by Nancy Jo Cullen
BUCKRIDER BOOKS:
AN IMPRINT OF WOLSAK & WYNN
2022/$18.00/96 pp.
Nancy Jo Cullen’s fourth full-length poetry collection, Nothing Will Save Your Life, reflects both literary and life experience. A frank meditation on mortality, family, religion and consumer culture, the poems relate personal history with emotional depth and sass. Readers are invited to consider questions of loss and perseverance that, while perhaps unanswerable, can certainly be sat with in good company.
The book begins with “Ghosts,” a poem that introduces family dynamics and what we might “give up”—ghosts, drink, fingertips to oil rigs. Cullen’s depiction of grief is relatable and specific. After a funeral, “Who knows what we talked about, / our brother’s giggle or the furious chain that tore off his finger?”
Motherhood is a recurring and complicated subject in a book that states early that “nobody asks to be born.” We encounter a mother’s “arch sadness” alongside images of today’s mothers at large: “Mothers are crying into their cold-pressed, non-GMO organic juice / the mothers of the mothers have had too much sun / fragile little snowbirds.” The distance between generations of mothers is a focal point of these poems, explored via deft combinations of memory, religion and contemporary perspective: “when they said crisis response planning they meant anti-wrinkle cream… not to mention all that human trash accumulating in the belly of the whale.” Sharp metaphors weave domestic life with larger realities.
Maternal concern fuses with economic critique as Cullen observes “the rich live longer everywhere.” Looking back on times “Before we became insurance brokers / Or single moms / Or sober,” the poems trace the speaker’s trajectory, one shared with other women who were “glorious bitches” and now “find we have failed as bigly as our own mothers / and our ex-lovers are old or dead or mad.” Amidst powerful turns describing various life stages, Cullen’s edge is sharpest as a parent imagining their children’s future: “Our kids have become students of commerce / They’re rolling out affordable flights to Mars / Such adorable little emigrants.”
Cullen’s lines flow with logic and wit as a religious sense of responsibility merges with issues of economic complicity. “Your continued participation serves as express consent / Bring your noise cancelling headphones / The Lord helps those who help themselves.” Spiritual well-being can’t be separated from health and consumerism as we reach “clinical levels of acquisitiveness.” From Beatlemania to “the hottest month yet recorded… we have sinned through our own fault / My darling gluttons….”
Evocative, humane and accessible, Nothing Will Save Your Life will appeal to poetry readers and prose lovers alike.
K.B. Thors is a poet and translator from Red Deer County.
