Mansions, Meat-Cuttery

Robin Ekiss’s first book, The Mansion of Happiness, is peopled with characters that often feel like apparitions and poems that read like textual emanations of Joseph Cornell boxes. Like those works, Ekiss’s poems are assemblages of orphaned objects (and subjects)—they are associative, and they are deeply nostalgic, but unlike Cornell, Ekiss is keenly skeptical. The father—“the shadowboxer”—in these poems has the subtly menacing cool of a businessman; the mother—“the miniaturist”—is withholding, demure, and potentially passive-aggressive; the daughter, as the speaker of “World Without Birds” says:

             sometimes I am the daughter
             and sometimes
             the idea of her.

All of them are introduced to us within the first several lines of the book. Suffice it to say that family, the body, and gender (Ekiss tells us “the face in general” is “a house / built by men”) are all central to the text, yet even when the poems appear ostensibly whole the reader is aware of the seams where things once beautiful and dear have been sewn together. This seems fitting for a poet who spent college summers as a meat cutter. It is, then, a testament to Ekiss’s abilities that the poems, far more often than not, feel organic.
The spareness of these poems, and their visceral nature, attests to this; one never feels that Ekiss has sacrificed anything by what she withholds. There is power in what is omitted. The reader is provided with intriguing objects, some dark, some striking, but with enough space in which to view them that one is also keenly aware of the great emptiness that exists there. One has the sense of how easily the page one has just turned to might have been blank, lending the work significant eeriness and solemnity:

            I have to lift her skirt to see the levers,
             skin of her calves whiter than paper
            embedded with light, pinpricked by the spire

           like the air above a church,
             that blue of veins and cells
           saying we’re commingled.

As for what happens in The Mansion of Happiness, it often seems as though, in a manner evocative of Pinter, it’s what’s not said, what’s happening in the white space that often seems most important. And though many events occur, the actions within the book are performed and received by characters who feel largely vacant or spectral, though not mono-dimensional. Though the familiar contexts of confessional poetry are present, in part, precisely because the speakers seem as though they might disappear at a touch, the poems largely avoid the histrionics of traditional confessional verse. This is particularly fortunate because though Ekiss is more talented than most, the psychic drama of the poems often invokes a kind of easy surrealism, and she simply does not have the matchless originality and precision of language and imagery that allowed Plath, for instance, to “get away with” melodrama. Ekiss writes in “The Bones of August”:

              Nothing in me wasted, 
              a use for grief, even. 
              I wore it on my left hand.

              I was married to it. I planted myself 

              in the dirt: 
              alphabets grew up 
              from the bones of my feet. 

              I drowned my heart 
              in the lake. 

Or, from “The Bird of God”: 

               Mother, I am
               out of my mind, spilling everywhere.

But this is a soft insult; after all, who does possess such rare talents.

Something particularly intriguing and unusual about The Mansion of Happiness is its engagement with interiority, not simply the self’s interior, but more centrally, the Bachelardian interior of objects. Bachelard tells us that, “Wardrobes with their shelves, desks with their drawers, and chests with their false bottoms are veritable organs of the secret psychological life. Indeed, without these ‘objects’ … our intimate life would lack a model …” On the simplest level, Ekiss’s speaker is wondering always, what it is that’s going on inside of the heads of others. In the book’s opening poem, “Preface,” we are asked to imagine a dollhouse, “in every room, another room, // in every girl, another girl,” and later:

                what did you see, what did you see

                but that other girl in me,

                the door to whose post was nailed
                the smallest coffin,

                hiding the name of God inside
                like rust in the mouth.

This idea, particularly of the body or self inside the self—and so, the idea of repetition, and what is lost in replication—is crucial to these poems.
It is a kind of matryoshka doll effect, with particular images and concepts (if not actual dolls, then approximations: gargoyles, dummies, cadavers, mimes, fetuses, androids) repeated throughout the book, pointing to the importance not just of children as an extension of their parents and the family name, but also the border between any set of humans, between male and female, while also raising the complexities of penetration and the benefits and pain that openness to such a thing implies, not to mention a kind of everyday resilience that such a stance calls for: 

                 The pleasure in being a woman’s

                 knowing everything’s borrowed
                 and can’t be denied,

                 as when you take apart a clock,
                 there’s always another side

(“The Opposite of the Body”). And, so, at her best, Ekiss manages to be gritty without the kind of inauthentic “fierceness” of mere anger.
And, indeed, Ekiss is at her best conveying the world of The Mansion of Happiness through tight, evocative imagery, or ideas sharp enough to call to mind things so subtle we usually forget about them: “No one here remembers / the love of a chair for its ottoman / or the privacy of a shut door”; “The smallest stamp / of bees across the apron of a dog rose”; “The Hospital has many wings; / it’s hard to tell where the meat ends / and the butcher begins”; “Agnes, and her tray of breasts—”; “Light lacquers the small fractures”; and “Toothpick made from a humming- / bird’s claw? Razor strop, / breast pin, fossil?”
Though, at times, the images fall flat (spines are simply “laddered”) or are clunky (“round as the stones where cholera resided”), unsurprising (“please begins / with plea – linguistic insurgency // driven by a sense of urgency”), or naively pedantic, to put it lightly: “A man who slaughters / bathers the same / as a man who saves.” And though Bassani believed that “Poets … always return from the domain of the dead,” I cannot, for the life of me, understand why poets must always have the dead up and doing things in their poems, as when the speaker of “The Bones of August” imagines seeing her dead father walking down the street. In fact, the dead are simply dead, in heaven or in soil, and rivers do not care for our opinions, and so on. Still, Ekiss is nuanced enough that the same moments that feel flat on a given read feel quite precise on another, though this may have more do with the phenomenology of reading. 
In the end, The Mansion of Happiness evokes the rooms of a house the guests never see, a claustrophobic world, where family does not signify as it might, where bodies, whether human or toy, are something assembled and disassembled, where one wonders what it means to live alone while in the company of other humans, what it means to live with disillusionment as one’s primary companion. It is a world one grows out of to wonder not which memories can be salvaged, but what those memories might themselves salvage.