“In pictures my grandmother looks like a spirit, or a haunting . . . My mother says her hands were strong,”  Marie Conlan writes in her transcendent new anti-memoir Say Mother, Say Hand by Half Mystic Press. Conlan navigates a deep sea of questions, confronting family histories, secrets, and trauma.  The narrative provokes us to consider: What is held and what has fallen away? What can be retrieved, remembered? And how can we let go?

Conlan deftly collages small discoveries, like seashells, about her matriarchal lineage; moments and memories swirling around addiction, the Holocaust, mental illness, and abuse reveal themselves in hallucinatory and piercing ways. Readers arrive in the midst of a suicide of “cold terror”; we all arrive in “the marrow of shaking blue cocoons.” 

The mutable landscape of Say Mother Say Hand is composed of caterpillar caracasses and mermaids, debris and “bones in the river.”  We hover above the river and we are submerged in the chill of grief and abandonment:  “I feel real cold in the / leftover winter”.

This book invites us to witness and interrogate the fluidity of our own family lineages and envision the possibilities of our futures:  “my nephew is born & I spread my arms like lineage.”   There is also a consistent sense of (re)searching the past and grasping through the palimpsest.  In one instance, the narrator speaks to her late grandmother: “Renata, I have little to curate of you.”  

Conlan traces the ever shifting shoreline of crisis and catastrophe in coarse, yet startlingly beautiful prose.  We witness both the recognition and refusal of inheritance: “The possibility of your hands terrify us. We do not want your history.” Family cycles/cyclones are also exposed: “justlikemymother she crawls into bed she drinks / justlikemymother more vodka she take her benzos / Whole palm fulls.”

We are continually swept up in the undertow of unique, lyrical language; the syntax is often decentering, mirroring certain moments. Consider the velocity and urgency in this passage: 

I didn’t leave her the morning was the dog jumping on the bed

weird to see her idle up moving asking what she

can make me and I tried I I tried to wake

her up she wouldn’t wake up I tried to wake her up it had

been sixteen hours maybe I called

the ambulance she’s not up she’sshe’s in the ER . . .

In essence, Conlan examines the human desire for something to believe in: “proof of god” and “proof of family.” Houses bleed and bodies leak. The instability of self, of identity, and of language intersect. This timely book elicits a universal, “unknowable ache” in our permeable and vulnerable lives.