QUEEN AND CARCASS | Review
The image of the rusalka, a Slavic water nymph, runs throughout Anna van Valkenburg’s first collection, Queen and Carcass. While rusalki are often considered to be malicious toward humanity, they were once associated with life rather than death, and in fact — assuming we are to go by the epigraphs in the collection — van Valkenburg’s rusalka comes more directly from Dvořák’s operatic version, in which the rusalka only becomes a demon of the water after being rejected by her love, a prince, suggesting a more ambivalent relationship with humanity. In fact, ambivalence lies at the heart of the collection, which culminates with an afterword poem of a “modern-day rusalka”, a speaker who is “still becoming / what [she] will become”, uncertain of how she will love or even simply exist. “I don’t have to be physical,” she tells us — “I can be air / that lives inside one lung / then pushes into another”.
The collection follows that ambivalence to suggest a cautious outsider’s perspective, often giving us speakers who puzzle through the world they are ostensibly part of, blurring the lines between the self and the substance of that world. “Melodies”, from which the title comes and the first poem in the collection, tells of “Aunt Krystyna” as she defeathers a hen. “She is at once queen / and carcass”, the speaker informs us, though it isn’t clear if she refers to Aunt Krystyna, the hen, or both. (Or neither?) In “Rusalka as Artist”, the wind is fractured “like water”, and words are snapped like “brittle / branches mid-air”. In “Little Red in Love”, one of several poems which allude to non-rusalka folklore, the “scent of tobacco” makes “nests in [their] hair”, ostensibly from “the bones of dead birds”; this follows a wonderful poem, “Lessons”, in which the speaker only learns to dislike the size of her feet after another girl asks her how she’ll live with them. It is only through the eyes of the other than she learns to dislike herself.
Queen and Carcass works best when it works closely within the triumvirate of the pastoral, the uncertain speaker, and the image of the rusalka that binds the two. Some images feel strange for the sake of strange; some poems feel as if they might fit better in another collection. When it works, though, the strangeness of the imagery is beautiful, revelatory, and often heartbreaking: weeds proclaiming death; the chill of time as “a frozen plum” that “When it thaws it will be edible”. Such images reinforce the awkward, tense position the speaker feels toward a world that is itself cold, dark, and unwelcoming, and yet is still, in some way, hers.
Queen and Carcass is available via Anvil Press.
