Auscultate

by Clayton Adam Clark

(Galileo Books, 2025) 

Reviewed by Jennifer Keith

Despite religious dogma to the contrary, Homo sapiens is a bloody punctuation mark at the end of the last word in the last sentence in the last paragraph on the last page in the last volume of the planet’s mega-Brittanica biography. With our impact on the planet, we may have already overstayed our welcome. The truth of humans as an ephemeral, invasive species is all over Clayton Adam Clark’s Auscultate, a collection of 38 poems from Galileo Press.  

The title refers to the act of listening to the heart with a stethoscope, an intimate diagnostic exercise that involves both touch and hearing. The imperative form is an invitation, or perhaps an order. Though hearts can signal sentiment, the heart of this book, arranged in four “chambers,” is anatomic, not emoji. Clark’s use of Latin and medical terms create a useful distance. While Auscultate offers glimpses of deep personal pain (the death of a friend’s mother inspires a number of poems, including the title piece), the book doesn’t ugly-cry.

The heart has two ventricles and two atria, and Clark’s poems are full of bifurcations, especially the dichotomy in choosing one impulse over another. Clark is deft at showing how those fateful binary decisions reverberate in other lives—or literally end them—for humans and other life forms. 

Those other life forms, Clark’s poems remind us, insist on taking up physical space. Encounters with nature become crises, hinges between brutality and mercy. Humans strike back at other species with pitchforks, tennis rackets, and neurotoxins or crush them against white drywall. Even a moment of pity for a worm besieged by ants in “Firebreak” is literally poisoned. In “Mousing,” compassion degrades into a practical numbness—having a heart is hard when modern life’s distractions are so ready to relieve you of the task. 

Speeding motor vehicles (“glass-and-metal crypt[s]”) compress time and force disastrous decisions by humans and other species. In “The Missouri,” a car-crash survivor makes a split-second choice between two fates and in “Flight Theory,” Clark’s driver is recalibrating fight or flight impulses in himself facing a charging dog while acknowledging the mutilation of a deer by a charging automobile.

    […] But you’re still

    surprised how far you must drive

    to find the roughed-up pieces

    and the head upturned on

    the shoulder, as if it never saw

    anything but ahead, or even if

    you can find time for second thought,

    you haven’t the space for change.

The driver in “Attrition” slows down on the road to his mother’s house so that if a deer must die, it won’t be by his car. But another driver doesn’t: "someone who still needs / the yellow sign with a bounding cartoon / buck to perceive their hazard."

 

Technically, the poems are heterogenous. Clark leans into iambic lilt and full-blown sonnet form on occasion, but it’s clear he lets each piece be what it wants. Both his free-verse and formal poems feel natural. He’s not shoe-horning his meanings into form in poems such as “Caprinae,” (a stealthy sonnet), “Figure II,” and others. 

Likewise, Clark’s free verse mostly avoids deconstructing for the hell of it, even if, in spots, the abstraction feels a little forced, such as in “Sleepwalk Mannerisms.” He’s taking cues from Francis Bacon, the subject of several of the ekphrastic poems in Auscultate. Clark’s visions of Earth’s human occupation, in all its meaty grotesquery, are dashed out on the page with the color and energy of Bacon’s expressionism.  

Physically, the book is curious. The cover art is colorful and oddly cheery, while the back cover includes a quote that hints what kind of “heart” is explored within. But there aren’t any blurbs, which is surprising. Most of the comprising poems have been published in journals and it is hard to imagine Clark’s work evading the eye of accomplished poets, whose words on the back cover could help get the book into more hands. 

In auscultation, the part of the stethoscope that touches the skin and transmits the sound is called the bell. The poems of Auscultate reverberate, toll, and warn. What flows through the book’s four chambers is warm, sticky—here: fire-bright with oxygen; there: dusky and choked dark without; everywhere: an indelible, brilliant stain.

Jennifer Keith’s poems and reviews have appeared in Sewanee Review, Able Muse, The Free State Review, Fledgling Rag, Best American Poetry 2015, Sugar House Review, and elsewhere. Keith was a finalist in the 2021 Erskine J. Poetry Prize from Smartish Pace. A chapbook, Truant Season, came out on Apathy Press Poets in 2022, and her first full-length book of poems, Terminarch, was chosen by David Yezzi for the 2023 Able Muse Book Award. She lives in Baltimore, Maryland.

Ladies' Abecedary

by Arden Levine
(Harbor Editions, 2021) 

Reviewed by Jennifer Keith

Ladies’ Abecedary opens with two epigrams. The first is by Thomas Wentworth Higginson from his 1859 op-ed in The Atlantic. Higginson, alluding to an earlier “daring, keen, sarcastic” work by Sylvain Marchal, wonders if women learning the alphabet would grease the skids toward some unspeakable chaos. The second is a blood-tinged spit of lyric from Bikini Kill, a feminist punk band, about lives that can’t be spelled out in any traditional way. Ladies’ Abecedary draws from both energies. 

 

The polite title belies the deep dive of these poems into the real lives of girls and women. It’s rich territory for Levine, whose poems are like snapshots that suddenly extend into a third dimension when you hold them in your hand. “Abecedary” speaks to the structure of the book, each poem represents a piece in a sequence, with Levine titling poems with letters of the alphabet and arranging them in an order. 

 

But there’s more to those solitary glyphs announcing each poem. The letters are initials, substitutions for women’s names like you’d see in police reports, case studies. The poems are introductions to deeper narratives where the reader can fill in the details. From the excruciating-but-healing “tourniquets” applied by “A” to the metamorphosis of “Z”’s brokenness, the subject of each poem is a very particular female identity who lives, breathes, and takes up residence in the consciousness.

 

Two of the poems pair letters, so there are 24 poems altogether in Ladies’ Abecedary, a perfect circle of hours. The book is slim, modest in format, but many of the poems go surprisingly deep, and, taken together, put bright pins in a large map, hinting at the breadth of women’s experience. There’s a child who plays God and is answered by a parent bearing the brunt of being at her mercy. Two teen friends stride into their future with a new sense of physical power and purpose, while a pie baker’s failure and redemption hints at a private loss and acceptance.

 

Some of the poems’ subjects seem recognizable. “M” could be Marie Curie, who suffered public shame and xenophobia when, as a widow, she fell in love with a married man. “L” might well stand for Lilith, a personification of untamable sensuality and dangerous seduction. “U” is a homophone, directed at the reader, a terse warning of assuming 

 

1) that you can find the missing

either with maps or with technology. 

 

2) that words will keep you safe.

 

There is an “I” poem with these lines:

 

… She got

Levi’s blue jeans, too, and wise 

to how fast a girl can go 

when the fabric wraps around both legs.

 

But the “I” of first-person is absent in Abecedary. Whereas other women poets fall to the temptation of trying to define large swaths of women’s realities through their own thoughts and episodes, Levine creates a mosaic of the stories of other women and girls, some fanciful, some terrifying, some difficult, some triumphant—and all believable. Levine doesn’t have just one story about women; she has two dozen, and doesn’t attempt to shoe-horn them into fitting together in a tidy set. The ease with which Levine holds contrasting and conflicting truths reflects both depth and empathy. The poems are free in both content and form to grow and expand as individuals.

The poems dealing with physical vulnerability in Ladies’ Abecedary leave a particular mark. “R” takes on maternal mortality as erasing a fully formed human as well as the mother of a newborn. “E” moves in a circle from subservient calm to the horrors of medical invasion involving blood and the extraction of “a condition,” after which the poem itself, like E’s fingertips, forms a circuit and returns to baseline, emptied and still. What’s happened to E is horrific, but Levine’s control of the poem keeps the reader present and unblinking. 

 

Immediately afterward, “F,” the poem about the pie baker, also touches on blood-like destruction that hints at pregnancy loss. But the poem ends with its subject embracing the cycles that define women’s physical lives and their attendant agonies and hopes: 

 

And what did you do? they ask.

Roll dough. She places that reply so casually down,
as if she had described knocking over a cup of water in her sleep

and waking to find the floor already near dry; this, and not a story

of toil in making, toil in cleaning, toil in remaking, mourning loss.

 

“F” and the other heroines in Levine’s alphabet don’t dazzle with CGI superpowers. Instead, they endure with quiet dignity. “H” is a portrait of a lonely docent embracing (and embodying) the passage of time. In another way, the solitary exile in “N” abides and even nurtures another, finite form of life:

 

Here, they brought her

the last zinnia and some water 

to hold it for a day or two. 

After that, she will

hang it by its heels

so blood rushes to its head.

 

“K” is a longer poem that reads like a fairy tale. A phalanx of sisters moving as one unit, in height order, carry stones through the carnivorous snow of “a cold land” to test the firmness of the earth beneath their feet. 

 

Levine’s figures include women suffering and strictured by obsessions of mind and body. The fascinating “P”

 

can’t have any part of her 

body touching any other 

part of her body. It’s hard 

 

for more reasons that you’d expect. 

 

“S”’s pretty dress is also a “silken tourniquet”, and the echoing of words and phrases (“drumbeat,” “tongue,” “wings”) creates music while also speaking to the obsessive inner dialog and ritual of her disorder.

 

Several short entries in Ladies’ Abecedary introduce women who are not just at the mercy of nature but engaging with it, letting it inform them with a deeper awareness of how the world works. “O” is a chilling six-line metaphor on the occasional missteps of evolution, and the subject of “V” unwittingly conducts an experiment that shakes up both the cycle of time and the natural order that depends on it.

 

Women’s sexuality appears in the darkly seductive “L,” the bawdy, bouncing “Q” and the easy, watery bath of “W and X.” But the one that induces shivers is “T.” Levine uses white space to create two entities in the poem, bucket seats where “T” and her lover-or-abductor are riding together, their past in the rearview. The tension of the poem captures a breathless, burgeoning female sexuality, where danger and adventure are riding in the same car:

 

There is some place he took her from,    or some place
she left with him, perhaps
they were tossed out

of the sky, lost their lease on God.           So, El Camino
the drive, the unruly asphalt gardens, 
the tailpipe fumes

like a long exhale, the tapering 
of their history.

 

Higginson’s Atlantic essay, quoted in the book’s first epigram, ends with a suggestion: “First give woman, if you dare, the alphabet, then summon her to her career.” In Ladies’ Abecedary, Levine has used her alphabet and skill to create a haunting index of women’s anonymous, yet recognizable, lives. 

Jennifer Keith is a web content writer for Johns Hopkins Medicine. Her poems have appeared in Sewanee Theological Review, The Nebraska Review, The Free State Review, Fledgling Rag, Unsplendid, and elsewhere. Keith is the recipient of the 2014 John Elsberg poetry prize, and her poem 'Eating Walnuts' was selected by Sherman Alexie for inclusion in Best American Poetry 2015. In 2021 her poem “Cooper’s Hawk” was a finalist for the Erskine J. Poetry Prize from Smartish Pace and another poem received honorable mention in Passager’s poetry contest. She lives in Baltimore, MD.