Blood Box by Zefyr Lisowski
Black Lawrence Press, 2019
Zefyr Lisowski’s Blood Box charts a poetic anatomy for the Lizzie Borden Trial and asks the reader to consider new possibilities when conjuring a historic poetic persona.
The collection’s title served as an entry point for me as I experienced the rich textures and themes of this chapbook. From “Blood” comes forth the not only the goriness and violence of the murder story, but also the seemingly antithetical theme of intimacy and family. After all, this is one of the reasons the Lizzie Borden story continues to captivate us—it’s about inversions of expectations. A home turned into a “box.” A daughter murdering a father.
In “If I Did,” Lizzie says, “Then ‘family’ a word that stirs and stirs. / What use are doors in this weather?” This stirring is demonstrated through the moving and evolving voices and forms Lisowski employs. The collection presses further into the source history and refuses to question “Did she do it?” Instead, these framing poems “If I Did” and “If I Didn’t” establish the collection’s perspective as a collection of “what ifs” and internal and interpersonal “stirrings.”
The poems’ evolving forms reinforce this focus on experience and establish a queer temporality. “Poem in Which Nothing Happens, August 3, 1892,” stands out both in the collection and when considering the relationship Lisowski’s book has with the material work. The poem features a floor plan, and the text of the poem is written perpendicular to the page, requiring the reader to turn the book. While this was the only poem written in this direction, this feels like an invitation for the reader to turn and inspect the voices’ undercurrents.
I read Lizzie as queer, and queerness reads to me like a sum of all the poems where Lizzie speaks rather than a specific moment. This method feels authentic towards summing a queer voice from the late 1800s. If I were to pinpoint a moment though, I would have to say it’s introduced in the first poem, not even in Lizzie’s voice, when the speaker says, “Do you know this weight towards becoming?” This question also speaks to the collection’s exploration of grief as a form of becoming, even when, perhaps, the grief is partially the result of one’s own actions, as in the case of Lizzie potentially having murdered her father.
The element of queerness is just one reason Blood Box has a unique and innovative relationship to persona. All of the characters have distinct voices, but they all have the same mood to me. They feel like they are part of the same song—almost like a collective mask or lens. They feel like instruments. Lisowski’s personas remind me of Jaqueline Jones LaMon’s collection Last Scene, in which I similarly noticed a consistent tone while navigating multiple forms and voices of lost and kidnapped children.
Well-paced and constantly surprising, Lisowski’s Blood Box is charting new ground in queer persona making.
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Robin Gow is a queer and trans poet and young adult author. They are the author of Our Lady of Perpetual Degeneracy (Tolsun Books, 2020) and the chapbook Honeysuckle (Finishing Line Press, 2019).