A Review of Nancy Eimers’ Human Figures — March 27, 2023 by Eva Heisler
Nancy Eimers, the author of four previous poetry collections, Oz, A Grammar to Waking, No Moon, and Destroying Angel. Her poems have appeared in numerous magazines and anthologies, and she has been the recipient of a Nation Discovery Award, a Whiting Writers Award, and two NEA Fellowships. She lives in Kalamazoo, Michigan.
Scanning the rows of swimsuits in Sears, my mother couldn’t find what she wanted. I listened to the scrape of hangers along the metal bar of the display rack, and I admired the mannequins. Faster, faster the scrape of hangers, an angry sound. Hushed and poised, the mannequins modelled a placidness of face I was trying at thirteen to emulate. In the chapbook Human Figures, Nancy Eimers describes the faces of mannequins as resembling “the random cloudless / pieces of sky in one of many / jigsaw puzzles left unsolved.”
The book’s opening poemevokes a display of mannequins sporting travel wear:
each figure’s attitude an ode to patience, same as wasted time, same timetable to read, same train about to come—
The poem then swerves to regard the mannequins from a future devastation, as if mannequins might be all that remain of the human:
This might have mattered, what we wore on earth, faces they wore,
that bright alert urbanity makes out of poise— and why we wanted them that way.
The opening poem’s question “Can they even be said / to have bodies?” sets up the collection’s preoccupation with the relationship of “human” to “figure,” a question explored in poems that move from department stores to a factory where “workers are sanding // haunches and torsos, tops of heads, / anywhere a mannequin gets round” and Iraq with ISIS regulations imposed on mannequins, their forms with
black CASCA bags yanked over their heads
as if their bodies hadn’t heard the breaking news
controlled a vast territory in the
human form.
An extraordinary pair of poems addresses the mannequins used in the Dooms Day Town constructed for a 1953 atomic test. The titles read like newspaper captions: “Photo of 50 Mannequins Posed in Front of the County Court House in Las Vegas, Nevada, Before the 1953 ‘Atomic Annie’ Nuclear Test” and “Photo of Unnumbered Mannequins Piled in Front of the County Court House in Las Vegas, Nevada, After the 1953 ‘Atomic Annie’ Nuclear Test.” The first poem includes an epigraph informing us that fiberglass is used in the manufacturing of mannequins. The poet imagines that these figures, positioned in folding chairs for public viewing, “in some other life / are ship hulls, longbows, drum sets, / Christmas tree angel hair.” The second poem, unfolding in couplets with many lines further fractured by forward slashes, describes the bodies staged exactly as thrown by the blast:
a photograph has made of grass a heap of arms
still gesturing the fingers curled please
Human Figures moves from doomsday mannequins to a contemplation of the eerie spaces of abandoned malls. “On Gazing at Photos of Shopping Malls Dead and Living” leaps across decades. The brisk, spare lines intermix observations (“BURT’S SHOES you can see clear through, / the letters gone”), historical details (“Shop in 1300 / meant a booth or shed for work // by way of scyppen— / cowshed”), and marketing language (“pleasure dome / with parking”). The poem is interspersed with prose that further probes an idea or image. In one, Eimers describes Giovanni Battista Piranesi’s set of etchings Imaginary Prisons. These eighteenth-century architectural fantasies are characterized by strange, complex spaces that defy logic. As described by Eimers, it is a space in which
you may begin to feel the madness, ladders / balustrades / the tiny figures (jailers? prisoners?) / capstans / archways looming into angry scribbles.
The passage ends with a surprising comparison: after imaginatively entering Piranesi’s prison, the speaker now wants to withdraw, to be “at enough of a distance to see how much this looks like the Galleria in Houston, Texas.”
Gazing at Piranesi’s Imaginary Prisons—entering that dream space—is not so unlike gazing at images of derelict malls in which infrastructure’s breakdown reads as irrational. In the poem “Fish Take Over the Bangkok New World Mall,” the speaker imagines someone sneaking into abandoned structures “just to enter that dreamy feeling // someone called ruin porn.” The term “ruin porn” is used, often disparagingly, to refer to the fascination with landscapes of abandonment and devastation, and Eimers’ use indicates an awareness of the risk of aestheticizing catastrophe. Why the fascination with places of abandonment and decaying infrastructure? I asked myself this as I read Eimers’ poems. Malls, in general, are sites of such numbing luster and boring sameness, yet how fascinating a mall once it becomes a ruin, when nature begins breaking through infrastructure.
Devastation is everywhere in Human Figures, but the book ends with a poem that puts us back among the living. “On Being Human: A Consideration” opens
inside yet another millennial shopping mall where under fluorescence the expectations of say a row of light blue Oxford shirts on their hangers can be breathtaking almost—
I know. I have wanted to fling myself into their arms almost exhausted. Almost home.
The sonic pairing of “expectations” and “exhausted” drives home how taxing both desire and anticipated doom can be. The repetition of “almost” is a refrain of not-quite-ness: not quite breathtaking; not quite exhausted; not quite home. It is not the one blue shirt that allures; rather, it is the “row of light blue Oxford shirts on their hangars,” a multitude of blueness, of cottonness, of Oxford-shirtness promising comfort. Part of being human, Eimers reminds us, is our vulnerability to “a common dreaminess.”
