Weekly Poem: Sarah Rose Nordgren finds inspiration in her fantastical childhood

When Sarah Rose Nordgren looks back at her childhood, she calls it “distinctive,” filled with myth and fable.

“I’ve always been interested in things like myth and fable because I’ve always been interested in childhood and I had a very distinctive childhood that was very full of those things,” Nordgren told Art Beat. “Very full of fantasy worlds, very full of living in the woods with no supervision. I shouldn’t say no supervision, little supervision, less supervision than I think a lot of people have these days.”

The poet grew up in North Carolina and the experience of what she describes as her fantastical childhood, and her interest in stories and dreams, permeates how she approaches her poetry. Nordgren, whose debut collection “Best Bones” was published at the end of September, has often been talked about for her surrealistic storytelling style, but she doesn’t see it that way.

“I’m not trying to write something fantastical, I’m not trying to write something surreal. I’m actually trying to get at something very, very real and very, very grounded in the world, and that is the best way that I know how to do that, sometimes through strangeness because of the intensity of the experience.”

Through dramatic monologue and persona poetry, Nordgren contemplates identity, family and relationships. Sometimes that identity is being stripped away, like in her poem “Sisters” about sisters and the “very raw and almost violent teenage girl relationship,” and in “1917,” where the narrator wants to travel back in time and take away her mother’s identity to save her from the pain she will experience in her life.

Other poems deal with the construction of relationships and the identity of an individual versus that of the group to which they belong. “Best Bones,” the titular poem, explores this theme by examining an individual’s feeling of loneliness within a tight, loving family unit.

When you finally reach the penultimate poem of the book, “When You’re Dead,” you start to redefine all these elements that the book has set out to understand.

“It attempts to dismantle the idea of identity and the idea of life after working through those issues through the entirety of the book,” said Nordgren. “It tries to take them back apart again and get back to something much more basic or more primal.”

Sisters

the duckling in the shoebox dying fluttering fast
its leaves and twigs I am green
transparent sister told my sister her legs are not
gorgeous crawling to the bathroom
said you both like that anorexic look but not me
on TV a wrestling match the mean
woman in leather tore up the drawing from that retard
who loved her once I pissed my pants
laughed too hard sat in the driveway for an hour
on the bus the drunk girl cried
I’ve just been through hell I’m supposed to be
a bridesmaid where is my dress
I’ve lost the two people the African Grey in summer
flew up into the trees my father’s
shoulder where are the two people that I love?

Originally, the collection was titled “The Only House in the Neighborhood,” the title of another poem in the book. Over the years it took to put the book together, Nordgren began to think of it as a house.

“(The book) contains all these different voices of the mother, voices of a father, voices of children, voices of old men, voices of servants. They are speaking out of a desire for some kind of feeling of unification, that they all want to know who they are, but they all want to be whole people and that these roles are usefully defining, but they are also extremely limiting to the psyche,” said Nordgren. “It’s almost like they are calling out to each other over some great expanse even though they are sitting right next to each other at the dinner table.”

That wholeness is what the book finally aims to achieve. The image of the house and the family, Nordgren seeks to have everyone be individual, functioning parts of a working whole.

“The house is like a bed that everybody gets tucked inside and put to sleep.”

“Sisters” from “Best Bones,” by Sarah Rose Nordgren, © 2014. Used by permission of the University of Pittsburgh Press.