Summer/Fall 2016

 

Reviewed by Cody Smith

 

Hurricane Party
By Alison Pelegrin
The University of Akron Press, 2012. 63 pp. $14.95.

 

I was born and raised in Louisiana where water soaks the land and the humid air. People say there’s something in the water, and, for Louisiana, water is everywhere, especially Alison Pelegrin’s South Louisiana. Something in it is mystical, hoodoo soaked in the brackish mud, gators and shrimp and crawfish, catfish and bottom feeders, floodwater’s destructive force, oil slicks sliming the Gulf Coast from the Deep Horizon spill. Pelegrin’s Louisiana water carries all these things.

Rivers, creeks, bayous, and lakes vein the landscape and psyche of both Louisianan’s and the poems in Hurricane Party. In “Louisiana,” she reminds us that Louisiana is a “Fantastical sinking state, of a boot the heel-toe-heel/ invisible, one football field a day drowned/ to sop the Mississippi’s mighty slop.” There’s a dichotomy in the waters of Hurricane Party: the rising oceans and hurricane storm walls that breach levees erode ways of life, but water is also a canvas Pelegrin uses to depict facets of Louisianans’ life that doesn’t change:

 

Red skin,

Redneck river at the dirt road’s end. River

Of ghosts, river of garbage, of beer cans

in wire baskets, river where no ass is too fat

for rebel flag boxer shorts. River reminding

me that in a way, the South did win,

at least for show.

 

The crawling pace of life, though never praised as a fore piece in the work, idles along the lines like a drawled sentence. Hurricane Party holds something as simple as floating down the Bogue Chitto in an inflatable tube as poetry and rightfully so.

Thankfully, Pelegrin’s poetic eye is more than willing to show its reader our warts: the refuse we dump into the water we love, rebel flags tattooed into skin, flying from the bed of pickup trucks, the flag even finding its way to the backside of underwear. Pelegrin jabs the good ole boys, the chest thumpers, the peacockers who dangle huge, metal bearing balls from their enormous four-wheel drive trucks in “Blue Balls”:

 

Country boy, in blue jeans straddling the blue balls

chained to your truck—what’s wrong with this picture?

Hint hint—it’s not your package, a sky-blue rabbit’s foot

bulging through your Wranglers—but the other—

that-which-must-be cock-socked, tucked away on first dates

and church picnics.

 

The speaker in “The N-Word” cringes when her “people pull the trigger on the n-word,” her people being Cajuns. The speaker shares with us, “I took to bed without supper once—on my birthday—/ locked down in my room for not repeating It/ on command.” Louisianans know there’s a racial slur for Cajuns, too. Pelegrin explains for the possibly uniformed that it’s “coonass,” as she continues to meditate on race, oppression, and colonialism:

 

My people, coonass proud,

Coonass a slur condemned by linguists

As meaning nothing, less than nothing, really,

Because they take it to mean “less than black.”

Look at them—the whole back row at church.

Less than black, and less than French, their jolie

Cajun words shamed out of them by nuns,

So that what’s left is worn thin like Sunday shoes

Passed down a ladder of sisters. Wicked trochee.

Crippled heartbeat. Wince every step of the walk.

 

These moments of lament, moments of witness, feel necessary if Hurricane Party is to present itself as genuine as it goes on to celebrate a culture we all know is not without its flaws. Pelegrin does not shy away from the South’s rebel flags, from its racial unrest, and the book feels more authentic for her clear-eyedness.

Hurricane Party is a triumph in voice. So many poets make great use of the page as a physical space, a literal canvas for their words. More experimental forms have a way of transcending the poem into a kind of visual art, too. I didn’t find this aesthetic in Hurricane Parties, and, to be clear, I would have been disappointed if I had. Pelegrin’s mostly left aligned, mostly straightforward construction really scaffolds her voice beautifully. All the white space, the forced caesuras would weigh the voice down, would be too much of a speed bump. Instead, Pelegrin’s lines sing with the music of her southern drawl. Read these poems aloud, and feel their fullness in your mouth. Pelegrin knows it, too. With Whitman-esque exuberance, she proclaims in “Where Y’at” that “Now I will sing the Louisiana drawl,” and with the poem’s place—in the beginning of the collection but close to the middle—Pelegrin gives words to a feeling that I had started to intuit: This is a collection of music, a celebration of dialect. Reader, you’ll be hard-pressed to find a restaurant in Cajun country on a weekend night that isn’t full of people dancing to a Zydeco band. Music saturates the whole of New Orleans, and not just with jazz of brass bands, though you’ll find plenty of that. There’s music in the tap dancers clapping their feet for tips, wannabe rappers freestyling on the corner, the clop of horse carriages, the hiss of Spanish moss, the percussive clang of busboys, cooks singing in kitchens. Some days it seems as if everyone owns a tambourine or knows someone with a tambourine or knows a guy who knows a guy. It’s in the whooshing of second line umbrellas. And Pelegrin’s poetry is in tune with it all.

Hurricane Party is more than just a celebration of voice, though. Like any true Southerner, Pelegrin can tell you a story. But it’s more than just storytelling, too. It’s the craft in which she steeps her poems that really takes me aback. Throughout Hurricane Party, Pelegrin laments an eroding French heritage. In here litany of names for Louisiana in the poem “Louisiana” she calls it the “I-will-not-speak-French-in-the-schoolyard state.” She reminds us in “The N-Word” that the French language and heritage is wearing “thin like Sunday shoes/ passed down a ladder of sisters.” So finding French forms like villanelles and pantoums in the collection feels satisfying. A nod. A kind of call and response embedded in the collection as a whole. But those form poems are more interesting than just a way to reclaim a vanishing French voice. Pelegrin uses the forms to mirror themes and to echo the storytelling style of all those front porch coffee drinkers whose coffee goes cold while they try to finish their story. For instance, in the loose villanelle “Burying the Hatchet,” Pelegrin’s repeating lines feels like every story my grandfather has ever told me. It takes him four different ways to get at the same point. It’s a cyclical process, things are repeated, changes here and there, but the music in the repetition, the way the style builds its own force is mirrored perfectly in Pelegrin’s form poems.

In her pantoum “Stupid Praise,” the repeating lines—Pelegrin takes liberties with their constancies, but the lines are still recognizably similar—echoes both what is going on in her book and what was going on in the news. “One last Katrina poem” opens the poem. And, near the collection’s end, I can feel Pelegrin’s self-consciousness of her Katrina poems. The book, not unlike a hurricane, operates as a centrifuge, with Katrina as its engendering spark. The repetition in “Stupid Praise,” contextualized by the book’s own reemerging riffs on Katrina, feels more poignant. The form is the manifestation of lines earlier in the work where a sense of hesitancy is present:

 

Bellyaching, praying with strangers—

it became my life’s work. Didn’t want the job,

but there I was, scratching out words, taking notes…

 

Pelegrin wants to let herself turn away from her new reality and face, instead, a more comfortable past:

 

Wish I could be funny again, like the old me,

wild child with food and music on the mind,

because I am worn out with bringing

 

nothing but needs to the hands of the Lord

beginning that day I packed the kids in the car

for a head start against The Hurricane.

 

Pelegrin becomes the reluctant hero archetype. She would rather not be post-Katrina Louisiana’s sage. I am, however, so glad it is Pelegrin. It should be a Louisianan who writes this book. Like Pelegrin in “Self-Portrait in a Tourist’s Snapshots,” I, too, am tired of people rubbernecking our state’s struggle as fodder for poetry, for social media statuses, for pats on the back, well intentioned as they may be. In her role as reluctant hero, Pelegrin’s eye takes in the destruction, the haggardness of rebuilding a home, neighborhoods, cities, a state, and a way of life, but hope twangs in the poems’ drawl. Even after placing us in the weariness of “ripping up carpets and breathing the stench/ of minnows shriveled on concrete,” Pelegrin, however, allows celebratory in tone and spirit to make its way into the poem:

 

a feast of outage-thawed seafood,

the easy work of peeling tape

from crossed-off windows,

 

each pane scraped clean

a day the calendar is giving back.

 

For Louisianans, there’s a strength of spirit. There’s a need for silver linings to make it through the day and finding them is a skill passed down from all the bayou people before. Pelegrin’s Louisiana in Hurricane Party is one where families sit together at the dinner table:

 

long after a meal

is cleared, telling our stories, which are one

story, the same story over and again,

only sometimes a few words added or missing,

story which, despite its heartbreak and body count

has always been about rebirth.

 

Ultimately, rebirth is what’s in the Louisiana water, and the horizon demarking the Pontchartrain from the hot sky is silver.

 

[Check out Cody’s backporch wisdom]