All Things Holy & Heathen by Chelsea Jackson
April Gloaming Publishing, 2024
From a Frankenstein-esque retelling of the Genesis narrative to childhood memories, Chelsea Jackson’s debut book, All Things Holy & Heathen, stays true to her creative mission: “I use my creative work to ask hard questions and explore what it means to be human.”
The collection cycles through four umbrella themes—Life, Death, Violation, Reclamation—and probes these narratives using an artistic technique called ostraneniye, which means “defamiliarization,” or a more poetic translation,“strangeifying.” This term, coined by Russian literary scholar Viktor Shklysky, is an artistic tool to combat habitualization and helps us to feel and experience anew.
In the opening poem of All Things Holy & Heathen, readers experience the Genesis narrative anew. God is nowhere to be found. The animals and plants as the creators of the first human suggests that nature has a power which prevails over human capabilities. We get to see the first human put together part by part, inside and out; and it is truly strangeifying. Acorns for eyes. Watermelon for brains. Ladybug shells for fingernails. Seaweed and moss as head and pubic hair. Bones from dead animals as the frame.
Visceral verbs such as “skinned,” “plucked out,” “sew[n],” push back on a romanticized depiction of nature and suggest the work of creation can be gruesome, borderline violent. Further strangeifying this scene is the slippery role jealousy plays in the creation of the first human: “Jealous, Willow added arms and acorns.” Jealousy is considered one of the seven deadly sins. Its inclusion at the conception of the first human implies notions of inherent goodness or wickedness and complicates the narrative that human beings were made perfect, in the image of God. It raises the question left on the minds of the creators of the first human, “It is good?”
The Sistine Chapel frescoes, which receive 5 million visitors annually, provided people with the first depiction of a Judeo-Christian God. Until Michelangelo was commissioned by Pope Julius II, the most people saw of God was an arm. I imagine getting a fully fleshed view of God set the imagination of the masses ablaze. Not to mention, how human-like God appeared. Today, a man with a long white beard and hair comes to mind as the default image of God. “The young Michelangelo,” a poem interested in knowledge buried in the human figure, defamiliarizes this image by providing a peephole into Michelangelo’s artistic development.
[The young Michelangelo] dissected and sketched cadavers
Because you have to start somewhere.
Artists participated in dissections; many famous ones, including Michelangelo, took the scalpel themselves. With their new knowledge, “artists as anatomical cartographers” were able to produce more accurate depictions of the human figure.
While common during the Renaissance, the Church only allowed the dissection of the bodies of criminals since their souls couldn’t be saved. By putting the “beautiful bile of criminals” in God, not only does Jackson strangeify his image, she strangeifies the entire institution.
Because to know chapels
you must also know the muscle and marrow underneath.
Collage art heavily relies on the technique of ostraneniye. The picture seems familiar at a glance, but if you spend a while looking into the images, symbols, and materials, you might find yourself wondering what you’re really looking at. In “I am a collage,” Jackson’s savvy use of the couplet form creates a false familiarity that is undone as you move through each odd-couple image:
My neck is my grandmother’s rainstick;
[…]My backbone, the spine of whatever book I’m reading
and family photos turned tattoostrail down each arm to meet my branch fingers
[…]My belly button is a cat eye
and dog whiskers spring from my hips.My legs are tornados.
As we age, grow in awareness, get exposure to differing ways of life, we can look back and start to see habitualized narratives in our lives. The speaker in the poem “I grew up” actively defamiliarizes a childhood memory through a series of confessions.
in a candy-cane house
with carpets the color of burnt oatmeal
and a Christmas tree growing in the front yard.
Confession: It was not a candy-cane house so much as it was a red-and-white trailer.
When a story is retold, be it a fairy tale, religious story, or childhood memory, its meaning can be forgotten or misremembered altogether. This habitualization creates a false consciousness, which ultimately influences our worldview. Using ostraneniye, Jackson’s collection disrupts this false consciousness and explores what it means to be human.
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Gabriela Bittencourt dos Santos is a writer, poet, and daughter of Brazilian immigrants. Her poems have appeared in Shō Journal, The Platform Review, and The Acentos Review. She is the creator of Gabriela the Overthinker, a Substack publication. As part of the Conversations series, she recently interviewed Chelsea C. Jackson about inherited beliefs, the power of language, and radical imagination—central themes in All Things Holy & Heathen.