The Brooklyn Rail

In a 2020 interview, Margaret Ross described a new goal of examining “the subtler, ubiquitous forms of violence which masquerade as etiquette or tradition.”¹ Her second collection of poems, Saturday, is the fruit of that project. Where Ross’s 2015 debut, A Timeshare, deployed an elaborate, page-sprawling syntax to expand a single point in time, Saturday sets out to capture the accrual of moments through which injustice is both learned and naturalized.

The problem of aiming language towards truth is a different one here: instead of twisting into escape trajectories, Saturday’s poems take on pangs of lust, guilt, love, and abjection that are more easily approached through cliché. Many of the poems’ speakers are teachers of writing (as Ross herself is), and they struggle to get their students to take on the big questions without falling back into familiar answers. Here is the speaker of “Theater,” an instructor at a summer art camp set on the grounds of an old mission school:

                               … Surprise
was what I was encouraging
having made muddled comments on cliché
after which I overheard one camper warn another

not to write about love love is a cliché.
Not love, just the way love gets described
I didn’t interject to say. Use your imagination
meaning: stuff in your head. But how

did what was in there get there?
That was not a summer topic.

The faulty circuitry in this exchange is what Ross seeks to reanimate, foregrounding topics like love and justice while giving an equal attention to the language available for describing them. Her teachers often find themselves neutralized in the face of the more insidious messages they see their students receiving: they are the voices of institutions whose own grounds of authority are “not a summer topic.”

As its title suggests, this is a book about the social education that takes place in between the school day and the sabbath. The poems of Saturday are set in the kinds of ostensibly safe spaces—childhood, classrooms, intimate relationships—where violence is present but also subject to a degree of willed or feigned control. Another teaching poem is named for William Blake’s Songs of Innocence and Experience, which could also be the title for this book. Like Blake, Ross is adept at seeing both tenderness and cruelty in the same image, at calling forthrightly for a justice that she knows her words alone can’t achieve.

The play between innocence and experience is most apparent in the collection’s childhood poems, where the world is seen at once through a child’s fanciful logic and the poet’s retrospective understanding. “Greenish Picture” collects figures of this doubleness in a young girl’s impressions of her childhood home. Its speaker remembers cherishing “a book whose cover / seemed romantic, though I couldn’t read / and later learned it was a manual / for natural pesticides.” She and her sister share a bedroom where a picture of a dog and a sleeping girl hangs on the wall: “My mother said / she bought the picture // because it made her think of us / so I studied it for evidence of what I was.” Ross gently evokes an inchoate awareness that this kind of study might become painful. The parents’ wine opener is “a silver person / who could raise her arms in despair,” and in the girls’ menagerie of stuffed animals lives a “fawn with holes in its skull / from when it was a salt shaker.”

The signature poetic move of Saturday is this sort of dreamy defamiliarization, shot through with the poet’s sense of the violence behind the curtain. Rather than purifying contact with the thing itself (“making the stone stony,” in the words of the Russian literary theorist Viktor Shklovsky), Ross’s redescriptions focus on the traces of human grotesquery left behind: the holes in the skull of the fawn. At their best, these lines ache with the half-articulation of the speaker’s own yearning: “magazines / in the waiting room not touched enough / to be soft yet.” At other moments, the voice of experience threatens to override the balance: “Later the city / added iron armrests / to stop people lying down.” This more overtly political voice makes for one of the trickier aspects of the collection, sounding the limits of Ross’s project by refusing to hide the intention.

Sex presents another liminal space where violence may be enacted, studied, and played at. The final poem of the collection (“Orange Tree”) reads as a response to Louise Glück’s classic poem “Mock Orange,” in which the smell of blossoms drives Glück’s speaker first to rage—

I hate them.
I hate them as I hate sex,
the man’s mouth
sealing my mouth, the man’s
paralyzing body—

and the cry that always escapes
the low, humiliating
premise of union—

and finally to a resigned fascination: “How can I be content / when there is still / this odor in the world?” “Orange Tree’s” first line condenses Glück’s overlay of the natural and the sexually abject into a single image: “A ginkgo leaf like a splayed ass.” But unlike the mock orange, an orange tree bears fruit, and Ross’s poem turns to sex itself for its mystery:

I try to force my soul up to the surface of my skin

I try to send my mind into my mouth, into my hand
            to touch you with

I repeat

in my head the sentences
            I love you I love you more than anyone
            ever can and suck your cock repeating them

I was reminded often in Saturday of the way Virginia Woolf—a fervent atheist—turns repeatedly to the language of religion as a placeholder for something mystical that she cannot quite name. “Love” provides this sort of placeholder for Ross: a label whose clichés give cover to pernicious forces, yet which still marks the site of a connective drive the poet is unwilling to abandon. The desperation of this passage stages that willful repetition, in a book that has trained us from its first poem to distrust the permission structure that “love” creates. And though Glück’s “humiliating premise of union” is no more attainable here (for all their explicitness, these are intensely inward lines), the impossible union that “Orange Tree” strains toward is between soul and body, identity and action. Like the porcelain deer with holes in its skull, the self bears the marks of what has been asked of it in the past; but somewhere in the vicinity of love lies a promise that it might also act in a brighter light, as something new.