Leaving Tulsa (Volume 75)

by Jennifer Elise Foerster

In her first magical collection of poetry, Jennifer Elise Foerster weaves together a mythic and geographic exploration of a woman’s coming of age in a dislocated time. Leaving Tulsa, a book of road elegies and laments, travels from Oklahoma to the edges of the American continent through landscapes at once stark and lush, ancient and apocalyptic. The imagery that cycles through the poems—fire, shell, highway, wing—gives the collection a rich lyrical-dramatic texture. Each poem builds on a theme of searching for a lost “self”—an “other” America—that crosses biblical, tribal, and ecological mythologies.

In Leaving Tulsa, Foerster is not afraid of the strange or of estrangement. The narrator occupies a space in between and navigates the offbeat experiences of a speaker that is of both Muscogee and European heritage. With bold images and candid language, Foerster challenges the perceptions of what it means to be Native, what it means to be a woman, and what it means to be an American today. Ultimately, these brave and luminous poems engage and shatter the boundaries of time, self, and continent.

Foerster’s journey transcends both geographic space and the confines of the page to live vividly in the mind of the reader.

Genres: Poetry

88 pages, Paperback

First published March 21, 2013

Reviews

[Nadine in NY Jones · Rating 3 out of 5]

I really wanted to like these poems, and I almost got there.  But they were mostly a little too experimental for me.  A lot of themes repeat throughout the book:  her grandmother's death, rib bones, fire, ashes, crows, cedar trees.  Sometimes I got it, most of the time I did not.

Apple of My Eye
1.
I am watching my reflection
in the dark and drafty window—

a crow on a crown of cedar
cawing out for her other wing.

2.
In the drooping orchard, plump
pomegranates.  I am watching the crows’
broad wings rising
slow over branches, beaks
pecking into white flesh.  It is late
November.  My stomach is a stretched
canvas of winter where birds
spit skin onto the browning grass.

I lay beneath the frozen limbs
thinking of pomegranates—
of what it would be
to be inside a bed of glistening
crimson seeds
as a tongue slides over me,
breaks me into juice.

3.
Uprooting the body was effortless.

Because I woke with no word
from the stream beneath my skin—a child
wrapped in the net of my breast.

Because I called her aloneness
the word on the tongue,
the same word as
watercolor, desert-scape,
taupe line—the many shades of stone.

Because I slipped across the indistinct shadow.

Couldn’t make out the black rock
from waters after twilight.  Make sound
as you cross, the little girl called
barefoot four stones head of me—

You will be safer if they can hear you coming.

4.
In the erupted doorways of the pre-dawn
I walk into the frozen orchard.
Blankets of blackbirds
peck at husks, hunchback women
lean from the night—I call to them.
No answer.  In the clearing the child has
candles for hands.  I look for the blink
of the moon on the branch—
one eye like an ember, one socket
of snow.  A black wing crossing
a circle of stones
fills your tracks with shadow.
Behind me coils a trail of leaves.
I call for the crow
from the lattice of trees,
tempt her with memories of gleaming
apples—It is imperative you tear
her up she cause nuzzling her beak
deep inside me and
spitting the seeds on the forest floor
where the sun in the morning is shattering
and brilliant with the prism of your ghost
drumming in the hollows of your rushed body.

5.
Sirens gather apples in their tents.
They spit the scraps of my eyes into the fire,
string my hair through the cemetery trees.

Beneath the raven’s teeth, a little girl
runs into the crevice of the sunrise.

Dawn flares
in the stained-glass window,
ignites my palm’s white cross of flames.


6.
I open my palms,
she shatters them—glass windows
stain the snowdrifts.

I light a candle in the marbled hall.
She dances with ribbons, willow sticks,
a black pony-tail on a pinewood pole—
this is still not enough to gather back
the seeds I spit out into gutters.

Because it was not my hands but an instrument
that removed the ovular body,
widened cracks in her half-
closed eyes,

a place to slip through—
dim light in the kitchen at daybreak.
Glint of bread knife on the floor.

The buttress of the dollhouse
buckles.  The chest of a magpie
splays across pavement.

I rummage the carcass
with a fishing pole,

unhook the dream
from its vanishing—

but it is only the dream’s
fresh lace of snow
outside the window

as I go into the kitchen,
place a warm nest
on the pine table,

crush nine small eggs to swallow.

[Michael · Rating 1 out of 5]

I have to say, there was hardly anything memorable in these poems, inasmuch as I could feel the writer feeling them as they were written. The images are all too . . . disconnected, too dreamlike, so much so that the context is erased and without any context each image felt completely self-contained: I started to read it like a kind of summary of a Ren and Stimpy episode (which if you can find the summaries of unaired episodes on Youtube, they are unbelievably hilarious). Each poem starts to get more and more ridiculous as it goes on, and indeed I did begin laughing at them.
.
Further, everything is made to be a symbol of something, giving everything so much meaning that in the end there is almost no meaning at all, nothing to anchor these poems to, which is unfortunately very common in a lot of published poetry these days.
.
Oh well.

[Alex Johnson · Rating 5 out of 5]

This collection of poems really showed me what poetry can do in the hands of a master. Foerster traces images of maps and clay and land throughout these poems, creating a cohesive collection that explores these motifs and how they interweave with each other.

Most of the poems hover in that sweet spot of half understanding and half bewilderment and full awe of the world being spun together. It reminds me of the best thing that poetry can do--concurrently see the familiar as foreign through someone else's eyes and yet recognize the feelings undergirding the poem. I found myself not fully understanding some of these poems' words but deeply resonating with the feeling underneath it.

[Katherine Hoerth · Rating 5 out of 5]

There is a strange beauty running through Jennifer Elise Foerster's first book of poems, Leaving Tulsa, a breathless and eerie strain that explores multiple narratives of the self, the landscape, about culture, about history, about loss. The reader is taken through the arid countryside that, while may be familiar to some, here, takes on a haunting aura that reflects the speakers' grief and longing where "cicadas/ deafen the sultry twilight" and the only rainbows in sight are made from gasoline (47). However, these poems are not just lament and elegy; rather, they are poems and stories that blur the boundaries of self, what it means to be human in a complex world like ours.


Read my full review here: http://boxcarpoetry.com/033/review_je...

[Scott]

I do not want to rate this book. I am the wrong person to assess its merits, because this style of poetry is not what I like. The imagery in most of the poems is dreamlike, but that means it is very subjective. My dreams may make great sense to me (or at least evoke strong emotional responses even when they do not make sense), but I do not expect them to make sense to someone else -- unless I make a great effort to explain their connections, allusions, and implications. Those explanations are not present. The reader is left to infer all of that, so I have no idea what the poet intended to say with many of the poems (other than present a general sense of melancholy). I find the poems inaccessible, but to someone else they may be very enjoyable.

[David A Townsend · Rating 1 out of 5]

Beautiful words and structure, I was unable to decode or find an emotional resonance.

[Jennifer · Rating 4 out of 5]

Some really beautiful poems in this collection.