Most of us know what it’s like when a persistent, agitating force pushes us to cast something off. I certainly do. Sometimes, you just gotta get out of Dodge. Metaphorically *and* literally, you have to leave someone, something, some place behind.
I am who I am because of all the running I’ve done — and also because of my commitment to interrogating the running itself. Flight is an instinct. Protective, sure. But also generative. Creative. A move toward a closer-to-true self, a self you may see reflected in a new poetry collection by Rachel Edelman: Dear Memphis (River River Books).
Here’s what Edelman says in a recent essay for lilith.org:
“My debut collection of poems, Dear Memphis, is a love letter to the home I had to leave to be myself.”
I’ve left home. You may have, too. It’s a common story. And despite its universality, the particular reasons we leave to find/save/be ourselves vary. What was it for Edelman and the speaker in her book? The publisher describes it this way:
“‘What do I know of exile?’ asks the speaker in DEAR MEMPHIS, standing inside the colliding geographies and intimate economies of the American South. Offering a direct address to the city where the poet grew up, this collection explores the displacement and belonging of a Jewish family in Memphis, Tennessee, alongside their histories of community and environment. The simultaneous richness and spareness of Edelman’s poems sing with their attention to the particular body and what it cannot carry, what it cannot put down. Through letters, visual art, city documents and dialogue, Dear Memphis excavates ancestry, inheritance and the ecological possibility of imagining a future.”
The excavation is made possible by the book’s opening action: the speaker goes back home. The first poem in Dear Memphis is “Return,” a poem of homecoming that captures the complicated, disjointed relationships we have with places that hold (or have tried to hold) essential parts of us.
“Return” is a vulnerable poem with a core question:
“Who did I choose / when I wished myself elsewhere”
What a thrill to choose ourselves! An absolute thrill of a choice that’s not without difficulty. And difficult questions.
Chatting with Edelman for an interview in Amherst Magazine, Carmella de los Angeles Guiol says,
“Throughout this collection, you ask really interesting questions: Would you rather be exterminated or assimilated? There are Jews in Memphis? What do I know about exile? And am I allowed here? The poems wrestle with questions around family, heritage, belonging, otherness. Did you feel like an outsider in Memphis?”
The speaker’s questioning is core to Dear Memphis, but the poems have an ease to them, even as they navigate tricky terrain. The lyrical quality of the poems does much of this work, but I’d like to name something else: intimacy.
I’m enamored by the ways Edelman brings me into the private space where the speaker explores and affirms her sense of self by actively engaging with Memphis, with family and with memory.
So how does Edelman share with the reader with a largely interior (intellectual, emotional) process? For me, it’s achieved through three main gestures:
1. The book lends structure to the speaker’s process.
As mentioned above, the book opens with a homecoming. The reader takes a literal journey with the speaker. They (we) become companions. Along the way, we’re given access to what the speaker has loved and loathed — and had to say goodbye to. The book’s structure establishes motion and momentum, and they animate the speaker’s contemplation.
2. Physical details ground the poems in the moment.
Edelman pairs the speaker’s remembering and questioning with exquisite descriptions of what’s tangible in any given moment, as in these lines from “Return”:
“My knife plumb
to a warped board, I set to core a tomato.
Imagine the slip
of teeth clean through,
the drip of seedy water
into the sink…”
And here, again, the language and its sounds are tactile, musical:
“My grandma’s stubby thumbs buttoned my brothers and me
in rubber, I slid open her glass back door to trudge the ditch
chasing down from her magnolia. Blizzard, her springer spaniel,
spun and jumped. Our steps galoshed, dislodging cobbles…”
3. The letter poems (“Dear Memphis”) give the speaker an “other” to interrogate.
The speaker writes letters to Memphis, her old home, from the vantage point of having found and made a new home. In one of the “Dear Memphis” poems (p. 23), for example, the speaker remembers seeking shelter in Memphis from tornadoes (“greensky afternoons,” “I’d wake in the basement,” “the windowless dark”) while also pointing out, “We don’t get storms like that here…” (the “here” being the speaker’s new home). This comparison is accessible to the reader because Edelman’s speaker isn’t just thinking about it: She’s in conversation with it.
The correspondence creates a space for the reader to occupy, a place that helps the reader experience (vs. intellectualize) one of the primary tensions in the book — the push/pull of connecting and distancing.
It’s not sparring, per se, but contending with. The speaker in these letters seems to be straddling the lines drawn by rejection and integration. In a in Southern Review of Books interview, Edelman says,
“Memphis roots my anger at authority, my devotion to community. So maybe the act of direct address is also one of gratitude. I come from a diasporic people; I don’t know that any of my lineages have lived somewhere as long as we lived in Memphis. I owe the place a debt I can’t settle anywhere else.”
As a writer, I seek to master the tools Edelman uses, especially while continuing to revise my own manuscript, which also includes letters.
As a reader, Edelman’s work allows me to fully trust her speaker and the places she takes me. It’s the important work of literature — transportive, magical and moving.
And finally, as someone who lives in a kind of exile herself and struggles with belonging, books like this feel kindred, and I’m grateful for the company.
Where some of the poems from Dear Memphis live online:
- The Boy on the Beach (About Place)
- To Belong Less to the Aggressor (finalist for the Adrienne Rich Award, Beloit Poetry Journal)
- Nocturne (Great River Review)
- Dear Memphis (You don’t just…) (Muzzle)
- Descent Fragments (Beloit Poetry Journal)
- What I Know of God (with audio) (Brooklyn Poets)
- Dear Memphis (Once, my grandma’s mailbox…) (Terrain.org)
Where you can learn more about Rachel and Dear Memphis:
- Edelman’s website
- Southern Review of Books interview
- Memphis Flyer interview
- Of Poetry Podcast, episode 41: Of Memphis, Geology and Water
- The Adroit Journal interview
- Brooklyn Poets interview
- Booksmith reading (YouTube video below), which also features Gabrielle Bates and Sarah Ghazal Ali.
This blog post is part of my ongoing effort to capture personal reading notes for poetry collections and other books. Far from official reviews, these posts represent first impressions and provide some context for what I brought to the reading of the text.
This particular installment of Reading Notes is made possible by a complimentary, digital Advance Reader’s Copy of DEAR MEMPHIS provided by River River Books, which made no requests about the content of this post.
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