From a Mother’s “No” All the Way to a Daughter’s “Yes”: Alexandra McIntosh Reviews Super Undone Blue by Sarah Anne Cox

Hypnotic and turbulent as the sea, Sarah Anne Cox’s Super Undone Blue destabilizes the reader, answering questions with questions and blurring lines between past and future. The book is supremely feminine; the first poem opens with a mother saying “no, I will not calm down,” while the last poem hints at a daughter’s sexual awakening. Visceral and erotic, the collection drips with blood, salt, and death. It is a lyrical book of undoing and of being undone—of life in the body. The poems are preoccupied with abandonment, with ruin, and with what will outlast the barrage of storms, what will stand the test of time. In the opening poem “Re: Hope (for Pussy Riot)” the speaker acknowledges our desire to ascribe meaning to even the most ordinary things, concluding that nothing “can escape iconography.” The vast natural imagery of the book is punctuated with human land marks, often decaying or collapsing, “floating sideways leaking,” and “walls tipping.” 

The first of three sections, “Of Oracle Boats and Ghost Ships,” confuses the readers sense of time, looking forward (oracles) and back (ghosts) for meaning. The poem “Hereditament” establishes lineage as a concern, opening with an image of birds washed with dishwashing liquid. The speaker seems concerned with what is passed down through generations, the “secret illness borne to bear/… a tiny bloodstain.” The instinct of procreation—the pleasure of it— overcomes the concern, though; the poem ends with “sugar” and “sexual appetite.” 

The binary of natural and synthetic is explored in this section as well, the speaker often slipping under the littered surface of the sea in search of what lies beneath. Sea birds, whose proper names are among the only capitalized words in the collection, serve as emissaries between worlds.

Did they call you home as they 

dove under? as they flapped against the sea wind

Their ability to visit the depths and return to the air lies beyond the speaker’s abilities, though. And even they can’t reach the bottom. 

There is no home for the sea bound

and this center section the respite 

what remains dangerous and deep under,

farther than even the Cormorants can dive

Limits are continuously challenged; the poems’ phrases overflow lines and clauses, and myth mixes with past and future to create a present churning with potential. Even in this mystical view of the world, even in the presence of all the machines that have excavated the depths of the ocean, the speaker admits:

we have not come so far

beyond the reach of the servitude

beyond the blues and greens of nova Roma

The constraints of humanity and civilization are exposed, even as they lie in ruins. The natural world will clearly outlast us all—a thought that is both comforting and chilling:

The Terns screech from the old coast guard

station abandoned to tiny nests and the white

feathered make forays into the shore break

witness to the smoke flares off the bridge

the summer’s wealth is not enough, the flag barren

and stark and the wind makes lonely council 

The second section of the book, “Locust Women,” begins with “Notes on Margaret Macdonald Mackintosh,” a Scottish painter whose eerie work influenced modern style at the turn of the 19th century. The title of this section plays with the idea of unruly women as a plague-associated insect, as well as a locus, the central point of cultural occurrences. Considering a few of Mackintosh’s famous paintings, the poems wrestle with the meaning of womanhood, “this weight of breast/ on our backs.” Birth, in these poems, both gives meaning and erases it: 

I have swallowed myself in birthing and am 

utterly alone

Sisterhood and motherhood mingle with isolation; fullness plays with emptiness. In “The Mysterious Garden, 1911,” the speaker becomes the woman in the titular painting, a spherical, ghostly blue form surrounded by eight feminine faces: 

I, a veritable gourd

not full but

like an egg sack that

rolls up with the wave

still intact

seeming fragile

though it has crashed in shore break

This metaphor captures the fragility and strength of Mackintosh’s painting, as well as the paradoxical violence and tenderness of mothering.

Death is ever present in the collection, not as an occasion for grief but rather an element of life in the swirling sea of time. One of the poems even goes so far as to say that, “This is the best thing that could happen.” The spiritual and ordinary commingle in these poems, as children with names like Orestes, Phaedra, and Heracles play a “water bottle mythic.” The magic isn’t expected to last, though, just like collecting pebbles on a beach:

the wet ones shine fantastic until they

dry and become plain again

The final section, “Polyxena Erasure &C.,” continues to examine womanhood in the name of the Polyxena, who in Greek mythology discovered Achilles’ weakness and reported it to her brothers so he could be killed. Like the others, this section is concerned with the relationship between past and future, using erasure to reveal meaning from what has already been said. The speaker of the poem, “Medea I-X,” find themselves on a doomed boat in the rain, waiting for the sun to dry them out “brittle.” Looking over the side, they, 

could see forever to the bottom

see our own wreckage resting

down there

couldn’t dive deep enough to touch it

always floating just below the surface

that’s how fate survived unchanged. 

Later, the poem addresses Pandora, telling her to keep the box closed for in it is her doom. Of course, like all of us, the speaker would open the box; they are looking into the box as they speak, trying to make sense of the chaos around them. Moments of peace are found in the natural world.

How shall we discuss this.

The spring chamomile oppresses

the senses and leaves me weak

Even in this loveliness, we sense violence. The smell “oppresses” the senses, the beauty leaves us weak. The poem ends with an outright admission of violence:

kin murder

kin rape

kin lineage

all of our crimes upon us. 

The agony of the world, as well as our complicity in it, cannot be escaped. 

The following poems— the “et cetera” of this section— are wide ranging, describing children and boats, bees and illness. There seems to be a preoccupation with significance—what will be remembered? The poem “Naxos” leaves the reader with an unanswered query: “how to become a star of a story/ when one is inconsequential?” A few poems later, “Provenance and Manuscripts” assures us that “the inconsequential still leave a mark.” The final poem of the collection, “Dress Matter,” flashes images of a “daughter’s open dress,” a loss of innocence, and the speaker is left “un done.” 

In Super Undone Blue, Sarah Anne Cox invites the reader into a turbulent sea, leading us through waves of time. Vibrant images and familiar myths buoy us through this consideration of womanhood, taking us from a mother’s “no,” all the way to a daughter’s “yes.” Time is undone in the book, but only momentarily, as the waves reside and build their strength to crash again.