I-70 Review
Writing and Art from the Middle and Beyond
Hadara Bar-Nadav
Hadara Bar-Nadav's most recent book of poetry is The New Nudity (Saturnalia Books, 2017). Her previous books include Lullaby (with Exit Sign) (Saturnalia Books, 2013), awarded the Saturnalia Books Poetry Prize; The Frame Called Ruin (New Issues, 2012), Runner Up for the Green Rose Prize; and A Glass of Milk to Kiss Goodnight (Margie/Intuit House, 2007), awarded the Margie Book Prize. She is also the author of two chapbooks, Fountain and Furnace (Tupelo Press, 2015), awarded the Sunken Garden Poetry Prize, and Show Me Yours (Laurel Review/Green Tower Press 2010), awarded the Midwest Poets Series Prize. In addition, she is co-author with Michelle Boisseau of the best-selling textbook Writing Poems, 8th ed. (Pearson, 2011). Her awards include a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship in Poetry, the Lucille Medwick Award from the Poetry Society of America, and others. Individual poems appear in the Kenyon Review, Ploughshares, American Poetry Review,·The Believer, The New Republic, Academy of American Poets, and elsewhere.··She is a Professor of English and teaches in the MFA program at the University of Missouri-Kansas City.
Artist Statement
My artistic practice is fueled by a desire to explore the flexibility and interdisciplinary reach of lyric poetry.· I am the author of four books of poetry and two chapbooks.· Each of my books challenges me to innovate and experiment with subject matter, language, and form. ·As a writer, I am excited by the potential of poetry to bridge disciplines and discourses, including art, architecture, literature, history, and medicine.· My influences have included a variety of artists, among them Louise Nevelson, René·Magritte, Emily Dickinson, and Paul Celan.· Death has been a common theme in my poetry, which is directly linked to my being the child of Holocaust survivors.· Having read about the operas, plays, visual art, and writing produced by prisoners in Terezin—the concentration camp where much of my family was killed—I have come to believe that creativity is a necessary counterbalance to destruction.· Art is an unyielding and beautiful force in the world; it reaffirms that we are alive—breathing, wriggling, sentient.
Lullaby (with Exit Sign)
I slept with all four hooves
in the air or I slept like a snail
in my broken shell.
The periphery of the world
dissolved. A giant exit sign
blinking above my head.
My family sings
its death march.
They are the size of the moon.
No, they are the size
of thumbtacks punched
through the sky's eyelid.
What beauty, what bruise.
(What strange lullaby is this
that sings from its wound?)
Here, my dead father knocks
on a little paper door. Here
my family knocks, waits.
Come through me, my darlings
whatever you are: flame,
lampshade, soap.
Leave your shattered shadows
behind. I'll be the doorway
that watches you go.
___________________________
From Lullaby (with Exit Sign), 2013
(Saturnalia Books)
First published in Prairie Schooner.
Fountain
Dirty, dirty boy,
what have you done?
Your bath splattered
with cigarette butts, leaves,
the droppings of doves.
No chlorine can clean
your iron-eating years.
Eyes peeled open,
genitals exposed.
A mounting rod lodged
in the base of your back.
Children poke you
and steal your pennies.
The loose change of your mind
emptied by the smallest hands.
Who isn't barbaric anymore?
The people no longer notice
you, bound in stone,
charming
as a taxidermied swan.
Splayed on the plaza square
in mid-spring,
you wait to be turned on.
___________
From The New Nudity, 2017
(Saturnalia Books)
First published in AGNI.
Dust Is the Only Secret
Tender father. Feather your face. Fingers laced with June. This waiting room white as always. July.
You were patient. August. Body of wilted springs. Part tissue. Part decay. Paralysis. September, and
the months drip. Patience. Pain. Infinite contain. Patient between 3 AM and Tuesday. Between sponge
bath and morphine. Between warfarin and vomiting. Current, rubber, hiccup, vex. The body lit up,
needled, electric. You dream, half-life, half-lit. Machines chirp metallic lullabies. A neon line blinks
across a black screen. Pulse like a promise green and green until the heart stops, sleeps.
_____________________________________________
From Lullaby (with Exit Sign), 2013 (Saturnalia Books) First Published in POOL.
I Would Have Starved a Gnat
This lean of bone and tilt. All odd angles to the sun. Flut. Flet. Flatten me with your mad flit. Your fast tying hands. All odd angles and eminent collapse. Now on our knees. Now bowing. Please, kiss my littlest one. A video found in a bunker underground. I once was a night. Once nightly news. See the vultures and gnats flock to our shivering. Food's necessity on me—like a Claw—. A gathering of wingly things so all you see is weather. Turning iridescent. Turning black. The kingdom of the body blown to ash. Buttons of us left in the sun. The crown and the teeth. The aftermath. No moist benevolent thing between us. Take me. Take half.
_____________________________________________
From Lullaby (with Exit Sign), 2013 (Saturnalia Books) First Published in Crazyhorse.
Door
Hung by two pins and swelling,
lacquered and puckering.
Effaced by thumbprints
sealed with grease and ink.
Your quick hands cancel
my gunmetal locks.
No one notices my head, no one soothes
my forehead with a cool cloth.
You handle me, he handles me.
My gold protuberance
available by turns.
I am legless and cannot move.
I am tongueless, mute
to your touch.
I unleash my deranged triangle
of shadows when pushed.
If you look under my skirt you'll see
the darkness of another world.
________________________________________ From From The New Nudity, 2017 (Saturnalia Books)
First published in American Letters & Commentary.
Zombie
A zombie is a head
with a hole in it.
Layers of plastic,
putty, and crust.
The mindless
must be sated.
Mottled men who will
always return
mouthing wet
promises.
You rise already
harmed and follow
my sad circle
as if dancing
on shattered legs.
Shoeless, toeless,
such tender absences.
You come to me
ripped
in linens and reds,
eternal, autumnal
with rust and wonder.
My servant, sublimate
and I am yours
(the hot death
we would give each other).
My dark ardor,
my dark augur.
Love to the very open-
mouthed end.
We are made of
so much hunger.
____________________________________
From The New Nudity, 2017 (Saturnalia Books).