In her novel Tom Lake, Ann Pachett offers a “simple truth about life: You will forget much of it.” Carolina Hotchandani’s The Book Eaters expresses both the accuracy of Patchett’s aphorism, and the methods its narrator engages to confront the erasures that time performs. Hotchandani’s debut collection begins with her meditation on a beloved father’s decline into aphasia, then opens to an examination of motherhood, history, culture, and their interleaved effects. As Hotchandani’s perspective shifts from that of a daughter to one of a mother, her project considers metaphor as a tactic to explore, define –– and perhaps recover –– a life.
For Hotchandani, self is inseparable from language. In “Portrait of Aphasia on a Plum Tree,” a word her father can’t remember becomes a ball he’d kicked “high / into the plum tree’s grasp.” The speaker leaves her body “like a ball in motion,” as her father’s full-fleshed thought shrinks to a plum pit –– both inedible detritus and pith, it burrows “in her chest like a solid thing / a word could almost name.” The pit becomes a metaphor for what is forgotten, and for how little remains beyond words. While Hotchandani crafts other metaphorical portraits of aphasia as a burnished moon, a row of shells, and invisible ink, there’s a shivery science fiction element to a thought that propels the speaker out of her body, then roots inside her as an alien, unnamable force.
Pregnancy is another force the body must reckon with, one that threatens to subsume the self in an all-consuming role. Metaphor offers Hotchandani the distance to examine it in a series of self-portraits. In “Self-Portrait as a Clothesline,” the domestic object becomes the adequate symbol of a self “stretched,” perhaps to breaking, “between two sweet gum trees.” Whether these are the poles of birth and death, or the generations a new mother strains between, her “dream of / a future” vanishes like “a sheet onto someone’s lawn.” Motherhood, in Hotchandani’s carefully worked figures, both swells and diminishes her. In “Self Portrait as a Woman Halved,” the stripe down the globe of her belly splits a pregnant woman –– the “child of parents from both sides of the world” (Hotchandani’s mother is Brazilian; her father, Indian) –– into Eastern and Western hemispheres. “But I’ll look at my child — / her skin whiter than mine — / and feel divided,” Hotchandani writes, aware that the world “will grant her an ease that keeps her / from knowing me.” The enjambment in those last lines shivers with the memory of tensions between generations, and with the gap between safety and knowledge –– poignant in the poem’s final words: “Glad, too, / for that same reason.”
Metaphor works best when it arises from the literal, and Hotchandani’s literal book eaters are insects that destroy wor(l)ds wholesale. From the “unhatched nymphs” in “Silverfish (Lepisma Sccharina)” to their “clicking jaws” (“Deathwatch Beetle, Xestobium Rufovillosum”), Hotchandani’s creepy-crawlies afflict the mind as well as the page. “Some days, insects that ravage books/are all I write about,” Hotchandani confesses in “I Keep Searching for the Perfect Metaphor.” In the work of writing, “spinning the metaphor’s threads / around me, I undergo a metamorphosis —
closed off, for a while, from the metaphor’s tenor.” While focusing on descriptions of “legs” and “roving antenna,” and “on how they consume entire archives of human knowledge,” the poet discovers that she is also “writing about forgetting.” Can a metaphor’s flawless yoking of disparate things be transformational? Since nothing’s perfect, the writer is unsure. When her mother visits to help with the demands of a newborn, Hotchandani writes in “Cursive,” “I make myself / the child curling ink into / words to keep / from disappearing.” Short lines, with the breaks after “myself” and “keep,” repeat an act of vanishing and the necessity of writing to hold it at bay.
The Book Eaters ends with a vision of a fresh start. Reading herself as both insect and book, Hotchandani concludes in “The Cigarette Beetle’s Bildungsroman” that she’s passed through her “story mostly unscathed: / a protagonist of a bildungsroman, / molting old abrasions;” she’s “prepared to greet the real world,/complete.” Her griefs and needs, keenly expressed through the cords, creatures, and characters she figures, have been assuaged, leaving their vibrating intensities between covers.
Metaphor requires a leap between tenor and vehicle, like a synapse between neurons. The poet invents, but the reader provides the bolt of electricity. Hotchandani’s meditative lyrics provide plenty of room for the unexpected explosion of meaning within the sinuous push-pull of her verse. Each poem pulses with the rhythm of thought as it yearns for expression in language. Reader, devour this book and be nourished.
[Published by Perugia Press on September 15, 2023, 97 pages, $18.00US paperback.]