freakonomics,

the way a fresh face

can turn into a catch-all

mitt, weathered before

its time; the way a delicate

voice can turn into the bark

of a seal, while the body,

from the neck down,

remains preserved

much longer.

She’s describing the people outside the mainstream, left behind by neo-liberalism. No one is immune to aging yet it is women who feel the effects most in a culture that puts a premium on female youth and appearance. In “Break the Mirror in Your Youth,” she says:

The beauty of babes

Is currency.

But beauty has less

of a shelf life

than vegetable oil

or MSG…

Today, a stale cookie

shaped like a deformed

pilgrim collar tells me:

Break the mirror

In your youth.

Kingyens combines the everyday materials and objects of our lives in economic and surprising ways. The fortune in the cookie was probably referring to luck but Kingyens turns the meaning to critique our selfie culture and its obsession with female beauty.

In “Small as a Mouse” she writes about the tendency of women to always be apologizing. In “The Weight of Words” she finds a compelling intersection, reminiscent of the TV show Girls, between the way we use language and how young women find themselves compromising in ways they would not have expected.

Now imagine a naïve girl

who hasn’t learned respect

for the weighty word

never, who uses it

too loosely when speaking

Like I’ll never do that

to only do precisely that

and more.

Growing up Catholic imprints us with some indelible images and habits even if we no longer practice. In “Bathroom Crucifix” Kingyens remembers

The first time I touched

a crucifix

I was five years old

in my grandmother’s

powder blue bathroom

unaware of suffering

and sacrifice;

unaware of the million

and one ways

a sinner could torture

a saint and get away

with it…

Readers will also identify with Kingyens when in her first poem “Autoimmune” she talks about slowly becoming aware that there was something wrong with her.

Some diseases take time

to manifest,

turning your body

against your body slowly;

cellular changes so subtle

they are imperceptible

for decades…

In this and many other poems in Before the Big Bang Makes a Sound, Carolynn Kingyens gives us much to think about and consider. She draws back the curtain hiding what we don’t always see in poems that express our common vulnerability and humanity. Hers is a new voice worth listening to.