Quilting Seven Skirts
by Jacki Rigoni

Reviewed by Carol Park

The poems gathered in Seven Skirts rivet the reader with heart and hope. Jacki Rigoni’s work reveals a family coming undone and then being remade. Her poems make the hidden obvious and rend a cloak of domestic violence. After thirteen years of marriage and three children, Rigoni’s husband meets police at his door. Charge: sexual offense. These poems stitch together her story of harm, blame, anger, self-respect, hope, and health.

The title of “Tell Your Daughters It Doesn’t Come in a Jar Labelled ‘Abuse,’” works hard for the reader. Before we even enter the poem, we receive a wry observation of how little is predictable within intimacy and directions for how to knit together the poem’s scant words. We perceive the maliciousness of Rigoni’s husband in:

a compliment offered

and snapped back . . .

a bank account he keeps safe

from you . . .

it blurts bitch.

The self-aware intuit how easily one can chalk over one offense and then another. The poem demarcates the shape of naiveté, regret, and shame, after denial mechanisms split.

Rigoni uses space to control the reader’s pace and understanding of the speaker’s experience.

by the time you realize it is         what it is

the lid is screwed on tight

The interval between “it is” and “what it is” traces the victim’s pause and rupture. This broken spacing continues throughout the collection. It controls the tempo and emphasizes certain words, such as “is,” or “tight,” marking the inalterable nature of the damaging relationship. Thus meaning is threaded together visually, here and throughout the collection.

The scalloped left-hand edges of poems and the decorative stitches bordering the margin of another poem, “New Sewing Project,” extend the handwork graphic. Section subtitles are printed similar to basting. They pleat together the title poem and five sections called “Thread,” “Stitch,” “Rip,” “Mend,” “Remodel.” The unusual print style summons the concept of handwork that creates and restores while reaching for beauty and survival and serves as an overarching trope. The seamstress holds hands with the poet.

One poem asks the question, Why stay a victim? Rigoni replies, the lid is “screwed on tight” meaning it feels impossible to get beyond.

Rigoni crochets us in and out of that stuck place of fear, grief, and anger. She ponders repair: how grace came to her through the natural world. Though bringing beauty and healing, nature’s wardrobe contains mold and death. In the poem “& at Huddart Park,” her marriage is described as “decomposing oak leaves,” and their pet frog is “devoured by nibbles.” Beauty tangles with decay: “doesn’t lichen lay / its lace tablecloth” on a crumbling log? Despite identifying with a dead leaf, Rigoni asserts, “haven’t I always been / instead, the branch?” She comprehends how, like daffodils, she needs to “just stop     resisting. / I think I can forgive you     without you,” in “When I realize I Don’t Need to Hear I’m Sorry, Even Though It Would Be Nice.”

Through images of home and garden, Rigoni unravels the old and creates new garments. She steps into bold joy and clarity, like red poppies on her cover. Nature, home, and friends mend the poet throughout Seven Skirts.

Published in Cider Press Review, Volume 23, Issue 6.

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