Sara Quinn Rivara’s Animal Bride (Tinderbox, 2019) is a must-read. The collection title evokes a fairy tale world of animals and matrimony which it delivers with a potent tone and braided storylines. In this dichotomous world set along the Great Lakes, the speaker is both the animal and the bride but also the bride of a vicious animal. Each poem contains flashes of separate scenes and observations, a representation of the confusion one feels when living and processing trauma. Days and items blur together, an idea heightened by the midwestern landscape where water, sky, and land all blur into one beige-gray setting. More pointedly, Rivara often personifies Lake Michigan in these poems. As a native of the Great Lakes region, I was instantly transported to winters along the giant freshwater shores. The book embodies the Lakes’ more cutting side: ice and snow, which also poses as metaphor for the animal bride’s stagnant life force along this frosted coast.

 
Winter in the Midwest, coupled with spousal abuse, darkens the tone of this fairy tale. Much of the speaker’s reflections are of a personal and dark time, as seen in the poem Lacuna: “but I knew / white silk makes a bridal / shroud and the morning / I was thrown against / the wall he said he thought / I was the dog—oh, / whatever can be fucked / is expendable.” The evocative white silk begets violence in these lines. Here, the imagery of brides/wives, girls, flowers, and trees is braided into the hellish themes of abuse.

 
Death and a variety of animals often appear in these pieces; there are many dogs, biblical animals, and others more common to midwestern lands such as deer and grouse and woodcocks.  Rivara makes each piece feel as if it is threaded together with sun-spun lace. Subtle internal rhyming also adds to the fairy-tale-esque feel of these poems as in, Letter from the Underworld: “My body has become borderless; there’s a blank / spot in the middle, pool with black flowers, red / of the dead swan—a woman is empty / space, closed mouth, broken jar.” Haunting and whimsical hang in the relationship between animal and human. 

A Wilderness of Women is the model poem of this collection and the gravitational point. It radiates holiness and femininity. There are a plethora of biblical and fairy tale references in this poem, which adds to the whimsical and haunting tone. While much of the collection does deal with a sense of entrapment and powerlessness, there are moments of strength, as in After You Left God, I, where Rivara writes, “If you come back, I’ll be ready. I’ll be the first beast you meet.”

October 2020