Reading Catherine Garbinsky’s collection of poems, Even Curses End, is to tramp through a shadowy and mysterious wood—a place that the speaker reminds us is both “dangerous and desirable at once.” A place that “not every girl survives” and, as the speaker warns us, the forest is sometimes some girls become.
The “wild” has always revolved between a place of power for young women and a place to be feared. It is a place to bellow the most primal and potent screams without fear of societal constraints. You can get naked, celebrate your body, relish in the safety of a space far from the violence of a patriarchal society. In essence, you can dance under the moon and live unabashedly as your brazen and bold self.
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On the other hand, the forest can be a place which lures you away from safety. Deep in the forest your screams can’t be heard. Your body can be consumed, buried, forgotten. Nobody to know where you went—that you ever even existed. This is the story that many young girls are told.
The warning.
The order to stay away.
It may be a narrative effort to keep young girls “good”—fearful of the wild and disconnected from their true power. However, in a world that is particularly unkind and violent to young women there is a hint of reality in the perils of tramping off into the dark wood alone.
Garbinsky invites us into both these possibilities in the opening poem, “Gingerbread House.” The speaker of this poem lives in “secret silence of the woods” for many years. She is the obligatory witch of the wood. She conjures magic, builds a sanctuary, and dwells in relative peace free of the village’s scrutiny of (what else?) her body— “They did not see my robin’s egg heart, / only the crooked branches of my body.”
Yet, when two strangers from town stumble upon her cottage, her kindness is met with violence and, ultimately, her death. After inviting them in and offering food, the two strangers eat their fill but then become brutal. Ultimately, the two strangers shove the speaker into the blue flames of the oven where her “cries become tinder” and her “body melt[s] into night.”
The book’s introductory poem sets the scene for the reminder of the collection in that the titular curse that arises again and again is the speaker’s lost voice (“cries becoming tinder”) which often manifests in the body fighting to say what the voice cannot.
At times, Garbinksy’s poems read like nightmares—the ones where you open your mouth to scream but anything but that scream comes out. The voice becomes a toad leaping from the lips (“Mother Holle, Or How Bipolar Disorder Rends the World in Two”), church bells ringing or even a spindle (“Seven Years of Silence”), or bones singing out “against the rough of fermented love” (If My Bones Could Sing). Repeatedly, the female body sings through trauma as a reminder that though you can struggle to be heard vocally, you will not be ignored, that the body cannot be possessed by another and demands to take up space—“I wandered naked, / having given you all but my skin, my muscle, my bones” (“Clothed In Starlight”).
In “East Of The Sun, West Of The Moon,” the speaker details a journey to finding a sense of safety in the body, a sense of home, after leaving a situation of lies and deception, possibly from a romantic partner.
The poem opens:
My feet were heavy as your lies, I was
tired of moving, never escaping.
I left again, looking for a place beyond
secrets and curses.
I rode on the back of hope,
calling out for safety,
calling out for home—
though I didn’t know what it meant.
The speaker is searching is not only for home but the meaning of home. The journey to such a place, physically and philosophically, takes the speaker to new and differing phases of doubt, altered paths and new directions, and even away from a life of silence in which the speaker travels “west of the silence in your hands” (carrying a particularly ominous sentiment of silence caused by violence at the hands of another) By the end, the speaker begins to find relief and a possible future in the power of the body to rebuild and regenerate after grief:
In my next place, I didn’t bother to hang art or curtains.
I knew I would move again soon,
I unpacked a few boxes, left the rest stored in the closest.
My heart was stored away with them.
Eventually I will dig it out, dust it off.
Build a new home out of my bones.
I will rest then.
I will rest.
The curse—whether that is silence, violence, or deception—will eventually end. As much as this collection of poems is full of horrific possibilities of voicelessness for the speaker, there is always an underlying heartbeat of hope. A constant fighting against being utterly consumed by the forest—a transformation that occurs in spite of world that seems set to destroy. And then, eventually, the curse will crack, “splintering / softly like an egg” (“Once I was a Nightingale”). For this speaker, the voice does return, calls out, and breaks the spell to find healing while looking back on that journey through the dark wood.
