In her fifth book, American Treasure, Jill McDonough confronts the American circumstance by traveling, researching history, and engaging with folks of all stripes while gazing hard at contemporary life in the context of our troublesome past. Her poems debunk America’s mythic greatness by shining light on our history of slavery, misogyny, and genocide. Evidence of our tragic defects may be found anywhere, even in McDonough’s own home, though her richest poems take place at sites of historical trauma — Jefferson’s Monticello or the Trinity Site, where the U.S. government tested the first nuclear explosion in 1945. Here’s an early poem from the book, “Joe Hill’s Prison.” Hill was an itinerant worker, labor organizer, and songwriter who was possibly wrongfully executed for murdering two men in 1914. Eleven taut lines comprise the poem:
The Historical Society in Salt Lake still has
some letters, a pamphlet called “Joe Hill’s
Remains,” even though he made it clear
he wanted his ashes scattered in every state
except Utah. Not wanting to be caught dead
here. The prison where Joe Hill died
is torn down now. Now there’s a Sizzler. Neon
and brick at the foot of mountains he must
have looked at through bars. They’re beautiful
mountains. They look like America, all majesty.
Rising purple up beyond the wall where he was shot.
I admire McDonough’s compressive friction, her ability to bring American beauty (“purple mountains majesty”) into contact with the poignant, tragic reality of Hill’s sanctioned execution. The poem refracts the historical haunting McDonough skillfully capitalized upon in her first book, Habeas Corpus, a collection of sonnets written about American citizens who suffered the fate of public execution. In this new work, McDonough’s poetic interests haven’t much changed, though she writes with more flair, humor, and confidence — elements of an original American voice. In this poem, Hill’s defiance of his imprisonment echoes forward to us through time. The pamphlet reveals his request to have his ashes strewn in every state except Utah. (Of course the state refused to honor Hill’s request.) Mixing seriousness and absurdity in a poem is one of McDonough’s many habits. For example, she notes that a Sizzler restaurant has replaced the razed prison. Even the name “Hill” feels like a bit of serendipitous irony in the context of the mountainous view surrounding him, with the majestic vista viewed through the barred window of Hill’s tiny cell.
Most of the imagining, traveling, and talking in American Treasure comes from McDonough herself, a middle aged gay woman determined to claim all her values and flaws. She understands that she is complicit in these historical affairs, has in fact benefitted from them. For McDonough, being among fellow citizens, especially strangers, is a full-contact social experience and a more-than-worthwhile subject for poetry. Testy confrontations, often while traveling with her partner Josey, are the subject of many memorable poems. In “Putting the Oh, Christ Back in Christmas,” McDonough and Josey sit at dinner mid-way through their “old-people holiday road trip” through the South. When another tourist (a white man sitting nearby) says of Jefferson and his slave Sally Heming, “… I mean, we don’t know it was rape,”
… Josey
and I don’t look up from our plates, don’t need to decide
to fuck with this guy. We both just get into it, like breathing.
I got you, waitresses, bartenders say, and we soothe
the twitch in his Faulkner-looking mustache: of course
Jefferson didn’t think he was a rapist. This makes him relax
so much he agrees when Josey shrugs, says I mean, she
was bred for it, right? Then he sees what we’ve done.
It’s entertaining to watch McDonough and her partner Josey clown this random, racist stranger. We’re in on the joke, watching them watch him realize he’s been fooled. Many contemporary poems would end here, with a comic mic-drop that humiliates the stranger, but McDonough knows that such a move would be detrimental to the idea of a poem in service to nuance instead of self-righteousness. She quickly pivots from narrative mode to a lyric meditation that recognizes her moral dilemma:
… In Andersonville the graves stretch out
for acres, each with a red-ribboned Christmas wreath,
reach as far as the eye can bear. In Americus Jimmy Carter
teaches Sunday School; a king-size bed in a Red Roof Inn
sets you back sixty bucks. In the morning you can see
everything. In the morning you can see what we’ve done.
The change in mode and tone suggests the possibility of enlightening the man they encountered at the meal. And yet there’s also a thread of complicity for the speaker once she surveys the bare economic circumstances of town from her bed at the local Red Roof Inn, a town that perhaps depends on tourism to survive. McDonough’s mastery of structure, image and tone in this poem creates the kind of ambiguity critical to a poem examining our varied ideas about history and power. The racist man, as well as the speaker, have “come correct,” have been changed. Note how the reader (“you,” in the final two lines) is also slyly drawn into the sphere of complicity.
Many poems in American Treasure are located in prisons where McDonough teaches writing to incarcerated populations, particularly to teens in “kidjail.” In these prisons, she views her role as an interlocutor, empowered to create an atmosphere of wonder and tenderness. “Sonnet for Reading Aloud in Kidjail,” the second poem in the book, starts out by embodying the boys’ painful desire for connection, beginning, “The boys in my local juvie want to work one / on one, write stories, poems, mark up the stuff / I give them. More than one kid at a time’s less fun: / more fussing, more holding back to show how tough / they are.” The circumstances are dire, as if McDonough’s presence among them sparks competition for her attention. But after these boys have completed her writing assignment, she’s able to charm them with their own novice attempts at poetry:
… Later
I read them aloud so they can hear how good they are; it’s
like a magic trick, their words in my grown-up voice.
They still and listen, hear themselves, lean in on me
like children, because they are children.
In this scene, McDonough offers the boys temporary respite from the harshness of their incarceration. The poem ends with an awesome silence in which the speaker senses the boys thinking about each other’s work, “That sounds pretty good. Dag.” Meeting the teenagers at their level, even allowing their own thoughts to close out her poem, briefly unsettles the power dynamic to which the boys are accustomed.
A sense of desperation permeates McDonough’s kidjail poems. In “Donuts in Kidjail,” a single donut on a table gathers immense importance for a boy who is, under McDonough’s guidance, writing an imitation of Elizabeth Bishop’s “One Art.” As the boy makes his list of all the things he’s lost (parents, grandparents, childhood, freedom), the donut sits nearby, a talisman of desire. This is also a poem that ends with the speaker’s departure from the drama, her return to a world in which all of her own desires can be sated: “… And I drove away, past / Forest Hills and new condo construction, Blissful Monkey / yoga studio, Whole Foods. Parked my car and walked into my / house, where no one hurts me, where I eat whatever I want.” The speaker’s utter freedom brings her student’s desire into stark relief.
For me, the most moving, effective poem set in prison is the title poem, where we experience a nuanced perspective on American “treasure” and how that word resonates for the poet. In one sense, our treasure consists of everything slavery and genocide has delivered to white America at large: freedom, generational wealth, property, economic opportunity — the very things that prompt a white man on a “slavery tour” to feel defensive about his ancestors and maybe even about himself. But the tenderness of McDonough’s prison poems identifies another kind of treasure hoarded away and therefore wasted: the talents and hopes of people incarcerated because they’ve been systemically deprived of economic security and political capital. The poem humanizes McDonough’s students and expresses her genuine love for them:
I draw hearts
and stars. High five! I love them. Men and women trying to start
fresh. People we keep trying to throw away. I love their easy laughs
in impossible circumstances: nothing more American than that.
In the midst of these animated couplets — you can detect the heat and intimacy of the teacher among her students, their industriousness, and their brief ability, through poetry, to transcend their dire circumstance — McDonough swerves, once again, to indict America for its moral hypocrisy. She also interrogates her own situation. The poem continues:
I was in prison and you visited me, says Christ. Give
without worry, the new Pope says. They let me see my privilege
everywhere: my car, my house, my bed. This face cops love.
These unbruised arms. Getting to call everybody sweetheart or hon.
Never far from McDonough’s attention are “they”: working class folk, people of color, waitresses and bartenders, disenfranchised workers, prisoners. Even our simplest language, such as McDonough’s habit of addressing everyone “sweetheart or hon,” feels complicated within the context of America’s history of atrocity. (I suspect these terms of endearment make light reference to the language Emmett Till was falsely accused of using in Money, Mississippi in 1955.) Many poets in the early 2020s address these topics through the lens of a highly-personalized self, but few do it at McDonough’s level of moral complexity and emotional breadth. These qualities are what make American Treasure a must-read.
[Published by Alice James Books on November 8, 2022, 100 pages, $17.95]