The compact and powerful poems in Hannah Bonner’s Another Woman get at the rise and fall of an illicit relationship while reflect ing on what it means to embody otherness, a construct historically created by men. Bonner also subverts the role by showing her female speaker as the one who’s in firm possession of both the gaze and the sexual agency it gives, which is most often associated in art, literature and psychoanalysis with maleness. In quite a few of the poems, the speaker is literally the other woman, the mistress involved with a mar ried man. Throughout, in addition to speaking through the 21st-century mistress, Bonner also gives voice to historical figures such as Lot’s wife, Mary, Delilah, Aphrodite, Dido and Karen Carpenter. Such pieces give Bonner ways she can work through the self’s grappling with love and loss by joining a chorus of other women, which serve as counterpoints to the speaker’s situation. With a strong voice, Bonner shows herself to have mastered the truncated lyrical mode in the lineage of Emily Dickinson, H.D., Linda Gregg and Franz Wright. Such a pared down style functions to highlight the emotions coursing through the speaker as she recalls the intense passions of desire, falling in love and the anguish of heartbreak.
Bonner’s background in film studies no doubt informs her image-driven verse, and many of her poems give a cinematic view onto a lush or stark landscape. “Disclosures,” for example, sets up post-coital satiation and bliss with these opening lines: “In that / which is half-lit, / like the white / peaches at dusk, still / cupping the heat / of the afternoon, / of August, / I am able to recognize / nothing more / than the outline / of my own figure / and his, / the initial blues / of evening.” The next stanza has the couple “Seeing things fully clothed—the orchard winged in green.” Here, the visual field holds the interior ache of lust spilling into romantic love beautifully. Her short and medium-length poems, which tend to deliver a tightly focused and luminous still frame or two and provide tonal illustrations of the poem’s narrative arc, use gorgeous images as a sensu al-qua-sensuous delivery system to great effect. For example, here’s the entirety of “And when he told her it was truly over this time”: “he looked at her like November light flung / long across a porch.” This piece comes at the end of a section in which the speaker realizes the affair has come to an end.
Regarding the setting, Bonner’s tryst and fallout are set mostly outdoors in the South and Midwest, and the speaker characterizes these landscapes, and the affair itself, as what we might best term anti-pastoral. In addition to subverting the idealized, sense-heightening elements of luminous natural beauty, the speaker’s lush and harsh descriptions of impassioned coupling in nature challenge and rearrange the romantic elements embedded in tropes about the affairs as wild, carnal, beguiling spaces in which lovers can give their human desire an animal form of expression. In her memory, the speaker and her lover move in and out of the euros-charged woods and prairie as agents of animal passions while disrobing themselves of gendered constructs of the body, entangling their forbidden intersubjectivity in the liminal spaces of tall grasses, thickets, dark woods and behind waterfalls. Above them, across a scattering of poems, the affair reaches its fever pitch and we see the night sky characterized as “A thrash of moonlight,” “Silent as a somnambulist in the green gutted night,” “stars” and their “quiet gasp,” “a tumult of stars overhead, radiant and fanged.” Such strong language frames the celestial sphere as a mirrored firmament in which the lovers saw their passion reflected as doomed by the universe’s destructive forces.
Throughout, the co-mingling of bliss and pain, of legitimate and illegitimate love, brings Jacques Lacan’s notion of jouissance to mind. In Lacanian psychoanalysis, borrowing from Schopenhauer’s and Freud’s conceptions of the sex and death drives, the relationship between the movements toward joy and self-destruction (symbolic death) is complex. We often find intense sexual pleasure and romantic bliss to be irritating or painful once they’re within our experiential grasp. Lacan says the force creating this psychic chafing isn’t due to a desire to die but rather to one to disrupt the established order, to lean into the taboo and defy limits placed on us by society. Bonner situates the affair’s blissfully painful opening and agonizing closure in such complexity. In “To the Bone,” the speaker states “the wet / want inside me whispers / spring is coming.” And “This Morning,” another of Bonner’s condensed-to-perfection, imagistic poems, has the wind devouring her “like a whole life / left open. / Space, allowance, stars— / everything I’ll take.” The pleasure and bliss the speaker experiences in this affair are consistently linked to her loss, the impossibility of possessing the love object her speaker desired most. In the absence of the really good hurt administered by her love object, she finds the imaginary annihilation by natural forces to be an objective substitution more appealing than numb nothingness.