Susan L. Leary’s “Dressing the Bear” reviewed by Jane Zwart

 

Susan L. Leary, Dressing the Bear.
Trio House Press. July 2024.
Reviewed by Jane Zwart.

 

 

 

The dedication of Susan Leary’s new collection reads:

 

In loving memory
Brian Lee Kilpatrick
12/29/1990 – 9/24/2020[.]

 

Brian is on every page thereafter, too. Sometimes the writer’s brother, who died of a drug overdose a few months shy of his thirtieth birthday, shows up in Dressing the Bear as his sister’s third-person subject, sometimes as her second-person audience. Always, though, his absence loiters in the blank space around and within Leary’s lines of verse.

 

Brian is not the poet’s first difficult muse. Already in her first book, This Girl, Your Disciple, Leary writes about trauma and loss, trying to understand or imagine her grandfather’s military service and his suicide. Dressing the Bear echoes that debut in several ways. For one, both address a complicated death—a death that its survivors feel not quite as chosen but not as entirely out of the departed’s hands, either. Moreover, in both cases, Leary stores up elegiac generosities.

 

But what the writer and her sibling shared—bedtimes and car rides and rewatching The Wizard of Oz, jokes and secrets and blame—she did not share with the grandfather who died before she could know him. Consequently, Dressing the Bear is a more urgent and sustained reckoning with grief than Leary’s earlier work. It is also more intimate. Of her brother and herself, the speaker says, “we spoke a private, muted language.”

 

Admittedly, once in a while, that “private, muted language” holds the poems’ readers at arm’s length, at least insomuch as you and I, rather than Brian, are assuming the role of audience. Take the lines that open “Mugshot”:

 

The windows we peer out of are coy today & the spiders,
asleep in the eye sockets. What we give over to madness?
What we sacrifice to create conditions that might
afford us grace? Our hair suffers the wind

 

as our throat suffers the queen.

 

To interpret the spiders and suffering here, I could use more by way of a legend. I’m not sure what form that legend would come in—a key to the poem’s symbolism? the story that prompted the poem?—but I suspect that many other readers, like me, will puzzle over some of this collection’s lines. None of which is to say that Leary owes the reader a fuller legend than she provides. After all, for one person’s grief to be, in part, illegible to even the most sympathetic witness is inevitable. Further, by preserving some illegible moments within Dressing the Bear, Leary adds to rather than subtracts from her book’s truthfulness. The crucial revelation being this: any true elegy will bump, here and there, into the unsayable.

 

That said, Leary’s losses only rarely best her ability to name and narrate them, even if, in one key example, the writer attributes the names she invents to her brother. In the book’s third poem, she muses on her brother’s autopsy, saying that it is

 

[p]erhaps why, in the newest dream, my brother curates
a museum of his body, his structures capped in glass
jars & labeled on strips of masking tape with a Sharpie.

 

He refers to his teeth as tiny clawfoot tubs. His liver,
a lifeboat for kings. His nose, a miniature cello. […]

 

As he points to the pink loofah that is his spleen,
I wish to look away, but I’m awake now & his body,

 

a matter of public record, what’s left of him weighed
out in grams. The right & left lungs, 810 & 650 grams,
respectively, both distended & full of bronchial foam.

 

Look what Leary manages to name and narrate here. She outdoes the medical examiner for precision, such that the weights of Brian’s lungs tell us far less about the magnitude of his death than does the description of his nose as “a miniature cello”—even as the word miniature is relative and contains a range of smallnesses. In part, of course, relativity is everything in the body’s calculus: from the mass of Brian’s liver, in grams, very few of us could arrive at any conclusion, but tell us it is king-sized, and we can infer volumes.

 

For Leary also sizes up her losses by way of metaphors that condense Brian’s story. In the tragic and fanciful label for a diseased liver, she crowns and shipwrecks her brother. In the doomed playfulness of “tiny clawfoot tubs,” she baptizes the man who could not get clean, his teeth rotted by addiction. Another poem expands that narrative, slipping the speaker into an epilogue that recycles the “tiny clawfoot tu[b]”: her “heart / is hollowed like a rotting tooth.”

 

Recurring images of this sort—images that are at once literal or physical or bodily and metaphorical or metaphysical or surreal—proliferate in Dressing the Bear, mimicking the way loss itself works. In other words, this collection, like the arduous work of surviving someone we have loved, proceeds by way of inopportune echoes.

 

For instance, in the early poem “Complicity,” a palm reader tries to follow Brian’s life line, but his

 

future avoid[s] examination like a pair
of striped legs curling back beneath the house
that crushed them[,]

 

and then, many pages on, the poem “Oracle” recasts Leary’s brother, turning him into a

 

boy prophet[.]

 

[W]earing a crown
of cream roses

 

& chewing
on Nicorette gum,

 

[…] he softened
the lines

 

of my palms
into his fingertips.

 

In “Complicity,” Leary writes about the living Brian, a real Brian who inhabited the past in the flesh. Even alive, though, her brother is marked by something otherworldly, by the cinematic and strange ending that the palm reader glimpses. Likewise, even as death has transformed the speaker’s brother into a dream, a seer, an “oracle,” he can’t quite shake his old self; he chews a mundane wad of “Nicorette gum.”

 

Put differently: never in this collection does Brian belong purely to the past, to the vividness with which he poses, “all thinned-out muscle & magic trick, sliding onto the back porch with a shit-eating grin,” announcing that “Only the finest track stars smoke Newports.” And the poet cannot peel back the veneer that death adds to such scenes—the thin iridescence of  “in loving memory.” Neither can she buff out all the gouges Brian sustained in life after he dies; he still wears, in the afterlife, some of his old scuff marks.

 

And such complexity—the inseparable transparencies of memory and missing, of flesh and figment—strikes me as, at once, amounting to the greatest honesty and the greatest kindness that one could harvest from their own grief and share with others. The gift of this book rests, then, in its refusal of the false stories we’re tempted to tell about our difficult dead: the story that begins “if only,” the story that ends “it was meant to be.” Leary asks instead, “Have we not all been crushed / by what shelters us?” We have. So, crushed and sheltered, she tells us that story about grief—a story which, because it is true, is also occasionally hard to decipher.

 

And often dissonant. Even the phrase “Dressing the Bear” proves jarring. Taken by itself, this book’s title poem seems forthright enough: an adolescent constructs and costumes a stuffed animal for his girlfriend. But Leary has already introduced another meaning for the verb “dress.” She considers Brian, knife in hand, and “when / he asks what I take him to be doing,” she writes, “I say dressing / a deer or gutting a fish.” Thus, read one way, “dressing a bear” means carefully putting “perfumed bones” inside a toy and then adding layers to its fur, beginning with a “floral button-down shirt.” Read another, “dressing a bear” is an act of evisceration.

 

Leary knows that to grieve someone you love is just as tender and just as visceral. These poems confess that “we dress our children in [the] smoke-filled clothes” of those whose autopsies we authorize. They narrate loss, and they name the departed. Not just Brian Lee Kilpatrick, who, Dressing the Bear insists, was neither angel nor waste, neither ghost nor hero. But all those whom we now love in their present absence, in their absent presence.