Sealey Challenge Day 8: In Another Country

Surprise and Desire

Today I’m sharing work from Andrea Jurjević, her second full-length collection, In Another Country, which won Saturnalia’s 2024 book prize. Her work was one of the reasons that drew me to Georgia State’s program (though now I have to figure out how to pick her brain, since she teaches undergraduates).

I love how her images unspool in each poem, leading me to some surprise of association. They’re poems that I can examine and use as examples of craft—to follow an image into some new awareness of how a thing lives, or some conclusion bigger than itself. Some examples:

From “Fish Treatment”:

She’d pick up every fish with care, cradle
it in one hand, while her other, free hand

would sink the narrow fillet knife
into its white belly—a narrow passage

one makes when sliding into bed at night.
And like a waking flower, a stream

of blood would bloom within that basin,
her hands brush against its thin petals.

Or, from “Mother’s Bedtime Routine”:

Now a cloud gathers above her forehead and from it forms a well

Now I lean over that well and on the reflective water

I see her dusting owl figurines in the house of misfortune

Insert exploding head emoji!

She also utilizes a device that I’d like to explore more—when the poem becomes aware of itself and takes a turn away from the initiating image and explores the way we see a thing. In “At San Fernando Cathedral,” which I wish I could reproduce in its entirety because of the rhetorical moves it makes, she moves from a description of a cathedral, where the “long purple silk” draped all over the alter “like vomit. Perhaps vomit is not the best word,” but, as the speaker muses, Christ’s experience on the cross would have been visceral, scatalogical. This thought moves to the idea of weeping, and here her turns go in unexpected and surprising directions:

And weep. Oh. Weep like a man. I’m not a sadist but tears of men are a turn-
on fast like the flap of pigeon wings.

Take Jesus—muscles tight, trembling, face twisted, eyes wet, pain eclipsing
his body—

that imminence of release, the man calling your name, crying it out like the
safe word, and, tell me, who in this picture is pretending to be human?

As a reader of poetry, I adore these kinds of surprises. As a writer, I envy it, and aspire to develop the ability to step out of my tendency to stay close to the initiating image, like an essay, and wander further along the path. Though I think I’ve managed it a few times in my poems, I constantly run into conceptual dead ends—or to so many paths I get paralyzed with indecision. Drafting a new poem is often agony—yet also the most satisfying experience, when it works. It’s like ecstasy that way. Which means I have to end with this image. IYKYK.