Anna Van Valkenburg's Queen and Carcass

Reviewed by Aaron Schneider

(Anvil Press, 2020)

Queen and Carcass, Anna Van Valkenburg’s debut, is a collection of richly allusive often surreal and haunting poems whose images sink into you, disappearing, only to return days later to reveal another dimension of their strange significance. Steeped in Slavic folklore and dream, and grounded by the careful observation of detail, Van Valkenburg’s writing moves in unpredictable, but deeply satisfying directions, producing juxtapositions that are as unexpected as they are dense and resonant.
 
Consider, for example, “Melodies,” the first poem in the collection and the one from which it takes its title. At a train station, the speaker hears a train whistle, and, in it, their Aunt Krystyna plucking a chicken. That transition, hearing an image in a sound, establishes the tone of the poem, and, in many ways, of the collection. The opening promises a swerving strangeness, and what follows does not disappoint. The feathers fall from the chicken that is being plucked, and

Even the clouds drop from the sky
like a pair of trousers, baring
what’s underneath

This delightfully odd and numinously menacing image is one of the poem’s best. “Melodies” ends:

She is at once queen
and carcass.
 
The thought of this leaves me
swelling like a balloon.
I lift up in song.

The poem pushes past the moment of insight to the speaker’s response to it. “Swelling like a balloon” neatly captures the elation of a particular kind of poetic knowing, but it is a bit conventional. However, the final line makes a last swerve that turns the poem towards a perfect and perfectly accurate strangeness.
 
The poems are packed with images that manage to be surreal while ringing true, capturing either the slantwise visual details of what they are describing or the emotional resonance of the moment. In “After War,” “smoke spills into the clouds / like sweet condensed air from a tin can.” And “Little Red in Love” begins:

Before the firs ate up our houses
like silver bags of crispy chips
one plank of wood after another--
 
our houses tall blondes
with lipstick, match-
stick legs--

And in the book’s final poem there is

...a chimney that is a cat
wrapped around itself
 
like fog.

A clever nod to/twist on Elliot’s “Prufrock.”
 
But the poems contain much more that surreal images. Van Valkenburg is capable of spare and incisive precision, and book is punctuated with short poems like “Faith:”

It’s the thing I can’t talk about
when I close my eyes
It collects in my mouth
like snow melt.

And the three-stanza opening section of “The Weight” is reminiscent of Atwood at her sharpest, tersest, you-fit-into-me best.
 
Atwood is a useful reference point for the collection because Van Valkenburg shares her preoccupations with fairy tales, feminism and clever inversions. In “Dawn at the Edge of the Woods,” two trees spot the female speaker in her kitchen. The poem invokes and then reverses the fairy tale trope of the threatening forest. The speaker wonders

But don’t they [the trees] know the bit
about keeping a distance
from unfamiliar girls?
 
Girls have an appetite
for trees; their fangs
cut through bark.

And, at the end of the poem, the speaker and her friend lose interest in the trees because “these trees are all the same / and we’ve been here before.” The speaker and her friend may have been, the reader hasn’t, not in quite this way, and it is a delightful poem because of that. There are a variety of reworkings of conventional fairy tales, including Red Riding Hood and Snow White, and they are all similarly original and inventive.
 
The figure of the rusalka recurs throughout the collection, and the final poem, “Oath of Modern-Day Rusalka,” closes with a stanza that, in its evocative terseness and sudden turns, serves as an effective coda to both the book and this review:

I will be a verb, a zoo, shoe leather
after rain. At the very least,
I won’t become an adjective.

 It is stanzas like this, and the surprising revelations they offer that make Van Valkenburg’s first book an impressive debut.

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Aaron Schneider is a Founding Editor at The /tƐmz/ Review. His stories have appeared/are forthcoming in The Danforth Review, Filling Station, The Puritan, Hamilton Arts and Letters, Pro-Lit, The Chattahoochee Review, BULL, and Long Con. His story “Cara’s Men (As Told to You in Confidence)” was nominated for the Journey Prize by The Danforth Review. His novella, Grass-Fed, was published by Quattro Books in the fall of 2018. He has a novel (Crowsnest Books) and a collection of experimental short fiction (Gordon Hill Press) forthcoming in 2021.