Congratulations to Theresa Burns, winner of the 2023 Poets Prize for “When I Google My Name, I Find This Girl”

The e-version of Vol. 60 of the Journal of New Jersey Poets is now live under “Recent Issues.” Thank you to all of our contributors for this issue.

To accompany the digital release of this issue, Sander Zulauf, editor emeritus, has penned a review of Theresa’s most recent release, Design (Terrapin Books, 2022). You can find his review below.

The Heart Already Knows

          In Design (Terrapin Books, 2022), Theresa Burns captivates us with her sharp observations of reality.  Her poems offer careful attentions to her family and the relationships, gardens, flowers, shrubs, colors, vehicles, hard work and memories that are soulfully important to her in a world gone stark raving mad.

          Design is structured like a Shakespearean play, a collection made with five Roman-numeraled Acts.  But instead of the introduction-rising action-climax-denouement-resolution of Acts I, II, III, IV, and V, the intensity of the poems builds throughout to a powerful climactic Act V, where she places some of her strongest recognitions.  And, yes, all five Acts contain moments of edgy dramatic tension.  

          Family relations—good and not so good—are her major concern and consistent focus throughout the collection, throughout her relationships, and what they all bring to her life.

          For example, “Marie Therese”—“We gave our daughter my name, but backwards.” 

          “Picnic with Sister-in-Law in Mount Auburn Cemetery”—this picnic with her sister-in-law, Patty, takes place above the dead in their “stiller town” ––“we are here not to hear / the trucks from the road / to get out of the way / of all that”

          “Knights of Columbus”—“When my father totaled the white Volvo / leaving his own driveway, / the airbag bloomed // like a calla lily, sparing him / the stares of the gathering neighbors.” 

          “Twenty-third Winter”—“Maybe it’s a form of cabin fever, my husband’s sudden / need to be so useful, so necessary, // my own usefulness feels used up, emptied with the cans / and bottles he never forgets // to drag to the curb on Tuesday nights.”

          And “Green,” a poem that pulls together nearly all of the focused attentions named above—family, work, flowers, colors, vehicles.  It opens and ends with direct questions, apostrophes that leap off the page to the reader:  “Did I tell you I had a [green]Vespa once?”  It builds fluidly and highly towards three final questions that demand answers:

“I’m not so bothered by things

 these days, I get how the world is sweet

but bitter at the same time and it’s no one’s

                   fault.  I can’t even remember what happened

 to the Vespa, if Dad gave it away or Teddy sold it

 before he moved out.  What about you?

                   Did you ever lose track of something you once

 loved?  And how did you get anywhere

without it?

“School Night” presents two views of her hard-working, frustrated, responsible and put-upon mother.  She’s watching TV with her sisters and brothers when their mother, lugging laundry up from the basement, stares at them watching “as if she’d never seen this invention. / God give me patience” {mother thinks).   “But if // (large break to the second half, a real turning, a pirouette to siblings reading rather than watching TV)—“it could be the funny papers / or a dirty novel we found at the local pool— and reveals a dramatic change in their mother’s attitude and dissipates the former TV-watching-induced anger/angst in the room:  “she suddenly became delicate, / and moved around us quietly as a doe, maybe / smoothing our hair as she passed.” 

Four of the five Acts in Design have poems titled “Design.”  One of the two epigraphs preceding the book is from Robert Frost’s poem “Design”:  What hath that flower to do with being white, which suggests an inspiration for the title. But the four “Design” poems also raise a question.  Why is one “Design” missing?  They appear in Acts I, II, IV and V, but not in Act III.  And what does the word “design” mean, and is that meaning reflected in these 81 pages of poetry?

According to the American Heritage College Dictionary, “design” derives from the Latin designare, to specify, to point out, to designate, arriving to its  contemporary  meaning, “to conceive in the mind, . . . to create.”  What a precise title for a poet to choose:  to create in the mind, to make.

And how do the four “Design” poems move?  With a gentle toughness, with counterpoints, with subjects-verbs-objects sometimes arriving convincingly and comforting, sometimes landing a jarring roundhouse that leaves you reeling with loss, anxiety, and emptiness.

In Act I, “Design: 1” opens with “I don’t believe in all / the same thing / but in repletion, yes, / surely, yes.  A shaky faith / in the rule of three: // trinity,” and then observes flowering shrubs, a single daffodil, a hyacinth’s nub, closing with “And in between– / I don’t believe // I don’t believe / —evergeen.”  (The second epigraph comes from Federico Garcia Lorca:  Green, how much I want you green.)

Act II, “Design:  2”:  In a dream, her sister Adele says “I love the wind” and she asks “You love the wind?” and then thinks to herself her counter-statement:  “I love the goldfinch and the river / birch.  I love my sister.”  Her sister answers “Yes, the wind.  If you can’t see it, / it can’t be taken away.”    

This last line brought a memory to me that happened 43 years ago.  When she was 57 and dying in the hospital bed set up in our family home’s dining room, my mother said to me “They can only take it away from you.”  

Act IV, “Design: 3” begins with the epigraph “—after reading Patti Smith’s M Train” and blends the now with time travel to her own childhood summers in Rockaway.  This poem reveals the poet’s strategy she uses in many of them: 

“I search for her

the way I search for most things—

always more want

than design: the body

to keep working,

the fog to lift, the coolness

of the train ride

 that delivers us to the water,

the taste of that salt.      

Act V, “Design:  4”

“[I] couldn’t number my failures.”

But there is a realization that failures are “beside the point / because the body itself kept breathing / / . . . its dumb insistent heartbeat / / the most intelligent thing in the room.”

Even as the mind turns again and again to old regrets and failures, especially as we age, the heart maintains its brilliant immediacy, its insistence on its genius of rhythm, all of its attention focused on all it knows.

Looking for the substance of Design, the attitudes around the subjects-verbs-objects leads to—what?  Belief in what can be seen, love of what can be seen, memory of what was, of what is even now becoming another memory, regrets yielding to the essential fact of living as intelligently as the beating heart that keeps on beating whether we think about it or not.  “Don’t worry,” our late Poet Laureate Howard Nemerov told me, “It’s all in the mind.  Except the mind, which is in the body.  Worry all you want.”

Why is the “Design: 5” poem missing from this book?   Is it because all of Act III is “Design: 5”?  There are some fine and sensitive narrative poems in it, as there are in all of the Acts.  But I’m seeing the first four Acts as a skillful grouping and building of her many visions already enumerated here, (family, work, gardening, colors, flowers, shrubs, plants, marriage, parenting, children, vehicles) all leading up to the climactic Resolution which is Act V.  Here are some of the poems gathered in it:

“Brick City” suggests a relationship that’s gone bad in two line stanzas of questions for an unidentified companion.  Perhaps the situation unfolds as the capacity of the mind to project guilt on the ego for the awkwardness of making physical contact accidentally with a stranger.  The persona obsessively tries to find out what went wrong—trying to apologize for an unknowable reaction experienced by the “other” (cf. The Banshees of Inisherin).

“Jardins des Plantes, 1980” expresses a desire for solitude:  In Paris, a young University semester-abroad student lives in a dormitory fearing night trips to a shared bathroom down a darkened “timed light / timed out” hallway.  “Sometimes I wanted to crawl into a cave myself” she begins, as she feels the loneliness of baboons sticky from mangoes, and caged birds yearning to soar in the botanical gardens:  “I felt sorry for them . . . / but not as sorry as I felt for myself that spring.”

“To the Professor I Lived With, Whom My Mother Called Svengali”   He’s a guy who calls her a “poet” to his friends; she’d rather be known as a truck driver.  The poem looks at a stultifying relationship epitomized by “trying to assume Brautigan’s casual / penetration of suffering and the smog / of love.”

It was decades before I could call myself

without irony a poet, allow myself into that club

of steadfast bees, living flower to flower

 for whatever sticks to us, or is carried by the wind

to seed the world.      

“Places I Never Went on Vacation”:  a poet friend, Nate, arranges a date for her with an investment banker who expresses his desire for “A wife and kids and a dog.”   Thinking this was “an indirect proposal”, she sweats with relief she married the man she did, didn’t even come close to the banker’s extravagant Rome and Greece vacations, or to Nate’s disastrous marriage, one that ended in divorce from his wealthy and beautiful wife.

This wonderfully-designed (there it is) book has many moments that keep you reading and draw you in and reward your re-reading.  Two poems that specifically do that:  “Hair Story”, her story, history, a look at hair in both its comforting glory and all its messiness. It ends with a shock of reality that casually detonates the poem.   

And in Act V, “The New Black” details a poetry reading that makes you feel glad you’re not the guest poet, who longingly thinks of the spring trees she left back home exploding “like seltzer // bottles thrown down a stair”.  Similes like this one are unforgettable.  Her poetic strategies are fascinating.  You need a copy of this book.

“Last Request” is a satisfying conclusion to Act V, and to Design.   Look at how Therese Marie discerns the best way to resolve her poet’s life—with a bus ride down Fifth Avenue:

“Be an eye at the end,

                    not a brain or a heart.

 Just a muscle that records what it’s seeing:

                    ginkgo, street lamp, line.”

                                      —Sander Zulauf