September
12
Andrea
Carter Brown
The
Word Works
Washington
D.C.
Copyright
2021
109
pages
Review
by Lo Galluccio
I
left New York City’s Lower East Side around September 1st,
2001 to stay briefly at my mother’s place in Cambridge, expecting
to hear about a tour of Italy I had been devising with my band and a
promoter in Rome. When my plans fell through, I fell into a deep
depression which persisted through the morning hours of September
11th.
It was my little sister who said, “This is one of the saddest days
in US history,” and roused me from my morose bed-ridden state to
watch the horrifying television repeating loop of the airplanes,
piloted by al-Qaeda terrorists, crash the Twin Towers in New York
City, the event we now call, 9/11. The cavernous holes and billowing
smoke, the fire and ash, was a harrowing signal that the US had been
brutally and systematically attacked by people who hated us and our
way of life. I had worked as a temp secretary in the World Trade
Center for Smith Barney, the largest tenant of the Towers, who
managed to evacuate all their employees. It was soon revealed that
American capitalism was under siege, that Osama Bin Laden and his
corps had masterminded an attack on the heart and symbol of it in New
York City, our own country’s cultural Mecca And while I had never
fully bought into the system as a full-time employee, certainly not
as a manager or executive, I felt that those people who had been
killed, the nearly 3,000 of them, were innocent in some fundamental
way. It was indeed a tragic day for America and a tragic day to be an
American. 9/11 was a political and historical reckoning.
Recently,
I came across Andrea Carter Brown’s poetry collection titled,
September
12,
released in 2021, her most recent book, along with two previous
chapbooks and another collection titled,
The Disheveled Bed,
none of which I knew. I felt compelled to read this collection, to
try to glean a better understanding of a first-person account of
someone who had fled New York City in the immediate wake of the
attacks on September 11. As the book is titled September
12, it
seemed that the author was also aiming to take stock of the aftermath
of the catastrophe. What does the day after an apocalyptic event
bring? What’s the damage, the perspective, the prognosis for a
person, a city, a civilization, an empire’s people?
Andrea
Carter Brown opens with a simple paragraph about how she was alerted
by her sister’s phone call to the first hit on the North Tower,
while she was sitting and drinking coffee in her apartment in Battery
Park City, just a block away at about 9 a.m. She immediately flees
the scene and her journey to Staten Island through New Jersey and
finally to upstate New York where she meets up with her husband Tom.
This
takes up the second section of the book, a lengthy prose poem in
sections of astute observation, resilient emotions and stunning
details. Like any refugee, she is dependent on luck, resources, the
kindness of strangers and happenstance. There is no clearer
demonstration of this than her parlous ride in the Staten Island
Ferry which stalls halfway across the sound and is enveloped by a
cloud of black smoke from the burning towers. Brown recounts how she
nervously dons a donut shaped life-jacket and takes it off, twice,
not knowing what will actually save her. Finally, after a kind Staten
Island resident named Joyce takes her and a dozen or so survivors in,
affording them clean clothes, internet and refreshment, Andrea is
able to reach her husband and let him know she’s okay. She writes:
“All
of Lower Manhattan dissolves in a scrim of gray dust. Rising, it
rivers the sky as the wind carries it east, raining grit and papers
on Brooklyn as far as the eye can see. On the western edge of the
island, on landfill made from bedrock excavated to build the World
Trade Center, I can just make out the apartment building where Tom
and I live. It’s still standing. I don’t understand. How could
those two skyscrapers, a hundred and ten stories each, fall down
without destroying everything nearby? But there it is: our home.”
(p 38).
The
names of Jersey cities, including the one where Andrea grew up, fly
by as though they are flags on a ski slalom course, as she is
transported by a Port Authority pick up truck and finally arrives in
a gas station at Larchmont, New York where she and her husband had
planned to rendezvous. However, he is not there so Andrea waits and
waits. Four days later, on September 15th,
escorted by the National Guard they are allowed to go home. She
recounts:
“Flashlights
on, dust masks positioned over nose and mouth, we walk through the
lobby, up five flights of stairs, and down dark hallways reeking of
spoiled food. Inside the apartment, dirty white dust covers
everything. The dust contains ashes of the thousands who vanished
four mornings ago: we know this without being told. The dead now lie
in our home, now cover every surface. They coat silverware, the
runners on which drawers open and close; they sleep in book bindings;
they seep between pages and underneath volumes packed tight on
shelves; they find corners of closets where we haven’t looked in
years. Yes, the dead are with us, will always be with us. Our home
has become theirs; we hesitate to disturb their final resting place.
Leave them in peace, if there can be any. As for the living, I long
to simply walk away, take nothing, and never come back.” (p 42)
The
third section of the book, “The Rock in the Glen,” memorializes
and specifies the victims from Andrea’s hometown of Glen Rock, NJ.
Here she gives us poignant portraits of the ten residents of the town
who on September 11th,
“go to work and never come home.” In a homage to Whitman, she
writes: “Picture a breeze/ rustling the oaks and the maples,
spreading/ the news of the morning of September 11./Picture a pretty
town brought to its knees.” (p.46). Through these portraits, the
ashen remains are transformed into very real people, people with
family and community causes, people who played sports or who had
retired, whose children, some of them, still expected their parent to
return home after months or years of waiting.
The
book opens with eight poems that are related to the Hudson River, the
great river that graces and enchants Andrea as she lives in Battery
Park City. Most of these are beautiful homages to other poets, like
Constable and Apollinaire, Dubuffet and Ruscha. In “Each Boat Signs
the Water.” She writes in the second stanza,
“I’ve
watched the river two years now
I know the names of tugs, the ebb and flow
of tankers and barges, when the next
bright
yellow banana boat
comes
in. I’ve caught
at
dawn an ocean
liner
cruise
into
port.” (p 24)
In
these poems Brown captures the movement and history of the river, its
importance in the founding of Manhattan and the way the waters’
reflexes determine her own mood and stance as well as the commerce of
New York. Implied by this poet, who is also a birdwatcher and
naturalist, is that the river rolls on – it predates and persists
beyond the reckoning of shattered man-made metal and glass, the
brutal massacre of human life of 9/11.
The
fourth section of the book “To the Dust” begins with an epigraph
from Charles Bukowski:
“what
matters most is/how well you/walk through the/fire.” This is a
fitting opening to a section that includes poems about ruined
buildings brought back to life, about kid necklaces made on the day
after, paeans to the varied ethnic laborers and characters that
frequented the old neighborhood before the cataclysm, and more poems
in the aftermath. It opens with a piece called, “The Kiss” in
which Andrea’s husband remembers that he heard about the towers
burning in a meeting and was sure that his wife was dead. His friend
Andy takes him home and they watch TV to hear news, to figure out
what happened. And he ends with “I was glad I had gone back to kiss
you a second time before leaving. Do you remember that?” And then
the poem turns to her story. “Did I hear your whispered I
love you?
I don’t know. I drifted back to sleep. Only late that night,
September 11, when you ask, do your words come back, as in a dream.”
(p 61)
There
are two fragmented poems with columns that divide and connect each
other: one called, “After the Disaster: Fragments” and the other
a blunt ode to the Towers themselves, called, “Pinstriped Bullies,”
that ends, “To live/in your/ shadow/was to feel/infinitesimal.”
(p 73). In a poem titled “The Garden of Earthly Delights” – a
homage to Bosch, Brown describes the trials her husband endures in
the months following the attacks….”you waited in that stuffy
acrid air/for someone to pick up the carpets/rolled up on our living
room floor/since the morning of September 11./Those months doctors
banned me/from going within two miles of the site,/you did
everything. It took three years/to get the asthma I never had
before/under control…” (p 81). In an “Ars Poetica” she
writes: “Let’s not romanticize bodies/falling. Others may use
float/or
dance;
I refuse to pretend/…Some screamed. The sound/they made landing?
Forget/thud. Louder than the wind.” p. 83. And there is grace. In
“This is for You” she gives thanks to all those who helped her
and her husband during and after the crisis,
a heartfelt tribute and testimony to the fact that no one can survive
a catastrophe alone. This fourth part is a powerful section of the
book: a poet wielding her full capacity at free verse to capture, in
elegiac figures, the loss and realities of the devastation wrought by
the 9/11 attacks.
September
12
ends with a fifth and final section called “The Present” with an
epigraph from a swatch of London graffiti, “Every day is a gift,
that’s why we call it the present.” Relocated to California,
these poems shine with the domestic pleasures of cooking and
gardening, of trips to Hawaii, of birds and snakes and reminders of
what has transpired. In “To the WTC Health Registry” May 2020,
Brown reports on the latest survey about 9/11’s health
side-effects that arrives in the mail during the pandemic. In it the
addressee is warned, “Call the 24/7 toll-free hotline
should/flashbacks
or raised heart rates/result at any point.”
The survey goes on to ask about new cancers and PTSD, nightmares:
“Still have trouble sleeping?” The poet ends this bureaucratic
summons with “May it do some good./May some future survey/find us
filling more spaces that say/Seldom/Almost
Never/Not at All. (p
99)
The
finale is a poem called, “Domestic Karma” which lists the daily
objects of health and renewal, including lemons and tangerines and
clothes lines of laundry dried by outdoor air. The author has been
restored to an almost regular regimen. “Monday morning/again. May
this ritual help us get/ through the week between tests/and
results./May it bring/months of Mondays like this,/shirts loving sun
on shoulders,/fear faded as favorite blue jeans/pinned to the line,
socks ready/to take us wherever we want.” (p 103). There is ironic
hope and a touch of glee in this ending – a sharp contrast to the
terror and urgency of Brown’s fleeing blindly that morning from the
furious heat and destruction nearby. To note, seventy of her
neighbors never returned home after September 11th.
In the Afterword she states, “In truth, I was very lucky.” And
there is more but I will let you read it. In truth, she was lucky,
but she was also brave and instinctual in making a fast getaway and
dealing with the displacement and damage of that day, for years to
come.
This
book is an amazing compendium of recollection and transformation. It
is an important and singular chronicle of one woman’s survival and
insight into the debacle of 9/11. It has remarkable structure,
imagination, music and heart – a poetic and historical treasure. On
this Fourth of July, 2022, it seems fitting that I recommend it to
you. Read it.
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