Eggtooth by Jesse Nathan. Unbound Editions Press, 2023. 136 pp. $24.00 (hardback)

Jesse Nathan’s debut collection Eggtooth circles the themes of belonging (or its lack), landscape (or its absence), identity, and the demands of art and love, though its true subject is the handling of grief. Eggtooth, much as Robert Hass suggests in his effusive introduction, is indeed “a book about growing up”; but Nathan, whose quiet but thoughtful sense of irony is the great strength of this collection, always seems aware that such growth implies an uneasy choice: Do I stay home, or leave in pursuit of a dream? What must I leave behind to live as I desire? It’s a question rooted deeply in the American psyche, grown all the more fraught in this instance due to the landscapes involved. The book begins, you see, in rural Kansas and transitions quickly to the more cosmopolitan climes of Berkeley, California. The dream being pursued is, of course, the dream of becoming a poet. The pressure of all those cliches about overeducated coastal elites and undereducated blue-collar types in the so-called “flyover states” inhere in these geographical dynamics. But what could it mean to learn, also from Robert Hass’s introduction, that Jesse Nathan was born in Berkeley before living in Kansas, and that his parents met while working as attorneys for Cesar Chavez and the United Farm Workers? In the subtext of Eggtooth, then, the arc is not one of abandonment but of return—a moment when life and location meet again, like a rhyme.

Yet how often a gesture at closure splinters into an unresolvable ambivalence. This seems especially true for the poems of Eggtooth, whose formal obsessions function as both engine and enclosure for Nathan’s rangy mind:

  and there—there I am, turning over a word
in my head—catenary—for parabolas that fountain
  form, word for the U a necklace makes, curve
an upside-down arch, as I towel off a sprouting
          cousin’s fallen arches, anklebone,
            all thirty-three joints known and unknown
          that carry me away from home.

The scene is a foot washing ritual at a Mennonite church where “most everybody’s here,” all the familiar characters of this community, as well as the speaker’s whole family. And appearing almost as an afterthought in the final stanza of this poem titled “Footwashers” is the speaker, whose distance from the action is doubly indicated by the repeated “there” (as opposed to, say, “here—here I am”), and the fact that he’s not wholly invested in the ritual; instead, he’s thinking about words as esoteric as “catenary.” All this existential unease is reified in the form, a seven-line stanza which Nathan borrows from John Donne and modifies. Nathan is no fundamentalist when it comes to his prosody, as the pentameter of the first four lines quickly expands into six- and seven-feet lines—a nerdy but charming little pun—as though the poem itself can’t help but expand its limits. A visible turn, however, occurs in the stanza’s final three lines. (I note that the proportions between the two parts of this stanza, 4:3, are the same proportions shared by the sonnet’s octet and sestet.) The form tightens, and the meter truncates and smooths out to a perfect iambic tetrameter; the rhymes, initially slanted, straighten and triply repeat—for the most part. Almost but not quite: “anklebone,” “unknown,” and “home” are insidiously close to perfect rhymes, except for the slight difference between “m” and “n” sounds that fool most ears. It’s a telling incongruity. In a collection whose favorite word is “leaving,” despite the poet’s attempt to make a place for home, there’s always some portion of disconnection found there.

Though the whole of Eggtooth follows one particular speaker who one imagines is Nathan himself, it’s striking that the most interesting character in these poems is Ruth, the speaker’s romantic partner through three-quarters of the collection, who follows him from the country to the city. When we first meet her, in “In a Churchyard After Dark, with Ruth,” we learn she’s a medium “to whom the elements fess up / as if sleep were a tide / on which their voices glide”—a vocation she takes up following her brother’s gruesome death (described by Nathan in incomprehensibly comic terms: “yanked into a baler / flew out ribbons.”). Her father, on the other hand, reacts to this trauma by becoming an evangelist of sorts, an “anti-sin magician” who took to “touring country churches, as though to brawl with failure.” Perhaps unsurprisingly, Ruth, much like the speaker in “Footwashers,” seems similarly detached from the available religious consolations, “idling at his show: thin, / looking luminous but slightly hidden / in the back of the sanctuary.” The basis of her alliance with Eggtooth’s speaker, then, is this shared sense of estrangement. But how differently these two sensibilities sound:

          At some point, I ask her what he
            who was her brother says. She seems
          to read the air. “Don’t saint me.”

A gnarled, overheated syntax dominates for two and a half lines before Ruth answers, sobering both the language and mood of the scene. Regardless of how all the medium-speak prepares us to picture Ruth as a sort of woo-woo occultist, it is the frankness of her voice that grounds the poem back in the reality of her brother, who would otherwise have been lost in the pyrotechnics of the writing.

This is the predominant dynamic between the speaker and Ruth through most of the book: the speaker’s poetic indulgences tempered or challenged by Ruth’s increasing individuation from the poetry and the poet. In the second of the two long poems framing Eggtooth, for instance, the speaker includes a brief revealing aside of Ruth’s reaction to what he’s writing: “When you read these drafts, love, / you frown. Say so much anger in your lines.” The speaker can only meet this insight with confusion—“Anger? Is that it?”—before moving on. It’s perhaps not surprising then that two poems later, in “What Ruth May Have Wondered,” the one poem spoken from Ruth’s perspective, her misgivings about her role in the poems reach their climax: “Why is it I’m in terms of him here?” she asks, “Where his projections read / and misread the thoughts inside my head.” There’s an inescapable complication here, an indictment which enacts the very problem it critiques—the Ruth we’ve come to know, after all, is still a persona created by Nathan.

And so Eggtooth returns to its original premise and the only recourse left to each of these lovers: a parting. But this time the loss is more local, more personal in its effect. In “Aubade Within Aubade,” after the speaker muses briefly on the landscape and Ovid (which is to say: his typical mode), Ruth announces, “I’m leaving.” Both the speaker and Ruth, we learn, have carried on their own affairs, though the tone of this reckoning is solemn, not bitter, like the final acceptance of a long-anticipated death. “Was that love we had, or just a stab at escaping,” Ruth asks. Guilt, yes, but mostly grief; and in that grief, a recognition. That each character has lived so deeply into this belief—the only antidote to feeling trapped is to escape—makes this moment inevitable and tender at the same time. Therein lies the pain in Ruth’s question. The very impulse that leads them to separate is what connected them in the first place. Once again, in the shape of the book, we hold an unresolvable ambivalence.

Thus the speaker and the reader find themselves without Ruth. But the reason for this ruthlessness (forgive me) seems the very tension that structures the whole collection. Can an artist grow without instrumentalizing, to some degree, the people and the resources around them? So often we’re fed an image of artistic development that implies, if not wholly demands, the exploitation of who and what we love. Like Saturn devouring his children. Eggtooth’s title poem, in fact, touches directly on this dynamic as early as its epigraph: “Whose bread I eat, his note I sound”. The bread it turns out is John Donne’s, the other major spirit haunting this book, whose ghost “Leaned up / out of my book and nearly bit” the speaker before the adversarial tenor of the relationship turns toward servility: “use me like an eggtooth,” John Donne says,

                    “…Use my imbalanced
  device, half-medieval, to shuck frank death
as you surge with goodbye. As you fast
          and breathe and pay,
            supposing the face a blade
          sustained to sing and to fly.”

In the ebullience of the language, sound outspeeds sense in this passage, though the meaning is clear: Donne offers up his stanza as a sort of poetic Ouija board to connect with literary forebears (like Donne himself), to access their strength, “to sing and to fly.” Donne provides the speaker an opportunity to commune with the dead, much as Ruth does; though the speaker’s achievement here seems to be mostly an aesthetic one, not without its own complications. John Donne blesses Nathan’s endeavor—both an endorsement and a burden. Hard to live up to the Great Dead; hard to have them floating around us, nipping at our poems.

If it sounds like the shade of Harold Bloom is floating around, well, that’s because Nathan’s project in Eggtooth is essentially working toward an acceptable resolution to the anxiety of influence. It’s no wonder then that his most engaging poems enact some encounter with the dead or an old life left behind. Or, not left behind, but approached from another angle. Following Ruth’s departure, the book’s orientation to time turns from its preoccupation on the past toward the present and future. Another love sprouts with a woman named Irena who tells the speaker, with a thought that could serve as this book’s subtitle, “there’s an accuracy to nostalgia, but no precision.” The poems themselves also loosen in their reliance on John Donne’s stanza, relaxing more frequently into unrhymed free verse.

That is, until the final poem of Eggtooth, my favorite of the collection, titled “This Long Distance.” Its occasion is the simple ritual of the speaker making a weekly phone call to his parents on a Sunday. The language of his parents is focused on the weather, the farm work left to do, and family—and eventually “how their bodies were giving out,” the encroachment of their physical decline softened by their joke calling it “an organ recital.” In answer, the speaker redirects conversation to his city’s “winkings of great piles of embers,” leading to more reports on a landscape edged with menace: the starlings in the pasture, says the speaker’s father, “could murder / if they wanted.” Grief managed through avoidance, denial. And immediately, rather than words, a familiar sound breaks into this shared silence. Like Nathan’s best poems (so personal and clear!), the train’s call at once like a welcome and farewell. Not resolution, exactly; but, for a poet, what greater grace than a music that can abide the distance between us and what we love:

                        …And they, who in his imagination
are in the dining room he knows well, hold up their phone, up against
          the back window to let him hear
            the call—so personal and clear—
          of the train out there.