Tender Points by Amy Berkowitz
Timeless Infinite Light, 2015
Amy Berkowitz’s Tender Points begins with an epigraph by Francesca Lisette. It reads, in part: “Tenderness isn’t always soft, it isn’t always kind or nonviolent—sometimes it’s a person screaming at someone else because it’s the only way they can be heard—but tenderness can make things clear.” Berkowitz is screaming at me, at you, at anyone who picks up this book. She is making things clear for us.
Berkowitz asks, “Why, exactly, am I constantly in pain?” This riddle is at the heart of Tender Points and leads Berkowitz down different paths in an attempt to solve it. Trauma is a key in helping solve this mystery, as is illustrated in a particularly stirring passage where Berkowitz imagines herself as Little Red Riding Hood. She writes:
I have a wolf in my story. But he will not interrupt my walk
through the forest. Which is to say he’s already interrupted
it: He’s the reason I’m here, sorting out the aftermath.
Which is to say the wolf is eternally interrupting my walk
through the forest: emerging from behind the same tree
again and again to block my path. Imagine it repeating
like a GIF.My Little Red Riding Hood has no granny in the woods.
She has no treats in her basket. Her basket is for gathering
clues. A handful of fur or a whisker she yanks from
his face. Could be DNA tested later.
Throughout Tender Points, Berkowitz details how fibromyalgia has taken from her life. She laments not being able to hang out with her friends (“4 Events You Miss Because of Fibromyalgia Pain”), the inability to use poetry to express her truth (“That’s why I so firmly want prose here. Sentences. Periods. Male certainty. These are facts. No female vocal fry. No uptalk. No question about what I tell you. No metaphor. Go ahead. Fact check. ‘Did I stutter.’ Fuck off.”), and the lack of sympathy she receives from those who should, theoretically, care the most:
And my boyfriend says, “Well, don’t wallow in it. That’s not
going to help. Just pick yourself up and get back out there.”These are the words of a little league coach but I am not
a little league team. I am a grown person with a disability.
Early in Tender Points, Berkowitz quotes riot grrrl icon Kathleen Hanna: “There’s this certain assumption that when a man tells the truth, it’s the truth. And when, as a woman, I go to tell the truth, I feel like I have to negotiate the way I’ll be perceived…There’s always the suspicion around a woman’s truth—the idea that you’re exaggerating.” This idea, unfortunately, still seems to be prevalent in the world at large. But in thinking about Tender Points, I would rather think of these lines from a poem by Emily Kendal Frey: “When a woman talks / A few people listen / I’d like to suggest that when a woman talks we listen.” We should listen.
Nate Logan is from Indianapolis, Indiana. His recent work appears in burntdistrict, Ohio Edit, and Pouch. He’s editor and publisher of Spooky Girlfriend Press.