Ellene Glenn Moore
The Kent State University Press (2021)
Winner of the 2020 Stan and Tom Wick Poetry Prize judged by Richard Blanco
$17.00, 72 pp, paper
Reviewed by Freesia McKee
What strikes me most about How Blood Works by Ellene Glenn Moore is how each poem functions as ekphrasis. The speaker approaches her own family like she’s viewing a piece of artwork, and like she, as a daughter and sister, is ancillary and in proximity, but not a central part of the unit’s functioning. She knows she’s part of this bloodline, knows she’s implicated genetically and through shared experience, but for so long, she’s felt silent and stark as a gallery, disconnected, temperature-controlled.
The positionality of this speaker is one of an art student using a pencil and notebook, poised to convey complex aesthetic details. The poems are exquisite and incisive, naming the tensions of each painting or sculpture. Through the explicitly ekphrastic pieces that engage with the works of Josef Albers and other artists, we watch the speaker developing a transposable method of observation she employs in writing about her family, body, and personal history.
Ekphrastic practice has honed the speaker’s abilities to view human situation as an arrangement of images. If she could just see clearly, she seems to believe, she would understand her family, the brutality of a brother, the distance of a distracted parent. This practice is also how she identifies another lineage she belongs to, a bloodline of creators. The art pieces she writes about serve as “instantiations/of the very loneliness swelling in [her] throat.”
The poems are even shaped like paintings; about two-thirds of the pieces in this book are prose poems. The insistence of the prose blocks, which Glenn Moore wields with precision, is “seared with graphite,” permanent proof of how “some memories turn tirelessly with the moon, some memories will not drown.” Glenn Moore has crafted many of the poems in sequenced blocks, multiple vignettes about the same thing, say, kitchens, connected across time and space.
The speaker often turns her ekphrastic eye towards her mother, an artist of a sort in her own right. The speaker attempts to try and sort out the maternal criticism and negativity that has made her feel unwanted. “I work myself over in frustration, stewing…/I understand that I am talking to myself/the way my mother talks to me.” The speaker shares of “my plans subjugated to my mother’s version of my life…she has promised to help me but now takes offense…” Their shared identity as artists is one of the things that bonds them, but it also makes their bond so difficult because living as artists has expanded their priorities beyond each other. The book’s opening poem is a sort of disclaimer, an alert that the artist is going to be telling on the artist/mother who made her: “…she will rewrite this story over and over. Your art is your art, she will say. It is whatever you need it be… The story is never enough.” Only another artist, I think, would say that, would understand the poet’s urge.
Glenn Moore writes about what it means to be part of a family and still feel apart, like you’re looking at your life as you walk around an art museum, the museum hallway an open artery, the lights low so the works don’t get damaged. The speaker knows and notices a lot, sometimes things she shouldn’t know, like that her grandmother had advised her mother to get an abortion before she was born. “This is a strange thing for a mother to tell her daughter. I am talking about myself.” The book navigates through that pain, questioning whether she’s told things that hurt her on purpose, or whether comments like these are just careless. What if there was an answer to this question of intention? Would that change the way it hurts?
By the end of the book, the speaker has left the museum and is trying to start her own family, reconsidering her body as a home for herself and a child. “We all look for that healing balm,” Glenn Moore writes. The speaker closes her eyes and turns inward, where the rough, stony parts of daughterhood and motherhood jump off the wall, undeniable, liquid, and loud.
Published in Cider Press Review, Volume 25, Issue 3.
Freesia McKee (she/her) writes about place, gender, and genre through poetry, creative prose, book reviews, and literary criticism. Recent work appears in Fugue, About Place Journal, and Porter House Review. In 2023, she’ll begin working as an Assistant Professor of English at University of Wisconsin-Stevens Point. Read more at FreesiaMcKee.com.
Ellene Glenn Moore is an American writer living in Zürich. She is the author of How Blood Works (Kent State University Press, 2021), selected by Richard Blanco for the Stan and Tom Wick Poetry Prize. Ellene earned her MFA in Poetry from Florida International University and her BA in Creative Writing from Carnegie Mellon University. She has been the recipient of a John S. and James L. Knight Foundation Fellowship in Poetry, a scholarship to the New York State Summer Writers Institute, and a residency at The Studios of Key West, and is the co-Founding Editor of the Plath Poetry Project, a collaborative writing project dedicated to engaging with the work of Sylvia Plath. Ellene’s poetry, lyric non-fiction, and critical work has appeared in Lake Effect, Hayden’s Ferry Review, Best New Poets, Fjords Review, Poetry Northwest, Brevity, Salamander, Ninth Letter, and elsewhere. Her chapbook The Dark Edge of the Bluff (Green Writers Press, 2017) was runner-up for The Hopper Prize for Young Poets.
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