“Remember, there can be beauty in sameness, she says.
More than comfort, it gives us space for awe.”
The Familiar by Sarah Kain Gutowski
Texas Review Press, 2024
Reading Sarah Kain Gutowski’s The Familiar feels, well, familiar in so many ways. Amid my own life circumstances, I’m not sure I had time for her heroine’s mid-life crisis, yet Gutowski’s keen awareness that a woman’s life is an ongoing dialogue between several dissociated selves rings true. Written as a fabulist narrative-in-poems, Gutowski’s second book of poetry, says Gutowski, “mimics the bizarre, darkly funny experience of midlife by making literal the multiple ‘selves’ that women often have to embody and employ just to support a family, create a career, and maintain relationships.” Alas, yes. And then there is that other self, our extraordinary self, as Gutowski names her, that just wants to ditch everyone, go dancing, shine shine shine.
In fact, I can’t help loving extraordinary self even though she’s a bit demanding and gets a few too many bad tattoos that her inevitable self will regret in the future while equally relishing the more adventurous narrative they tell about her life. However, representing her future aged self, inevitable self is my favorite. “Buck up, / buttercups,” she reprimands in “Every Action Chose This Moment,” “Or whatever. Wallow / in your sadness. But your every action chose this / moment. Also, none of it was ever really under / your control.” Perhaps my affection issues from the fact that I have lived a life in which wallowing was not an option or helpful, but I deeply appreciate her voice in the final section of The Familiar anchoring the chorus in straightforward sensibility.
But I digress. We aren’t there yet. Gutowski’s book has three preceding sections that deserve our undivided attention (pun intended) as well.
The book opens with the extraordinary self in the company of her past, present, and future manifestations wrestling with all the pent up want and desire a woman must negotiate her entire life while keeping her ordinary worlds from crumbling. “[K]now that she’s kind of a shit,” says the speaker in the book’s second poem “A Necessary Lesson”:
Perpetually cranky with the kids because she can’t have
more quiet, or more time, or simply more of her way;
distraught when odds are stacked against her and small requests
from the children—for a glass of water, a repeated direction,
or braided hair—stand like roadblocks in her path
to some imagined greatness. I mean, really, she’s the worst.
Don’t waste time over her spilt ambitions, opaque as milk—they were too much for such a small glass.
I so appreciate how Gutowski effortlessly states the banality of being American, the crazy- making ambition that, in the end, dies with us and often leaves a trail of woes behind. Perhaps, at the core of what it means to have a crisis at some point in the “middle” of one’s material existence is this need to do something so great that our remembrance will rise mythologically from the ashes of mundanity—forever. But that seldom happens. Crisis hits when, suddenly, we realize this, and that we are more likely to be remembered as the dust some future homeowner keeps brushing off their shelves.
When I googled “Is midlife crisis global?” the first article to populate my feed was published in Fortune (eh-hem, capitalism). I couldn’t read it without a subscription, but the title said enough: “The midlife crisis is real—in every rich country in the world.” Good to know Americans are not alone. There are other bored imaginative peoples out there with lattes.
“I ask my ordinary self if she’s happy,” says the speaker in “It’s Difficult to Say the Word,” to a version of herself that must retain a day-job, do the expected tasks, “smile when there’s a need” (“Her Blandness is Camouflage”). If this were another less-privileged world, a day-job might be all her ordinary self had ever dreamed of; but it’s not. In this, her American world, the question of happiness is, as the speaker says, “a trick question.” “Why,” she wonders, “does everyone feel / entitled to happiness, as if it were as common / or as necessary as oxygen?” There’s more to dream of here. More to hope for. In fact, there’s more exposure to others successfully attaining what they have dreamed of or hoped for, and therefore, it’s hard to be anything more than what ordinary self answers: she’s content. In moments like this, found in section two, Gutowski captures so well how we are supposed to feel alongside how we know we really feel alongside how we want to feel. It’s all there fractured, painfully obvious, and ridiculously hilarious if we really think about it. Gutowski has.
Perhaps this is where
we acknowledge this conceit is not unique, nay, notextraordinary: we all house within our skin and brains
another self or two, whole persons devoted to one aspect
of twenty-first century life with particular, not entirelyhealthy, focus.
(from “My Heart, Not Hers (And Not Hers Either)”)
When I think about my own life, I’m aware of this fracture. Like most living American poets, I too want to win that one big poetry book prize that signals career success and means my name will never be forgotten in the annuls of history. But, in more sane moments I realize, by sheer numbers, the odds are stacked against me. Better to write for that one lone reader in the future who needs to find my one surviving copy of a book I wrote sandwiched between others on a used bookstore’s bottom shelf in the poetry section. My authorial voice might speak hope to them in ways I can’t even imagine right now.
Despite obscurity, I am American and, even in my most menial materiality, have more than the larger percentage of those alive on this planet. I have often sat back and pondered how confounding and laughable (and obvious) we are in our excess of everything—including self-pity and poetry.
If poetry is the stuff of questions, my extraordinary self asks,
why do so many poems end with profound conclusions?
Where is doubt? Where is awe? She’s drunk again, havingfound an audience of traveling American writers—who
like wine and, for some reason, listening to this idiot talk.
My ordinary self, one table over, folds and refoldsa cloth napkin, pressing its corners into exactness.
Maybe we aren’t reading them closely enough, she suggests.
Maybe we aren’t reading them correctly. My extraordinary selfwinks at the bespectacled men drinking at the table
and refills their glasses to the brims. That, she says,
is what the patriarchy would have you believe. Faulty readers.My ordinary self frowns and leans forward, elbows
on her knees, jaw in her hands, eyes pitched toward the cliff
outside the window. Questions in poems don’t matter anyway,she says. We have more than enough doubt and awe
right here.
She’s right—all her selves are right in this book. Their collective espouses a simple awareness spoken, at last, by her inevitable self, a “weird Sartrean grandmother” that, says the speaker, everyone mostly ignores but is probably “the most right” of anyone: “Sometimes a freakout is just a freakout, she insists. / Sometimes, she sighs, we don’t learn a goddamn thing” (“Flat Chalk Slates”).
True enough. Joy Harjo has said that “poetry keeps the door open to awe …” Gutowski slams that door shut for a sober minute to show us that even this is a matter of privilege. If you have the luxury of a poem or awe, abandon your crisis, and embrace them wisely before all is “washed clean by time.”
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Kimberly Ann Priest is the winner of the 2024 Backwaters Prize in Poetry from the University of Nebraska Press for her book Wolves in Shells, as well as the author of tether & lung (Texas Review Press) and Slaughter the One Bird (Sundress Publications). A professor of first-year writing at Michigan State University, she lives with her husband in Maine.