No Spare People by Erin Hoover is a tale of female resilience, through different circumstances, places, almost through different lives, narrated in clear, easy to understand words. People and scenes are described in a sprinkling of straightforward expressions that make us feel like a spectator, almost an actor in the ongoing play, strikingly so in poems such “The hedge fund manager’s first wife,” or “The nineties.”
The collection opens with “On the metaphor, for women, of birthing to creative activity,” which is suitably a narration of the sort of irony that women experience: expected to birth and nurture children, family, life, and at the same time being caged by these prospects, not being allowed to birth the stories and words and worlds we wish to. And still doing it in spite of, as Hoover says, fighting harder because of the obstacles we’re supposed to submit to:
[…] I wrote the way writing feels urgent
when you learn energy has been expended
to silence you, or worse,
to get you to silence
yourself.
[…] and I wrote like this for years
to an audience performing the great labor
of the world
Throughout the manuscript, Hoover describes other hardships born by being a woman. In both “Maternity exhibit in an election year” and “White woman,” Hoover reminds us through two different experiences how hard it is as a woman to be seen as a whole being. We’re a co-op woman, or a mother, or a degree, or a white woman, or an unmarried woman, or a pretty face, or a uterus, or a queer parent—everybody around us, often men more than women, sees us as a different part of ourselves, parts that may not agree with each other, parts that we may need to be careful to hide or show if we want to survive an experience. but if “‘prettier’ is a door to walk through, // where does it ever get me?” we can’t help but keep wondering with Hoover.
In “If I wear glasses, will you be able to see me?” we read about the thin line between a disability and a condition—and being clumsy, “not a medical // condition but a scold.” The line is made of a prescription, of technology, or sometimes just of how others perceive us, even and especially when others is a doctor. “When technology dulls a problem, it isn’t // a problem,” writes Hoover, and yet, “At night, I’ve pointed my car at a // direction I believed to be a road, just as my aunt used to // turn toward my voice. When I truly can’t see, I cry out.”
“Retail requiem” is an eulogy for so many things we lost, but not only. The nostalgia for places and moments we took for granted is there, mixed with the benefit of hindsight showing us how much wrong there was, how things were deteriorating and still are. People who were losing their job haven’t found a new one possibly, and “the people who made the goods // we bought, the means of production bone-close, // most likely overseas […] // slave labor” haven’t changed. Today, just like yesterday “we could protest if we would only agree // to see them.”
Incredibly notable is how the experiences we breathe through with Hoover are highly influenced not only by the author herself, but almost as much by her surroundings, and especially by the people she interacts with, whose importance we every so often forget about. In some of the above-mentioned poems this is seen in a negative key, but it can also bring light to her days.
In “But for the hours I didn’t care if I lived” Hoover’s emotional writing brings us through nights with her in the darkness, disappearing “into a grave I created,” and reminding herself to go on another day for none other than her child. She goes through in a parallel with her experience being a daughter, worried in turn about her father wellbeing:
Do we have children as a kind
of insurance, to guard
our minds like this, stop us
from ruining ourselves?
“To be a mother in this economy” is a different perspective on how we influence and are influenced by others. “I wonder if my absence lives inside // her,” she asks us, and we ask ourselves. We do our best, work so hard for the people we love, and sometimes that means working hard far from them, leaving them alone for periods of time so we can give them the best possible life later on. Sometimes it means surviving with the knowledge that they might remember our absences just as much as our hard work, if not more.
As anticipated, this book is also a story of resilience, of reminding us how much we can go through while still being able to see life and beauty: “I once asked why the subjects of mad kings didn’t rise up, // what it meant to nail parchment to a church door. Each day // I realize anew how elastic the mind is.” And once again through her daughter Hoover finds “An upside, birds // alight everywhere.”
The author reminds us of how we want to the world to be better in “Baby care instructions, because I may have been born a knife, but my daughter // won’t be a knife, nor its willing sheath.” We’re not only fighting for ourselves, we’re not only creating to be free from the energy expended to silence us, but to give a mirror, and then a voice, to others who are with us and who will follow us.
This strength accompanies us until the end, in “Forms and materials,” because “Pain is always the vehicle, pain is feminine,” and yet “I am the word continue,” and with Hoover her daughter, and the women narrated in these verses, all persisting in their own way.
No Spare People, by Erin Hoover. Mount Vernon, New York: Black Lawrence Press, October 2023. $16.95, paper.
Valentina Linardi (she/her) is a queer writer living in Japan. Her poetry has been published in Square Wheel Press and in The Hearth Magazine, and her reviews have appeared in The Poetry Question. You can find her at valentinalinardi.com, on Twitter @Valentina_L1997, and Instagram @valentina.linardi.
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