Marcia LeBeau’s debut collection, A Curious Hunger, is a powerful testament to the unabashed wholeness of womanhood—and an assertion that our culture, where power skews cis male, needs to make space for it. All of it. This is a big ask, for Western culture has a longtime habit of affording women far less space than it affords men. Personal space and autonomous power have become entangled in a dynamic erroneously seen by the powers-that-be as a zero-sum game: fear that the more space women have, less will be left for men. Though A Curious Hunger at times addresses this power dynamic directly, the reason I consider it a deeply political book is because I consider writing about the personal to be a political act, especially when it comes to a woman’s sexuality, bodily autonomy, and roles in society.
Matters both weighty and light, somber and carnivalesque, weave through the fabric of these poems, just as they do through life. Through an embodied female lens, A Curious Hunger rejects black-and-white thinking about marriage, motherhood, sisterhood, sexuality, and liminality; rejects reductive attitudes towards women, à la “virgin-or-whorehood,” that our culture can’t seem to get past.
This kind of judgmental theistic thinking has helped shape models of cultural history that stretch all the way back to ancient mythologies, the most widely known being the monomyth conceived by Joseph Campbell. He teased out (or perhaps wove in) a common thread from all these mythologies and termed it “The Hero’s Journey.” According to this trope, the hero descends into an underworld, where he slays dragons, battles through obstacles, and secures treasure, all the while gaining knowledge and wisdom which he generously bestows upon the mundane world when he returns. Though billed as a progression of archetypal events that represent universal human experience, it is, in fact, very much limited to the male experience. Girls and women were never ceded the space to go off on solo adventures.
Moreover, unlike young men who choose to go boldly into the underworld, women are generally dragged there. Take Persephone, for example, who was forcibly taken by the king of the underworld himself. And despite her mother’s, Demeter’s, deific status (she was Zeus’ sister for gods’ sake!), not even she could protect Persephone from this fate. “Toward the River” relays the speaker’s own underworld experience, in retrospect,
I never understood why my mother let me leave the house
with him. Maybe she was high off the frosting from the cake
they had just shared for a joint birthday. Maybe because he was in
med school and bound to take an oath that promised—
do no harm.
…how could she have imagined him turning right,
down the hill toward the river after we backed out of the driveway.
The dark water churning, invisible until we reached the boat slip
parking lot. The lot my family never turned into…
Like Persephone, the speaker will find wisdom and power in her underworld experience, but a woman does not become a powerful Queen of the Underworld overnight: her journey toward empowerment is long and winding, fraught with dangers even greater than the Hero faces on his journey, for the Hero’s eventual success is baked into the formula. The Heroine’s success, however, is far from guaranteed. One might even say the odds are stacked against her as she labors to bring her body out of the shadows into which it was unceremoniously driven; as she hauls it back into the mundane world, where it will be judged as defiled and devalued. Her task is to summon strength when the world deems her weak; summon self-worth when the world deems her worthless.
The only way for her to overcome these obstacles is to defy the cultural constraints which put them in place. Before she can defy them, though, she has to learn how to identify them. That’s the tricky and treacherous part. The poem “Training” illustrates this difficult situation into which she’s been wedged:
A man lands next to me in an empty
New Jersey Transit car. I cannot
hear what he’s saying, his salt and vinegar
breath so close. I’m trained to sit and smile and nod
and cannot (yes, believe this), cannot think of any other
way to stop the talking besides fake yawn, fake sleep. I turn
my head toward the window, press my temple cold
on glass. Minutes later he is running
his finger up the side of my thigh
The word “Training” is a brilliant double entendre here, referring to both the cultural learning women receive from an early age to be nice, compliant and deferential; not to take up too much space, and the vehicle that carries women through a network of public spaces in which her training is put to the test.
The thematic arc of the book takes the speaker on her journey out of the Underworld into the sprawling messiness of womanhood—and it doesn’t get messier than childbirth and breastfeeding, as the poem “The Survey” illustrates so viscerally:
The woman on the other end of the line
wants to know if I have postpartum depression.
I just want to know how my reality has become
Tucks pads slapped down in underwear like slices
of bologna and a bra holding rock-hard porn-star tits [….]I recount the ludicrous contortions between contractions
that made the midwife snort, “That eighteen-wheeler
plowing through your uterus, that’s nothing special
happens every day,” while she typed
on her Blackberry. Yet we’ll do it again.
Forget the moment our vaginas, butane-doused
and lit, tore open into the newest scalp on the planet.
This poem is unmatched in its brutally frank depiction of the moment a woman is at both her most powerful and her most helpless. It is a state of being that only a woman who’s given birth can possibly relate to, along with the bologna-slap of a Tucks pad and breasts filled to bursting with milk her body produced practically overnight. Her language of subjective experience defiantly one-ups the common cultural parlance of objectification: silicon porn star “tits” are mere fakes for the real thing.
The poem’s lineation provides a syncopated energy that carries the reader through the harrowing humor-laden scene in the same way the speaker’s body carries her through birthing and nursing a newborn. Just as musical syncopation displaces the regularity expected from given metrical patterns, arousing the listener’s desire to reestablish metric normality, the lyrical syncopation of LeBeau’s line-breaks disrupts units of meaning, arousing the reader’s desire to reestablish semantic normality. Note especially how lines such as “Forget the moment our vaginas, butane-doused…” pause mid-meaning, leaving the reader to wonder how the hell that line will end. By breaking the social taboo against writing this frankly about such a supremely unladylike experience of the female body, “The Survey” signifies a momentous step forward on the Heroine’s Journey.
LeBeau goes on to break an even bigger, juicier taboo in “Prenup,” when the speaker tells her future husband to make space for the possibility that she may enjoy being admired by other men:
I can’t promise you I know
how to sit across from a man,
as he lights his campfire heart,
without letting it warm me.
And I won’t pour water
over it before it glows down
to embers in the lambent
hours of morning.
As the shadow flames sashay…
It is no all-consuming inferno of passion, but rather a short-lived flicker of extra-marital interest, an acknowledgement of hidden womanhood, that she wants him to hold space for. What married woman doesn’t want that? None. What married woman admits it? None. This is what makes the poem so transgressive—and so necessary.
“After You Tell Me You and Your Wife Have ‘An Agreement’” presents a scenario where a man voices his clear intention to fan his so-called campfire into an inferno, to which she replies, “I want to talk about everything / except your agreement, / here in my car where you’re taking up too much space…. Be the kind of man / who doesn’t have an agreement, / so that I wish you did.” He is the kind of man whose self is so all-consuming that no space would be left for her.
After all, it is not desire for another but rather the desire for space that is the speaker’s ultimate aim in this book. Space is, after all, something women—wives, mothers, daughters, sisters, objects of male desire—have exceedingly little of.
We see this lack when she is home amidst the chaos of her young family in “The Finding.” It is a feeling every mother of young children will recognize instantly:
I stay at my post. At the sink, loading the dishwasher. Yell at someone
to do something.
I have no space for slowing down. A text that there is a bear
in the neighborhood.
I have space for that.
LeBeau relieves the emotional tension, whose force has built to near exploding, with perfectly timed humor. In much the same way, she relieves the claustrophobia of female confinement that’s been building throughout the book with poems that show our Heroine finally receiving the space she seeks, and passing it on to others.
In “While Our Airbnb Host Eavesdrops,” the speaker is grateful for her companion’s ability “to hold space better than anyone. I feel her holding. / Contemplate the word miracle.”
In “Slow Truths,” she holds time for her sister’s meticulous morning ritual:
I watch my Downs sister making breakfast. The way
she carefully removes the bread from the refrigerator. Takes out a slice,
shuffles to the toaster oven, opens the glass door and lays it softly
on the wire rack. People pay gurus big bucks and fail to learn
this mindfulness. She stands watching, waiting for the ding. After pulling up
the counter stool, there is butter and cutting and spreading
and re-spreading, tongue resting outside parted lips,
ready to take the first triumphant bite.
The space she holds here is filled with uncontainable love and patience.
In “Gen Z,” the speaker holds space for her young son’s eventual autonomy, imagining them at a college party, looking over
at the girl who is calling their name and I’ll know
that I’m definitely not their number one girl anymore… / Maybe they
won’t end up with wives. Or partners. Maybe they won’t even
end up as men. I wonder if they will change their names. Who they’ll
want to kiss, never mind if they’ll even go to college.
And in “What My Husband Should Know,” she makes space for his habitual tardiness, telling him (in her mind, as he’s not home yet):
When your place at the table is set again
and remains untouched after all the dishes have been cleared
when I sit on the chaise wondering about the ones
who loved me without fully knowing me while you
love me after slimy births and sudden deaths
LeBeau uses white space to convey the space she makes for him here—white space that simultaneously signifies the space he’s made for her wholeness over the course of their years together. Because that’s how holding space for one another works.
These white spaces widen even more in “After Fagradalsfjall,” a poem that opens with an image of volcanic rocks brought back from a recent trip to Iceland:
Lava rocks rest on the kitchen table a language of holes.
Our footsteps fall back into home patterns / /
A familiar dialect
The pyroclasts, light as paper
Joy hissing from the emptiness.
“A language of holes” is the love language that runs throughout the book: a language which is distinctly feminine, far from the strictures of rhetorical male discourse. It is a language spoken by those who know that “making space” is a generative act which does not take space away from its creatrix or creator. It is a language light as the touch of a mother who holds space for her son’s autonomy or the look of a sister who expands time itself to accommodate her sister’s slower pace. It is the language of a wife who carves space out of her annoyance to sympathize with her schedule-challenged husband and—is brazen enough to expect the same space be made for her in return.
