Swallowtail by Brenna Twohy

Once upon a time, whilst perusing Netgalley, a starving reader came across a magical collection of — Hold up. This is NOT how this fairytale of poetic adventure went. Well, mostly. It’s true I stumbled on Swallowtail while searching through ransacking Netgalley. It’d been awhile since I’ve stepped outside my circle of favorite poets and I wanted to give new voices a chance to win over my heart. Lo and behold, there it was. A stunning cover with a butterfly thing on it grabbed my attention and, without even reading the blurb (as I sometimes ignore), I requested it. And received it. Go me!

In truth, there’s so much to say about Swallowtail. Much of it is magical, with a splash of lines that caught my breath and moments where my heart screamed, “finally, someone understands” but no adventure would be complete with a few…flaws. So let’s talk about everything I loved (and wished I loved) about this collection.

WHAT I LOVED:

It was love at first poem. Literally. I remember opening to the first piece and thinking, “holy balls, this is good.” No, it was better than good. I actually felt a pinch of envy as a poet myself. I wished, in that moment, I could have written anything as deep and beautiful and tragic as that first poem. Each line spoke to that still-vulnerable part of myself — the girl who, like sand dollars, had to grow a thicker, heavier, tougher shell in order to weather the currents of life. The poem, entitled “I Guess I’ll Tell It Like This”, sets the tone for Swallowtail:

did you know
sand dollars grow heavier skeletons
in rough water?

& did you know
young sand dollars
can’t make themselves heavy enough
so they eat pebbles
to weigh their bodies down?

& did you know
the things
that
I
have
swallowed
just to keep this body
safe from the current?

& did you know
when I say the current
I mean
this body;

& did you know
there is a man
I can only talk about in metaphor,
the way his tattoos
make an avalanche
of my mouth

(even now)

& did you know
there are whole years
I have dropped
to the bottom of an uneasy ocean;

& did you know
this is how we evolve?
Hunted girls
grow shells
& they call us
“hard women.”

As if survival
could ever be delicate.

As if we haven’t been chewing rocks
for generations.

As if we haven’t been rebuilding
our own bones.

First off, I know the use of punctuation here isn’t conventional or correct. There’s a huge cloud of stigma around “modern” (it’s really post-modern, but hey…semantics!) poetry; there’s this belief it’s not at the same standard or quality as, say, Hemmingway or any of the other dead dudes still making bank on poems about goats. Honestly, if I read Swallowtail in high school, this would have driven me insane because I truly disliked when writing went outside what I considered the highest standards of grammar/punctuation (wasn’t I such an insufferable snob?). But the more I read literary works, the more I developed an appreciation for using punctuation in a skilled, impactful way. “I Guess I’ll Tell It Like This” flows well because it’s not impeded by the stops and starts of punctuation, creating a stream of consciousness type of confessional lyricism. Wow, that’s a mouthful! And I know it’s a smidge hypocritical of me, but I always give poetry a bit more leeway when it comes to things like punctuation because of this very reason. This poem is raw, beautiful, personal, sad, but also honest in a way; I didn’t expect it to make me feel so many emotions at once. Another poem I absolutely loved was “January”:

My horoscope reads,
“Happy Birthday, Gemini
Mercury is retrograde
and didn’t buy you a present.
The planets didn’t think you’d make it.
We watched you collect pill bottles
and we settled in for a long winter.
We saw you pacing on that bridge
and the whole sky dressed in black.”

Many of the poems in Swallowtail are dark, filled with grief, loss, desire, suicide, and abuse. Heavy stuff, really, that one might need to read at a steady pace rather than all at once, especially if you’ve been the victim of sexual assault. Underneath it all, however, is a glimmer of empowerment for women to reclaim their bodies, for scars to be embraced (and remembered), for lost loves to remain in the past and buried. I think that’s what makes Swallowtail beautiful; it doesn’t tell you to own your scars by becoming the tough girl, but by owning your insecurities, weaknesses, flaws, and vulnerabilities. And remembering there are many things that happen to us, not all of them our fault.

WHAT I WISH I LOVED:

To be frank, there were more than a few poems I simply didn’t get. There were more than a few Harry Potter series centered poems where I found myself startled by them because they just didn’t seem to fit the rest of the collection. Was the author trying to articulate her experiences through retelling a story we already know and love? I found myself wondering why these poems were included. Their presence was jilting, baffling, and, sometimes, felt random. I do my best not to judge a poet on these things, but it’s hard when the reading experience feels like it’s being interrupted by poems that stick out like a sore thumb (and not in profound ways). My second issue with Swallowtail is probably mostly me, but here goes: it’s repeptitive. As much I loved poems like “I Guess I’ll Tell It Like This” and “January”, there are only so many ways you can write about the same love gone wrong or issues of abuse. There were lines of different poems that, if reorded or reworded, would have echoed the exact same thing. Having a common thread or repeated theme is nothing new in poetry, but if each poem is so similar to the next that you start experiencing deja vu, then maybe a little variation is needed. Again, I loved this collection, but these are two areas that kept me from staying in love with it.

VERDICT:

If I could turn back the clock….I’d still request Swallowtail. I’d still read it and, yeah, probably complain about the same issues I had with it, but I believe it’s the type of collection we need. Twohy experiments with form that echoes Anne Carson, but her poetic style is like listening to a song that makes you happy and sad at the same time. Girls need to know it’s okay to be vulnerable. It’s okay to explore grief, loss, shame, and desire–and to own our experiences, good or bad. Empowerment comes not from conquering your fears or the past, but by using these to carve out a better life for yourself; it comes from the understanding that pain as much as joy and loss as much as love are what make us who we are.