Book Review: RECEIPT by Karen Leona Anderson
 |
Receipt Poems by Karen Leona Anderson |
| Milkweed Editions, 2016 $16.00 |
Karen Leona Anderson’s second poetry collection, Receipt, is a reexamination of the daily duties of our modern American culture, particularly regarding feminine expressions of identity and womanhood. Anderson unearths the power behind receipts and recipes, transactions and documentation of the many roles women stretch to fit: mother, wife, cook, sexual being. With a precise and often cheeky voice, Anderson illuminates daily things—a CVS receipt, a Nordstrom dress, a cookbook—documentation of domesticity that beckons the reader to adapt a critical lens for the mundane and ordinary.
Receipt is sectioned into three parts: “Recipe,” “Receipt,” and “Re.” Anderson begins her collection with vintage cookbooks as inspiration. As a culturally identifying marker of domesticity, the aesthetic of 20th and 21st century cookbooks formulate women as recipes themselves: commercialized instructions to be followed and consumed. The parallel Anderson makes is eye-opening, albeit witty. In “Betty Crocker Cooking School of the Air,” the caricatured homemaker is representative of ingredients for the picturesque wife— “So slow, the directions on how to stay newly wed: / marshmallow, movie, coconut, marriage, whip cream, // baby, mayonnaise, baby.” In most of the “Recipe” poems, Anderson notes the playful vintage cookbook as the poems’ backdrops; however, it’s poems like “Asparagus,” or “Pizza Night” that imply a much darker side associated with domestic roles. In “Asparagus,” the speaker struggles to accept the disillusioned confines of her environment, “how I / love how I hate this place we’ve made.” And in “Pizza Night,” she needs “to feel / full of the worst thing you can / without meaning anything.” In “Holy Face Community Cookbook,” Anderson unveils the brokenness of the speaker’s relationship to her children through recipe-like instructions:
These recipes tell us Mix Well. Or Bake
till done. Some dumb sun blighted this land,
no, you did; no, you. The receiptfor repairing damage…
careful not to overdo it;
you’re overdoing it; exactly; I am;
kneading hand over handover hand; now, Fight well,
you two, as the kids watch the world
burn down. Did you fight to save it?If not, start over.
It’s moments like these where I felt the draw of Anderson’s larger message: there are distortions everywhere regarding female identity, continually perpetuated through ordinary objects that represent our consumeristic culture.
As the collection moves from “Recipes” to “Receipts,” the consumerist nature of American identity is offered in forms of paper receipts. Anderson evokes within the reader the stark realization of the products and services women buy, why they buy them, and their cultural weight—financially, emotionally, and physically. The purchased items are clearly angled towards women and their perceived social roles in the following poems: “Beauty Nails ($39.95),” “David’s Bridal ($0.00),” “ClearBlue Easy ($49.99 CVS),” “Epidural ($25.00 copay).” Anderson reflects these receipts—a dialogue between the speaker and the object—back on the reader as a way to reveal the underlying distortions. In “Shirt ($29.69 T.J. Maxx),” the speaker confronts the frustration between the menstruating female body and the unrealistic expectations of how female bodies should carry clothing, “I can’t / pin up a whole half / of the species. I can’t stop. / I guess a good skirt / would help; I guess I’m bleeding.” In “Paid ($3,678.53 Capital One),” the speaker is in conversation with her accrued debt, “an existence built on dinners out and clothes, men, / and the management of myself. That’s my kind / of work.” Here, Anderson positions the reader to question how and where money is allocated, and how much money women spend to meet unrealistic standards of beauty and femininity.
The third and final section, “Re,” seemingly merges the old and the new, the manufactured with the natural world, as a kind of rebirthing or reconstruction. Anderson blurs the line between our culture and outside environment. In “Free Minutes,” the speaker hears “Frogs call all-network: / across the marsh’s mall,” and in “First House” the speaker finds “Bees have restored the holes they left in the porch.” In a sense, Anderson allows man-made objects and natural objects to coexist in women’s lives. This conveys a re-representation of domesticity—a recalibration of the various female identities that are either embraced or rejected by society.
Karen Leona Anderson succeeds in Receipt by giving the reader documentation of the domestic. By doing this, the reader has the power to reexamine female-identifying roles in our patriarchal culture. The importance of these physical documents is the reminder of what is problematic in the everyday domestic practices of women. Anderson gives agency to these distortions—a voice that grants the reader context for questioning the “ordinary.”