In her ferocious poetry collection Look Look Look, Callista Buchen discovers in the prose poem an ideal form for her project: a prolonged, ontological investigation of motherhood. Her aim is essayistic; her form, hybrid. Like Plath, who casts herself as a cloud being wiped out in the eye of the puddle that it has birthed, Buchen describes the cellular biology of the mother’s “self-effacement,” the identity of the self that is at stake. “The cells of children,” she writes in the title poem, “move through the placenta, latch onto the mother’s lungs, liver, brain.” Buchen lands not far from Plath’s cloud with the assertion: “A fissure leads to fog.”

Poised as a sort of counterweight, the second poems of each of the book’s five sections (all called “Flashes”) are monostichic. Yet from these airy interludes, too, the bouncing pronouns—first, second, third—blur the identities of individual women into the one, the commune. In keeping with the philosophical character of the book, we infer the general from particular examples, but never with such rapidity as we do in the interludes. 

Another way the prose poem serves Buchen’s purpose is with its resemblance to the book’s dominant metaphor: Woman as house. Prose poems are blockish. The injunction of “Onward” is: “act as if your arms are open windows, like your body is all mortar and brick.” Most of these poems resemble what women are made or expected to be: domicile, birthplace. In contrast, men in the book are peripheral, self-indulgent in melancholy, as seen with the husband (never ”my husband”) who promises to stay awake but doesn’t, the one who sleepwalks and is unable or unwilling to provide needed support. Subjected to social and biological horrors, the women in these pages transmogrify. They become surreal: collect hard hats, deflect tornadoes with steel, and cradle traffic cones. The more their identities are subsumed, the more their bodies are weaponized against themselves, the stranger their obsessions become. 

As a man, I think of Look Look Look as the ultimate Mother’s Day book. Ultimately what follows from the “gasping and bloody” hardship of poems like “Apparition” is the heroism of becoming, in “Threshold,” a fortress, a monument, a door for her children to pass through, unharmed.

October 2019