“All About Eve”: Jesi Bender Reads Carolyn Oliver’s Poetry Chapbook Mirror Factory

“I’ll writhe wild-eyed
for your city full of spies

drink their desire and spit
it out in a flood.”

Carolyn Oliver’s Mirror Factory is a chapbook of persona poems that focus on archetypal female figures, including: Catherine of Aragon, Emily Dickinson, Iphigenia, and the ultimate Abrahamic feminine symbol, the OG if you will, Eve. The title comes from a poem in the collection, “Eve and Psyche Arrive for a Shift at the Mirror Factory.” The first woman, the progenitor of all existence, works in tandem with the representation for everything that is non-corporeal, an abstract center for all thought and feeling, to create reflections in which we see ourselves. In Eve and Psyche, Oliver set the stage for her exploration of feminine identity using that embodied archetype and the female spirit to refract back the light.

The myths behind both Eve and Psyche are centered in disobedience. These women didn’t do as they were told and, while there were personal repercussions, their actions opened up new realities for all of mankind. Oliver’s readers will encounter Eve repeatedly in varied situations. She hovers behind the other characters in these pages and pops up periodically to contemplate a Cezanne painting or as target practice for William Tell. Even in poems about Fritz Lang’s Metropolis or female saints, the presence of Eve is there, as the woman we all come from is ever-present in the women we are.

Gods or just godly, the women in these poems rue creation. It might seem paradoxical, as this is often seen as the source of a woman’s power, but Oliver highlights how the capacity for life can be at once a strength and a horrible obligation. Sex and sexuality often are posed at odds with procreation, as expression against function. In the poem “The Holy Pines”, inspired by the Aeneid, Oliver writes, “We never asked for their ambrosia. // They fed us in our dreams. Call it drowning.” A gift comes with a forced acceptance is no longer a gift. It can become a weight that drags us deep into a watery grave.

This collection uncovers the joy found in placing commonality, even universality, side by side with our differences. Oliver makes femininity and feminism complex, rather cliched platitudes. The strength of her voice, which is both original and intelligent, offers a refreshing take on these historic and often well-known lives by alternating between realism and fabulism. The thread of Eve throughout offers both an element of continuity as well as creative, often humorous, asides. My personal favorite poem from this collection is “Eve Consoles with the Rokeby Venus after the Suffragette Slashing,” which examines the violence and freedom to be found in feminine sensuality. If you love engrossing and inventive language, or enjoy imagining how historical figures might react in surreal or asynchronous situations, then this is the collection for you:

With our hot bronze eyes we searched out every sunken sister.
We burned them blue.
Then we wriggled our sleek lonely uncomplicated bodies
up the rivers almost reaching
the sky that crowns the mountains,
the groves who know how to live forever enough.

Mirror Factory, by Carolyn Oliver. Bone & Ink Press, April 2022. 36 pages. $10.12, paper.

Jesi Bender is an artist from Upstate NY. She is the author of the chapbook Dangerous Women (dancing girl), the play Kinderkrankenhaus (Sagging Meniscus), and the novel The Book of the Last Word. Her shorter writing has appeared in FENCE, Sleepingfish, Exacting Clam, and others. Her play Kinderkrankenhaus will see its second production at the Brick Theater in Brooklyn in September 2023.More: jesibender.com.

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