The Robot Scientist's Daughter by Jeannine Hall Gailey

Jeannine Hall Gailey was my mentor and model for poetry through my MFA.  She liked my poetry, and I admired hers.  She has recently published a collection of poems that deal with her childhood near the Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL), birthplace of the nuclear age.  She details the horrific side effects she, and the nearby residents, suffered as deadly poisons such as cesium, strontium, plutonium, and uranium turned plants, animals, crops, cow’s milk and even mud daubers into deadly vectors of those poisons, leading to cancer, leukemia, and whole host of physical ailments.

Jeannine served as the poet laureate of Redmond, Washington, and her poetry has appeared NPR’s Writer’s Almanac, The American Poetry Review, The Iowa Review, and Prairie Schooner.  The Robot Scientist’s Daughter is her fourth collection of poems.  She grew up near ORNL, where her father worked on robots to deal with nuclear waste.  Her childhood home now lies under a gigantic concrete slab.

As we struggle to end reliance on fossil fuels for our energy, many advocated the construction of nuclear power plants as a substitute.  No matter how safe, accidents can, do, and will occur.  Even aside from those problems, the disposal of nuclear waste has not been settled to everyone’s satisfaction.  Poetry is the perfect place to explicate these problems.  The sadness and the emotion and the difficulties Jeannine experiences are a warning to us all.  Gailey never plays on our fears, however.  She handles her situation with grace and notes of caution.

I liked many of the poems in this collection, but one stood out for me among all my favorites.  In graduate school, I briefly flirted with chaos theory as applied to literature.  In her poem, “Chaos Theory,” she writes, “Elbow deep in the guts of tomatoes, / I hunted genes, pulling strand from strand. / DNA patterns bloomed like frost.  Ordering / chaos was my father’s talisman; he hated./.imprecision, how in language the word./.is never exactly the thing itself. // He told us about the garden of the janitor / at the Fernald Superfund site, where mutations burgeoned / in the soil like fractal branching.  The dahlias and tomatoes / he showed to my father, doubling and tripling in size / and variety, magentas, pinks, and reds so bright / they blinded, churning offspring gigantic and marvelous./.from that ground sick with uranium.  The janitor smiled / proudly.  My father nodded, unable to translate / for him the meaning of all this unnatural beauty. // In his mind he watched the man’s DNA unraveling, / patching itself together again with wobbling sentry / enzymes.  When my father brought this story home, / he never mentioned the janitor’s slow death from radiation / poisoning only those roses, those tomatoes.” (33).

I can only hope that when we do free ourselves from fossil fuels, we do not insert deadly poisons into our land, sky, water, crops, animals, and our lungs.  In his monumental work, Poetics, Aristotle wrote, “Poetry is something more philosophic and of graver import than history, since its statements are of the nature of universals, whereas those of history are singulars.”  I believe this sums up Jeannine Hall Gailey’s latest collection, The Robot Scientist’s Daughter perfectly.  She uses the “singular” event of poisoning our planet a cautionary tale of the widespread and deadly effects of nuclear power. 

Take up some, or better yet all, of Gailey’s work, and perhaps you will have a different view of our world and the safety of our planet.  5 stars

--Chiron, 1/17/16

Becoming the Villainess by Jeannine Hall Gailey

Jeannine Hall Gailey is the Poet Laureate Emeritus of Redmond Washington.  Garrison Keilior featured her work on The Writer’s Almanac.  I reviewed her third book of poetry, Unexplained Fevers, in 2013.  She has won numerous awards, and her works has appeared in The Iowa Review, American Poetry Review, and Prairie Schooner.  Becoming the Villainess is her first collection.

As I wrote in 2013, Jeanine Hall Gailey’s third book of poetry, Unexplained Fevers, helps the heroes and heroines of fairy tales step out of the towers and oppressive households.  She uses these poems as allegories for the problems facing many people today.  In Becoming the Villainess, she dips into the world of comic book superheroes and their exaggerated physical features.  She writes, in the poem, “Female Comic Book Superheroes” “are always fighting evil in a thong, / pulsing techno soundtrack in the background / as their tiny ankles thwack // against the bulk of male thugs. / They have names like Buffy, Elektra, or Storm / but excel in code decryption, Egyptology, and pyrotechnics. // They pout when tortured, but always escape just in time, / still impeccable in lip gloss and pointy-toed boots, / to rescue male partners, love interests, or fathers. // Impossible chests burst out of tight leather jackets, / from which they extract the hidden scroll, antidote, or dagger, / tousled hair covering one eye. // They return to their day jobs as forensic pathologists, / wearing their hair up and donning dainty glasses. / Of all the goddesses, these pneumatic heroines most // resemble Artemis, with her miniskirts and crossbow, / or Freya, with her giant gray cats. / Each has seen this apocalypse before. // See her perfect three-point landing on top of that chariot, / riding the silver moon into the horizon, / city crumbling around her heels” (5).  She spans the objectification of woman from the Ancient Greeks through the Germanic tribes to the teenage boys spending hours before a video console.  Some things never change.

My favorite of this collection, “Alice in Darkness,” deftly manages to put a favorite children’s story into a more realistic venue.  She writes, “Forget tears.  Chasing / white animals with timepieces / in this drug-trip landscape / can only lead to more of same. / Hedgehogs, playing cards, paintbrushes: / full of undisclosed danger. / Didn’t your mother tell you / not to kiss strangers? / That Cheshire smile shouldn’t fool you. / Pull your skirt down. / Your nails are growing so fast / you’re hardly human. / Alice, fight your version of bedlam / as long as you can. / Sleep the sweet dream away / from that gooey looking glass, or mushrooms, / or the fear of your own body. / Forget what the night tastes like. / Stop wondering (sic) through the shadows, / holding your neck out / for the slice of the axe” (3).

Jeannine Hall Gailey’s first collection, Becoming the Villainess, foreshadows the wonderfully inventive and pleasing poems which would come later.  I sense a note of humor flowing from her experiences as a woman growing up in America today.  She has a fourth volume coming soon – The Robot Scientist’s Daughter --- and I look forward to seeing what she does with science fiction.  Five stars

--Chiron, 2/6/15

Unexplained Fevers by Jeannine Hall Gailey

A common exercise in a creative writing class has students take a fairy tale and re-write it in poetic form.  The exercise is challenging, but I thoroughly enjoyable.  Jeanine Hall Gailey’s third book of poetry, Unexplained Fevers, helps the heroes and heroines step out of the towers and oppressive households.  She uses these poems as allegories for the problems facing many people today.  Gailey is the Poet laureate of Redmond, Washington.  I was pleased to discover this collection is a serious read.
 
As we all know, the original Grimm’s Fairy Tales were rather dark, but they all had deep symbolic meaning.  Here is a sample of Gailey’s work: “I Like the Quiet: Rapunzel”:

“Solitude my solace, wrapped around me 

like layers of golden hair.  Stacks of books 

and I can sing as loud as I please all day and night. 

I sleep I kick and snore, during the day, delight 

in eating nothing but radishes and lime leaf tea. 

Who says I need a partner to dance?  Here

 in this tower I am mistress of all; the reindeer, 

the knight’s armor teetering in the corner, 

various discarded disguises, crowns, 

crumbs and bones.  Will you rescue me? 

What kingdom will replace my bounty 

of leisure, what tether of care and nurture 

do you wish to rope my neck with?” (12).

Another poem, “Advice Left Between the Pages of Grimm’s Fairy Tales,” ties a few fairy tales together:

“Life is not a fairy tale, and this isn’t your pumpkin coach. 

You’re not lost in some magic wood, 

and that blood on your hands isn’t from an innocent stag 

at all.  Princess, remember to fill your pockets 

with more than bread crumbs, and  

if you can’t sleep don’t blame the legumes 

beneath the sheets.  One look at that glass coffin 

they’ve set up for you should tell you 

everything you need to know about their intentions. 

Remember a lot of girls end up dismembered, and 

every briar rose has its thorn. / Forget the sword and magic stone, 

forget the enchantment and focus on the profit margin, 

the hard line.  Read the subtext” (60).

The final poem in the collection, “At the End,” reminds the reader of the darker side of fairy tales:

“At the end of our story, we roll along 

with the prince’s procession,  

or wake up to a castle filled with friends, 

their eyes, too, puckering at the light. 

It never occurs to us to flee our fates. 

After all, we cannot sleep forever,  

it’s not our role; we merely rest until we’re touched – 

or jostled – awake by the right man or moment.

How can we lament what we’ve missed, 

asleep in glass coffins and briar-thorn prisons? 

We’ve noticed no change, not the way 

the citizens seem to glare at us as we pass 

or the price of apples. The guns men carry 

now under their coats.  Even the carts 

seem sleeker, prepared to bustle us into the future"  ... (68)

These poems grab our memories of childhood tales and bring us into the reality of life today.  You will find yourself going back over these pieces again, and again.  5 stars

--Chiron, 5/16/13