Geography
By Kelli Russell Agodon
Floating Bridge Press
ISBN 1-930446-06-3

elli Russell Agodon's chapbook, Geography, winner of the 2003 Floating Bridge Press Poetry Chapbook Award, is a graphic map of the specific way stations passed on a pilgrimage through the valley of the shadow.

While nurses and technicians in our most advanced bastions of medical science still refer to America's most dreaded disease by its euphemism "C A", Agodon calls a breast a breast, a cell a cell, describes a lead apron by its weight, and faces the beast name to name. There's nothing tentative about these stark descriptions.

Our pilgrim, though courageous, is not intrepid. She's scared spitless, and reaching for detachment, sometimes finds herself guilt-slung and angry, emotions that emerge most poignantly in the poem, "What I Told the Ceiling":

"I always thought my first ultrasound
would show the small hands
of my unborn child:
its jewel-sized heart beating inside me,
Instead, doctors search for a different growth,
one we don't throw parties for,
buy cigars or mail announcements
to our friends . . .


I am ripe, I whisper to the ceiling . . .

I want to pluck the fruit 
from my body. Return the apple
to the tree, to the invisible seed
that it appeared from. What am I growing?
Who can I blame?"

Poetry's erudite apologists love to point out how art can triumph over the disasters of suffering and death, but perhaps it is only those who have stood in its shadow who can appreciate the starkness of grief, that first morning in the hospital room, awakening to the body's grief for its lost member and contemplating

"What remains on the nightstand —
a lump of bagel,
a half-sipped ginger ale,
a crossword puzzle
empty of even the easiest words."

Agodon's long list of successes in her field — twice nominated for the Pushcart prize, and recipient of numerous acknowledgements of her work by publishers and grants — has undoubtedly served her well in honing her skills for the tangent grasp of metaphor which can integrate personal experience with wide travels. Geography as a whole most effectively succeeds in its seamless mesh of inner and outer places, and leaves the reader hoping along with the speaker hope for:

". . . future trips to France,
    to novels I will write and days spent
beneath a blue and white sun umbrella,
waves washing against the shore like promises."

© Sandy McKinney