A New Zenith of Expression in Joan Houlihan’s It Isn’t a Ghost if It Lives in Your Chest

A New Zenith of Expression in Joan Houlihan's It Isn’t a Ghost if It Lives in Your Chest

article by Michael Todd Steffen





Readers have been the subjects of many famous painters—Fragonard, Manet, Sergeant—


and their expressions often mirror the emotions that go into the act: sometimes pleasant and passive, other times a little stormy or strained with the effort. I thought of these portraits as I was reading Joan Houlihan’s new book of poems It Isn’t a Ghost if it Lives in Your Chest, often finding my face involuntarily reacting with a lifted brow and a smile. The language in the poems of this new collection makes to date Houlihan’s most confidential and generous expressions.





A typographical invention these days isn’t easy to come by. Houlihan manages this by designating the book’s five sections with number of fore-slashes (/), one of many rudimentary gestures that will remind readers of her idiosyncratic signatures in the earlier book-length narratives The Us and Ay. The new poems astonish us in their simplicity:





Cloud bales load the sky.


Arms and legs, I am spokes on a lawn


fresh-cut. Which way


am I facing? Ground. Sky. Ground. (“The Cartwheel,” page 5)





The childlike brilliance, reminding us of Cummings and Bishop, is woven as a recurrent theme throughout the book, notably in fairytale allusions and curious linguistic observations that bear the weight of earthiness and thing into word and syntax.





Once you know you will die, the sky flattens.


Stars poke their fingers through


and point at you.





The passage is from “Gift Horse” (page 29), a title ringing with at least two associations: the proverb about looking a gift horse in the mouth; and Homer’s story about Troy and the gift horse in which the Achaeans sneaked into the walled city to sack it. The two instances demark a curious turn and counter-turn of thought—the wise, humble, and appreciative vs. the wary, ironic, and doubtful. (Sappho’s two adjectives for her inspirations, poikilothron and doloploke—fascinating and mischievous—announce this bifold—inviting, yet perilous—address to the poet from her numinous semiotic landscape.)





We meet this tide in and tide out again and again throughout the book, signed at the outset in Houlihan’s epigraph from Jacques Lacan, You are this which is so far from you.





Paradox sways us to and fro in the mother image of the book’s opening title, “The axe and hammer which come to be mother,” the axe for chopping and breaking down, the hammer for fastening and building. This dialectical wave continues throughout, to the ambiguous mix of shriving and atonement in the final section of the book, where grief is encountered both as a breaking down and restoration of the mourner, a passage through regret and guilt to justification of the survivor’s needs and inspirations. This two-way encounter in particular with Houlihan produces simultaneity in single words, double-entendres.





When she announces of her mother that “Her language busted with wrath,” we are left to wonder whether this language itself burst, whether it broke something else, or “busted” somebody in the sense of “arrested” or “caught out.” That it does so “with wrath” recalls how wrath may act both on the subject and the object of the verb, on the victim as well as the one wielding the terrible emotion.





Again, when Houlihan tells us “Her will, made of pitch, can’t be read”—can such an intangible thing as “will” concretize as a tarry substance? Or would the elusive force be more in the way of an agricultural or athletic motion?





The subtilty of Houlihan’s care with words operates in the multiple possibilities which are left unresolved in a very palpable silence bringing focus to the pivotal word. She does this in a broader sense by not announcing Oedipus in her sleight of hand with the Sphinx’s riddle:





by the pad of my feet in the morning,


by the tip of my nose at noon,


by the tap-tap-tap of my cane at night. (“Her Fostering,” page 4)





And she just stops short of announcing Little Red Riding Hood, throwing the Wolf’s grim phrase in the voice of the poet’s father:





What pink flesh you have, he’d observe,


as he stuffed an apple into a pig head


and served it with both eyes open.





Houlihan’s title on page 14, “I am a Switzerland,” finds its rejoinder title on page 16, “I am a Fugitive from a Chain Gang.” Like the French and Greek leitmotifs, the fairytale references and glimpses of ghost stories, the escapee theme is woven throughout different poems and gives It isn’t a Ghost a good sense as a book of continuity and resonance. (The first two sections are dedicated to “mother” and “father,” an echo of Houlihan’s 2018 book Shadow-feast with its first two sections respectively titled Hers and His.”





A menagerie of animals also (cooing dove, hooing owl, calicos, tabbies, wild turkey, geese, a brown bear, a rabbit named Little Plato…) makes frequent appearances, often lending, like the fairytale references, a charm of fable to the psychic landscape of the book. Section /// takes on the theme of a bestiary, celebrating the commodity cow that is led to the butcher’s block (You are the ignorance/she lives through), an octopus with its dusky ink, and a damaged parrot which becomes a brilliant extended metaphor for the trials and transformations of the fugitive:


Slow as a child first out,


she moved through the worlds of trees and grass,


fell asleep in the sun while the other birds played,


woke in the dark and expelled her owner’s words


Oh snap! Crap! Baby want a bitch-slap?


Felt herself be green but never knew her head was red… (page 41)





The intricacies of survival are given noteworthy consideration with the poet contemplating the dual game of predation between the human and animal worlds, in a camping moment of deprivation with the prospect of hunting—and a dangerous reversal:





Nature, it’s here for us.


The squirrel bit, the bird bit,


and bear. Loaded for you


they rise big from a bush,


typically drag you around


and stuff you in a log,


a meal to come back to, enjoy.


Nine-tenths of the law and all that.


I waited for hours playing dead,


then used my fingers to dig my way out.


The dirt’s still under my nails. (“Trigger Warning,” page 49)





Yes, we may very well acknowledge from certain experiences, my “triggers” have led me to such encounters, with “bears,” getting stuffed in a log and having to use my fingers to dig my way out. Things penetrating us and beyond our control find language and understanding through poetry, as if the pleasurable practice of the art required some usefulness. It is helpful to locate and name that which is so intimate with us and yet remains elusive and Other.





It is as constant with us as our breath, the in and out movement of the lungs in our “chest,” which the book’s title announces isn’t a Ghost, but a living presence. Or in a “chest” of keepsakes, like a poem, a record of occurrences perhaps for nobody else but only a ghost if left unwritten, unrecorded.





Artists ever aspire to new zeniths of expression. Houlihan achieves this in the poems of It isn’t a Ghost if it Lives in Your Chest, a poet who has taken its readers to satisfying heights in her narrative book-length poems, and then again in 2018 by intensifying the focus on the intimate subject of personal grief in Shadow-feast. In the new work the lens has softened back. Acceptance and wisdom with subtilty and their own milder guile come across and make everything seem fresh and curious. (This is also true of the elegies, more discursive than tearful, for late friend and poet Lucie Brock-Broido, author of the 2013 National Book Award Finalist Stay, Illusion). All the while we savor Houlihan’s characteristic talents for making her medium inconspicuous, inviting, and vivid. We turn to vertigo with her cartwheel and can feel, before we envision, her flattening sky.





It isn’t a Ghost if It Lives in Your Chest


Poems by Joan Houlihan


ISBN 9781945588914


Four Way Books


Tribeca, 2021