Self-Portrait with Cephalopod
Kathryn Smith
Reviewed by E. Thomas Jones
Kathryn Smith’s Self-Portrait with Cephalopod is a collection of poetry ruminating on how to best live in the dying world. “Dogged” by goodness, as Smith writes in “Psalm Formula: Anti-epistle,” the speaker of Self-Portrait with Cephalopod grapples to find her place within the grand scheme, and looks to natural sciences, pop culture, womanhood, mental illness, and a wobbly—or absent—faith in God to interrogate why she (or we) exist. Simple matters such as watching hummingbirds, driving a Prius, or getting a mammogram each become their own Atlas: shouldering the burden of the magnificent, terrifying world the speaker cannot help but acknowledge, observe, and exist within.
The relationship between the speaker and the world extends to the relationships between humans and animals and science, as explored in several of the collection’s poems. Often, the speaker expresses a wish to be good, as in the poem “Situs Inverses,” but provides only complicated versions of goodness to indicate what she means.
After explaining situs inverses as a medical term where a body’s organs are flipped—a “mirror image of their expectations”—she returns to an earlier image of “an immature squirrel dropped from / the maple’s high branches in my driveway” to close the poem with: “I’d like to be a better person […] / One who is able to kill a maimed squirrel / rather than watch its quick, shocked breaths, […] / hoping that as night / dips near freezing, death will take / its own course.” Smith’s craft subverts expectations, asking readers to perceive from new angles—and by asking us to linger with the cruelty of the squirrel’s slow death, she seems to ask the reader: when is killing no longer cruel?
There is much to celebrate in this complex, apocalyptic, wonderful book. Among unanswerable questions are moments of pure lyricism: “I want / to press my pink finger against / your marbled blue / bubblegum fat,” Smith writes in an early ode. In “Concerning Nectar, Concerning Brack,” she composes: “Not even birds / find sweetness—only water / stained red. We’ve omitted / sugar hoping to slow invisibly / quick wings, to glimpse / the proof of flying, green flutter // altered to simple mechanics.” The poems here, their language, stick like spiked seed pods.