One of the most formally striking poems in Anna Veprinska’s new collection, Bonememory, is “Matryoshka.” “Mama keeps a matryoshka doll / from Ukraine,” the speaker tells us; she “opens it for the children,” revealing how in the nesting doll, “one rounded body fits inside / another” (7). Like its namesake, the poem similarly shrinks before our eyes. The first stanza is six lines long; the fifth, five; and so on until the final, one-line stanza, which stands alone, prised from its protective shells. “Matryoshka” is an evocative meditation on fertility, “the others mama expects / from me,” and on inheritance, “a sheltering of other within self” (7). Heredity and vulnerability are twin concerns of Bonememory, interrogated metaphorically as the memories that are buried in our bones; the histories, familial and societal, that are archived in our flesh; and the fault lines of identity and embodiment along which we are sealed and cracked open, cracked open and sealed.
The collection itself is split down the middle, although the two halves are thematically porous. In Part One, “Bone,” vivid images inspired by Veprinska’s lived experiences are woven together to create a portrait of resilience and risk. In “Wound at Synagogue,” the speaker grows up “in a Jewish-Ukrainian / immigrant family, / her upbringing / buttressed / by anti-Semitism,” and eventually changes “her name / to Wanda, / a Slavic word / meaning wanderer” (23). In “Colon,” a concrete poem in which the text is clustered to depict two vertically stacked circles, the speaker puns on their diagnosis with ulcerative colitis, which affects the colon, and the function of the punctuation mark: “The space / between / health & / illness / is not / period / but colon / porous: porous:” (31).
A “Metaphysical Interlude” is stowed away at the heart of the titular portmanteau, in which four poems, each a kind of prayer, play with the possibility of transcendence—though if these are prayers, they are prayers for the agnostic. “Where were you?” one speaker queries. “What / happens after? God answers / nothing” (43). “Prayer,” another concrete poem, recalls the devotional works of the early modern poet George Herbert, who shaped his texts to resemble altars and wings, although the visual altar of this poem, unlike that of Herbert’s, is bisected by a vertical slash of verse, a visceral confrontation: “Bend your spine, Eternal. Let us see you bend” (45).
The interlude is succeeded by Part Two, “Memory,” in which the collection expands to reckon with broader societal traumas including the Holocaust and Hurricane Katrina. These cataclysms are also refracted through Veprinska’s personal narrative; in addition to being a poet, she is a scholar of poetry written after crisis. “I’ve been thinking about the intergenerational inheritance of guilt / in the families of perpetrators” (57), says a character named M. “For example, after the Holocaust,” M. continues, but is interrupted when an olive rolls under her fridge, symbolic of how historical crises can fall “recklessly / indifferently / out / of / grasp” (58). In the triptych “Meanwhile, trauma,” the speaker remembers “Packing Ukraine / into a three-suitcase memory / in 1993,” living in Washington, D.C. on the day “of the 2016 U.S. election … while democracy limped in the streets” (85), and being “back in Toronto / in 2020 when earth’s gravesite widened” (85) because of the COVID-19 pandemic. For all her sensitivity, however, Veprinska is not uncritical, going so far as to call empathy “the lie with whom we sit making small talk / until decorum dictates we can depart” (39). These poems provoke us to consider the causes and quality of human suffering, but they prefer the honesty of unresolved difficulty to the lie of overly simplistic cures.
As noted above, the division between the two parts is gestural more than categorical—affective more than effective. Bone is memory, here, and memory bone. Thus the confessional Part One closes with “Shoes,” in which Veprinska compares the relic shoes of Holocaust victims to the “makeshift memorials / of children’s shoes” which were assembled across Canada in 2021 to honour the victims of Indian Residential Schools. “How much of this country is an unmarked grave?” (38-39), the speaker repeatedly questions. In Part Two, meanwhile, familiar recollections interleave the public histories. A photographer takes a picture which “Mama keeps … in a plastic sleeve in our first family album” (54); in “Papa,” the speaker wonders of her immigrant father, “What threads of yourself did you need to sever / to forsake your home[?]” (67). There are also three “Vignettes for Ukraine,” one in each of the three sections, which tie a ribbon from the personal to the public and from the metaphysical to the political.
Veprinska is preoccupied with tender edges. These poems are full of cleavages and incursions, demarcations and cuts—some historical, some physical, all psychological or spiritual. Across these divides, meaning is made or refused. In “Witnessing Names,” the speaker says of a mysterious child, “When I learn his name means to carry, / I wonder with what little weights / he has filled his life” (52). To carry could almost be a translation of the Greek μεταϕορά, or metaphor. For a metaphor to be archived in the flesh, Veprinska reminds us—for an experience to wound, scar, and mark out a tender edge—is the human condition. From generation to generation we hurt and we heal, we make and we unmake. One to the next, like so many nesting dolls, we carry within us the little weights of our lives.