Villain Songs by Tammy Robacker
ELJ Editions, 2017
a message turned on itself
these poems a fire burningto reach the other side
of my teeth
Tammy Robacker’s debut collection, Villain Songs, unflinchingly examines a difficult family history, taking it apart and studying it piece by piece until it can be reassembled in a new way. The poems are lyrical, musical, full of internal rhymes, strong rhythms, and echoes of sounds and images. Even when they sit in the darkest places, they have their music: “Blood orange fruition // of the smallest, wild hope / crawled out of me for five days / in broken shells and poked yolk.”
The book moves as a loosely chronological retrospective and possesses a feeling of thematic unity, even though the poems often range outside the primary speaker’s direct experience. Robacker weaves the stories of women from mythology and a number of “Villain Songs” into the fabric of the book’s more personal history, which gives it power and a depth of rage. Brunhilde, a Burned Woman, Jane Doe, and Medusa speak, as do a fisherman’s wife and a penguin. There is a powerful reversal and questioning of the word “Villain” implicit in the way this book deploys the term, as the poems interrogate the social construction of guilt and blame, innocence and purity:
Shame split the earth apart
in the dark crotch of that closet,So when the devil came he did right swift.
He pulled the thingy string swingingfrom a bulb overhead. That naked
curse lit him up for you like a new idea.
As the primary speaker of the poems works through the trauma of childhood sexual abuse, and all the grief and denial that accompany it, these other female voices enter to buoy up and strengthen her in her journey toward remembering and healing. They become an alternative to the unsupportive and unbelieving family, who refuse to acknowledge the speaker’s experience: “…she called after me, I guess nobody / can have any fun since you got— // With two air claws each / she scraped and re-scraped / the word ‘molested’ for me.”
Villain Songs moves through the landscape of trauma and anger toward a fragile sense of understanding and acceptance: “But I will only carry the living wound / to here. This burned out star. Now I take it, / like heirloom plates, and break it apart. / Crush the taboo. Examine the fragments.” By the close of the book, the reader has also traveled this journey and leaves with a deeper emotional insight. That insight, combined with the complex pleasure of the poems’ music, carries the book’s difficulty right through to the last poem, where the repeated metaphorical connection between abuser and bird finds its final catharsis:
Carcass of dead bird
just a bone cagestaging the center
plate. Picked cleanof innards and dark heart,
his quiet, broken neckalready squirreled away
for our soup the next day.
Villain Songs is a powerful debut collection which speaks with a strong and moving voice. Readers will find much here to admire.
Phoebe Reeves earned her MFA at Sarah Lawrence College and now teaches English at the University of Cincinnati’s Clermont College in rural southern Ohio. Her chapbook The Lobes and Petals of the Inanimate was published by Pecan Grove Press. Her poems have appeared in The Gettysburg Review, Hayden’s Ferry Review, Memorious, Phoebe, and Forklift, OH.