Book Review: I ATE THE COSMOS FOR BREAKFAST by Melissa Studdard
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I Ate the Cosmos for Breakfast Poems by Melissa Studdard |
| Saint Julian Press, 2014 $12.00 |
There is a universe inside each instant—if ever a writer has taken that statement to heart, it’s Melissa Studdard. Her fourth book, I Ate the Cosmos for Breakfast, turns a keen eye on life’s smallest moments to pay homage to the astronomical range of human experience and emotion.
Studdard opens the collection with one grand overture before the small moments, “Creation Myth.” Here, her deft hand paints a new world in broad strokes:
So there God lay, with her legs splayed,
birthing the screaming worldfrom her red velvet cleft, her thighs
cut holy with lovefor all things. both big and small,
that crept from her womb like an army…
A few simple word choices—her, screaming, velvet, army—and we’ve got a radical poem that sets the tone for its counterparts to come. Studdard shows us the beauty in ugly things, a God “in love with her own making, infatuated // with all corners of the blemished universe.” This God is a prescient predecessor for Studdard’s other speakers.
“In Another Dimension, We Are Making Love” reminds us that our human capacity for understanding is limited while illustrating alternate possibilities and emotions that can change on a dime:
Like you, I believe most in what
I cannot see or hear. Anger: a wounded steam
rising from the cauldron of your throat.
Alchemy: the steam dissipates, and you reach
across the table for my hand.
Studdard’s mastery over metaphor collapses the most immense of concepts—humanity, the universe—into understandable images. She plays at shifting sizes and shapes, using the canvas of available objects as a screen onto which she projects the human drama. “What you mistook for a person / is really a country,” her speaker informs us; yet all the necessary things to remember “can fit on a scrap of paper / smaller than your hand.”
Perhaps the simplest of Studdard’s extended metaphors, “If I Saw the Airports in Your Eyes,” is exemplar of how sometimes only comparison can make emotion decipherable. The lover is an airport, departing planes, packed luggage, a trolley. The speaker: a city, a building, brown sugar packed tight. Then, a pause in the images—“I’d say Don’t remind me / Please don’t remind me.” This flash of concentrated feeling fleshes out the rest of the metaphor so that, when the lover’s “exhaust…punches through my sky / like a fist,” we all feel it.
These pained poems of love are the jewels of Studdard’s collection. Her incinerating diction and expert craft elevate the love poem, so long made shameful by clumsiness and cliché, into a series of glittering surprises. Two favorites include “A Prayer” and “For Two Conversion Therapists Who Fell in Love and Became Gay Activists.” No, Studdard doesn’t shy from love, religion, or politics—gasp!—yet still creates successful poems. I’d argue it’s due to her talent for making a thing comprehensible. Reformed conversion therapists, like us, are people whose “atoms have come to worship / and rejoice at the temple of the familiar.”
Close readers will note that I Ate the Cosmos, from its very first poem, is a galaxy of a collection constantly collapsing in on itself. Ideas are compressed into more accessible, digestible chunks as new emotions and concepts become part of the reader’s known universe. And so, the final poem, a diminuendo. “The Soul is Swaddled in Body” doesn’t try at anything other than reminding us how the littlest moment can be immeasurable. For this, and all its other poems, I am grateful.
If I could do it all over again,
I wouldn’t write a damn word. I’d
just make love to you in the meadow
with the cows watching, and the cats
chasing mice through the straw.