Posthuman by Risa Denenberg
Floating Bridge Press, 2020
Posthuman reads like a requiem for a planet disappearing in plain sight. From tender lament to remonstrance, author Risa Denenberg constructs a poetry chapbook intent on delivering the truth of our earthly existence as it nears past tense.
Published by Floating Bridge Press in 2020 as a chapbook competition finalist, Posthuman is constructed as a modern sonnet series consisting of 18 14-line poems thematically linked by a representation of human destiny that is more hopeless than it is hopeful. Although Denenberg writes in free verse and doesn’t employ a specific meter or rhyme scheme, the utility of the sonnet form is present in Denenberg’s penchant for conveying sorrow and, often, regret seasoned with the respite that the capacity to love brings to the page.
Integral to the theme of Posthuman, and presented as hopeful, is the survival of a planet that the author asserts will be allowed to thrive upon human exodus––a future Earth to flourish unfettered by the wreckage imposed upon it by the inhabitants who caused the greatest destruction. It is from this conceit that Denenberg derives the book’s title, taken from the second sonnet in the series, “When Humans Perish.”
When humans perish, honey will flow and bees
will grow fat and rejoice. Irises too, when they open
to dew and no boots trample their wakening. Pink
stripes broadcast the dawn; frogs fall silent; chords
of birdsong rise. The new garden is Posthuman,
While the sonnet series centers on humanity’s environmental predicament, it brings into focus contributing conditions that placed us at this moment in history. For example, the series begins with an epigraph invoking the Holocaust, quoting from Esther “Etty” Hillesum, who, in writing before being deported and killed at Auschwitz, reminds us, “we must shoulder our common fate.” The series closes with the young environmental activist Greta Thunberg, whose prophetic assertions about the world she and her generation stand to inherit could serve as the book’s anthem. Like Thunberg, Denenberg doesn’t shy from imploring the reader to act, or at least to consider what comes next. From the 16th sonnet in the collection, “Do you have intent?”, she writes:
What’s it going to be? Empathy or cruelty?
Teamwork or extinction? Public service
Announcement: This is your debriefing,
We’re going off the air. From now on, you’re on
your own.” Name one thing worth living for.
Perhaps what grounds these sonnets, however, is that, while Denenberg is taking on global issues, it is not without references to personal experiences, including love, loss, and loneliness.
For the poem’s speaker, love and loss are entangled; however, the telling is not solipsistic but written from a perch of wisdom that age brings when illusions give way to reality. The speaker recognizes death is, if not imminent, on the horizon. In “The Clouds Know,” Denenberg ponders the afterlife, admitting the clouds know “there is no heaven,” confronting an unromantic vision of death as the sonnet’s volta, ending lines 12 – 14:
I know death. She’ll breeze in on her chariot
soon enough. I’ll never cross the threshold
of faith, never know the end of the story.
Meanwhile, pets provide affection, and the view of the Pacific Northwest out her window is the scenery she’ll miss. A self-reflective speaker recounts snapshots from her life and loves past, “…The fine-looking / man I wrote poems to when I was twenty. / That first woman-kiss on a blanket beneath / a gardenia bush under a full Miami moon.” Despite the emphasis on what is framed as an inevitable demise, there exists an undertow of longing that unites these poems, a longing for what was, what could have been, and, perhaps, what will be if we are to believe in a kind of planetary resurrection, a rise up of all that is green and good once we who can’t seem to help but kill our host are finally gone.
Structured as a modern sonnet collection—having taken her own liberties and deviations from the traditional form and its variations—Denenberg opts to end the book with a non-sonnet poem postscript, “Apocalypse Selfie.” Written in free verse, the poem appears to cast off formalistic construct and, lacking a layer of artifice, posits itself as an even more direct address to the reader than that which precedes. Furthermore, the poem’s inclusion serves as a writerly reminder that to give up on speaking these truths is only an option if one is intent on giving up altogether. Written in the midst of climate change extremes, now marked by a Pacific Northwest fire season seemingly determined to repeat itself each summer, the ending lines, referring to the smoke-filled skies, are unrelentingly ominous: “But all of Cascadia is burning. It’s a miracle / You can stare right into the sun and not go blind.”
Indeed, Denenberg has, with this collection, joined a chorus of those intent on telling the truth of humanity’s plight, pondering whether we have the will or capacity to save our planet. The fact that one can stare into the sun and not go blind is not a miracle, as I’m sure this eco-poet is well aware. Rather, it is a powerful metaphor for our denial, for a refusal to see.
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Maria McLeod is the author of two poetry chapbooks, Mother Want, winner of WaterSedge Chapbook Contest, published in 2021, and, Skin. Hair. Bones., forthcoming from Finishing Line Press in 2022. She lives in Bellingham, Washington, where she works as a professor of journalism for Western Washington University.