To Be Now: John Spiegel Reviews Susan Comninos' Out of Nowhere

Susan Comninos’ debut collection Out of Nowhere is an homage to legacy, where we come from, what it means to follow in the steps of, and how that affects our perception of the present. Comninos specifically explores these themes within the context of her Jewish heritage. As she notes in “Imagining Abraham” when it first appeared in Rattle, “Growing up in the small Rust Belt community wasn’t ideal…the preferencing of football over academics; the experience of being one of two Jewish kids in my grade.” ^[1] Comninos similarly notes in an interview with The Reporter, “I don’t recall much diversity. Certainly, that led to my feeling different.”^[2] Reconciling these two dynamics—being firmly rooted in a cultural heritage while simultaneously feeling isolated because of that heritage—leads to a unique tension throughout the book.

The first poem, “Bequeathal,” establishes these ideas immediately. Before the poem even starts, the title evokes thoughts of inheritance and ancestry, an elder passing down gifts and wisdom to a new generation. The poem begins,

If legacy means long arms—

my grandfather’s smile

stitched to the gap

 

in my teeth (1).

The speaker connects herself to her forebearers not just through heirlooms, as the title might suggest, but through physical characteristics: a smile, tooth gaps, and, most significantly, long arms, arms one could imagine reaching out, as a child reaches out to a parent to be held, an image of family legacy. The speaker circles back to this image later in the poem; she asks to be made into a golem “…with arms / long enough to reach / you.” The speaker connects symbols to family, both literal and thematic, and ties them together with the simple act of reaching, to firmly establish the reader.

As the book progresses, Comninos goes on to grapple with her Jewish background in more detail. She addresses her parents directly, first in her piece “A Love Poem.” Addressed to her mother, the poem begins, “Adonai of night and of flowers, God of my life” (12). By conflating the speaker’s mother and God, we are left to consider who we are truly descendants of: children of our parents, children of God; seemingly contradictory ideas. The poem goes on: “…I have the same wholly American / whorls (fingerprints, curls), and features as when / my first-generation mother / invited me into being / her future” (12). The speaker considers her heritage, what it means to be her mother’s future, while recognizing the place of those who came before her. Her mother was a first-generation immigrant, an outsider. What we inherit may might be a feeling more than something tangible. Our physical features might connect us to our parents more than the teachings they instill. The poem concludes, “She asked, and I answered / with a face like her mama’s mishpokhe…my hair, oh my eyes” (12).

“Imagining Abraham” tackles similar ideas while addressing the other side of the family, the eponymous “Father Abraham.” The poem, written in couplets, relies heavily on anaphora, beginning each stanza with the phrase “My father was a wandering Aramean.” The repetitive nature of the piece functions almost like a chant, creating a meditative atmosphere. Each stanza offers a glimpse into the speaker’s father and, thus, her own nature. We learn how he “placed a dead deer in [her] hands,” how he’d been “cast out by beasts,” and that he “erased for [her] the path to his home” (22). But despite what these revelations may mean, they are all overshadowed by the anaphoric “My father.” Her connection to him precedes everything, and thus becomes more important than all else.

On a more literal level, Comninos explores the connection between poetic history and its connection to the modern era. In a simple way, we see this with the number of poems containing headers, either connecting a poem to its poetic predecessors, as in “I Don’t Think He Had Any Intention To Hire,” written after Philip Levine, or by acknowledging traditional poetic forms, as in “Book Door,” subtitled “Sonnet of Cheating With a Friend’s Man.” Here, Comninos adheres to traditional poetic mechanics, such as a more conventional ABAB rhyme scheme, while eschewing others, as the sonnet is lineated in couplets rather than quatrains or a single stanza. The effect is a poem that simultaneously feels connected to its history while intentionally moving forward and away from it. It’s as if the form were a starting point rather than the finish line, and the finished poem itself was not a finish line, but where the baton traded hands, a recognition of poetic history here rather than familial legacy.

In the same interview with The Reporter, Comninos discusses how she views prayer as a kind of poetry. I would argue that, due to her deliberate connections to Jewish culture, the opposite is equally true here. Poems such as “We Have Trespassed,” a visceral poem addressed to “slim girls, starved,” begins

“We have trespassed; we have dealt treacherously

with our desire, coercing a rebirth from bone;

 

we have acted perversely; we have done wrong

in our bodies, wishing them hollow as folly” (48).

These lines function much like a confessional, a repentance. Comninos is utilizing traditional poetic forms, yes, but she is also repurposing them. In this way, the poem is not bound to the purposes of its heritage but finds new meaning. Legacy, after all, is not just where we come from, but where we might go.

In the book’s epigraph, Comninos references Rabbi Simeon, quoted in Stephen Mitchell’s “Lamentation:” “It is all so mysterious, these events and emotions that appear out of nowhere, that are given to us, perhaps without our consent.” This is legacy, heritage. We arrive on this planet in the middle of a history we are initially unaware of and are forced to come to terms with it all; who we are, where we come from, what it means to be us, to be now.

^[1] https://www.rattle.com/imagining-abraham-by-susan-comninos/

^[2] https://www.thereportergroup.org/archives/feature/susan-comninos-publishes-her-first-book-of-poetry