A Review of Ann Keniston’s Somatic — September 20, 2020 by Luanne Castle
Ann Keniston’s ambitious new collection Somatic investigates the 19th-century theories of hysteria and psychosomatic illness by neurologists Josef Breuer and Jean-Martin Charcot. Both somatic and psychosomatic illness manifest physical symptoms, but female patients diagnosed with hysteria—now called conversion disorder—have been subjected to manipulation, exploitation, humiliation, and iconization by their male doctors. Amid this exploration into psychosomatic (and somatic) illness, Keniston makes use of the forms ode and elegy, as she searches for how the disparate genres play off and with each other. As if that wasn’t enough, the book also functions as both elegy and ode, which first manifests itself in her mother’s life and death.
In the book’s first of four sections, mourning shadows the images of suffering: “escalating misery and also // the body in pain” (“Unconscious”). These first poems bear witness to hurt on both sides—mother and daughter have harmed each other. The daughter grew up feeling unloved because of her parents’ divorce, but the mother also has been wounded. The daughter now sees her own culpability and understands that with her mother gone, she cannot “fill the holes // I’d made her make / in me” (“Opaque”). Both women are responsible for the daughter feeling that there is never enough love to heal the trauma.
The book’s more public arena is in the middle two sections where Keniston gives voice to the women who had been diagnosed with hysteria by Breuer and Charcot. The symptoms of hysteria can include hallucinations, blackouts, and tremors. The cause is considered psychological or psychosomatic, such as a reaction to stress, rather than a wholly somatic cause. That Keniston titled her book Somatic, rather than psychosomatic, allows the reader to examine the pain of illness, no matter the cause, rather than focusing on perceived or real psychological causes.
Keniston’s ability to juggle all the obsessions of the collection becomes clear from the beginning of the final section when meaning blossoms:
Today’s lesson is: injury takes many forms. And: healing is an act of will. Or artifice
or wall. A poem conceals its author’s secrets by giving them another form. (“Assemblage”)
Injuries take shape in the body’s symptoms and the mind’s tics. Loss by injury can be lamented-- what is absent or missing is praised or held up to others. The injured must seek healing, whether or not it appears actual. A change of form and a piecing together of fragments obscures the secrets that inhabit text and gaps. In these poems, Keniston reinhabits odd pieces, trying to remake structure from language she has discovered or shards left behind by others: “This confession written by myself / using preexisting phrases / recounts the history of dirt / which was inadmissible” (“Reassembly”). The poet turns an elegy into an ode or collapses the two together, thus obscuring what the author wants hidden. Yet even in this hiding, more is exposed, explored, and learned.
Reading this book in these “me too” days illustrates how the treatment of “hysterical women” of the 19th century prefigures society’s all too common response to women who raise their voices about the pain inflicted on them by sexual predators. The beautiful poem “Profusion” laments the mental and physical pain of injuries and the use of an injured person “as a vessel” for the wounds of others. “This must be how I tally // what I haven’t lost yet, lifting / each loved thing, then relinquishing it // to mourn its loss.” By lifting and reading each poem in Somatic, losses created by injuries to the body, mind, and heart can be mourned anew even as the damaged animate their odes.
