The Eggshell Skull Rule by Amy Strauss Friedman
Kelsay Books, 2018
Amy Strauss Friedman’s stunning full-length debut, The Eggshell Skull Rule, made me reconsider my previous disbelief in signs when I glimpsed her mention of Leonard Cohen’s “Hallelujah” just as that song came on the radio. That shiver of déjà vu stayed with me as I read and reread Strauss Friedman’s powerful book, which is filled with women as real to me as my own reflection.
I recognized myself in these poems. I’ve been the girl creeping through “the forgotten / prairie” of a lover’s anger, the girl slithering “under furniture / and across time” each time a toxic partner speaks, the girl adopting someone else’s opinions instead of forming my own: “What you believed I believed.” I have been the girl who “made myself smaller” at age fifteen in the presence of men I never should have known.
I recognized my mother, “perpetually unloading the dishwasher,” the skin beneath her eyes “sheltered and sunk”—the woman who carved “my face through each of her palms / the day I was placed, still warm, in her arms.” I felt her sacrifice, and I felt what I have given up in choosing not to have children of my own. In Strauss Friedman’s poems, I could make out a distant parallel version of myself as the mother I’d hope to be: “Bite your lip, steel your arrested but never rested / heart. Untether her universe from yours.”
Again and again, daughters and mothers appear in these pages, often in the most surprising forms. Daughters turn up as relics of our girlhood—as Cinderella and her ilk “disentangled from clamshell packages with box cutters / all twist ties and tape and embalming fluid”; as nesting dolls, “reproductions in hollow bodies, / stilted hearts smaller than the next, / a gutted infinity mirror.” Even font types are mothers to Strauss Friedman, who reimagines Times New Roman as “a soccer mom who martyrs herself to her children” and Georgia as refusing “to wear the same dress to more than one charity event.”
These poems reveal vulnerability and strength, perhaps women’s most defining characteristics. The women in these poems know “there’s no overcoming, / only coping.” They are “at the market but not at the market,” expected to be everything and everywhere at once. They turn houses into homes, and they are houses themselves—works in progress, “festering with yesterday’s dust” and constructing walls “of blind cooperation / born of distrust.” They admit what they can’t do—namely, “start with a new therapist again” or “stop watching CNN.” These women, like upended trees, are “all creatures bent on survival.” The Eggshell Skull Rule is a beautiful book, one I carried with me for weeks as I committed whole poems to memory.
Melissa Fite Johnson’s first collection, While the Kettle’s On (Little Balkans Press, 2015), is a Kansas Notable Book, and her chapbook, A Crooked Door Cut into the Sky, won the 2017 Vella Chapbook Award (Paper Nautilus Press, 2018). Melissa teaches English and lives with her husband in Kansas.