The Stranger Manual: Catie Rosemurgy

The Stranger Manual would be funny if it wasn’t so tragic, and the book’s reoccurring character, Miss Peach, might be eccentric, or whimsical, if she didn’t seem so terribly isolated. Through the cartoonishly self-pitying Miss Peach, Rosemurgy interrogates everything—from the body to the mythical town of Gold River—to the point of alienation. The book isn’t a strange manual, it’s a guide to systematically making the world strange. And it’s disconcertingly good at it.

Rosemurgy’s obsession with the body—its lyrical connotations, how it represents the self to others, how it marks and scars—can be seen in the book’s first poems, but it doesn’t necessarily stand out as unique from the work other poets are doing until “The Wondering Class,” where individual parts of the body becomes ciphers into the landscape of Miss Peach:
I think the stomach means we cannot love one another properly.

I think the stomach is our one true eye.

I think the stomach is an ingredient.

I think the fingers mean we are too small inside on another.

I think the fingers mean our roots become bone and we lurch away
with a new agenda.

I think the eyelash means we can float to the ground like snow.

Even in this short selection it’s possible to see what I mean about Rosemurgy defamiliarizing her most basic spheres of existance—here, the body is casually dissected and held up for the frank appraisal of Miss Peach. In part, I think this focus on the corporeal stems from the fact that Miss Peach does not trust the body, especially her own. Organs, she knows, will succumb to disease. Sex hints at violence, against self or others, and the stomach, as we are continually reminded, always hungers. In an earlier poem, “Neighbor: Miss Peach’s Body Didn’t Turn Out Right,” Rosemurgy begins by writing:

But whose did? She’s crumpled where she’s supposed to be unfolded,
something bad written on a piece of paper. Her walking
is a devolution that hunches and shrinks everyone

as she moved up the tree-lined street. I’m on my porch waving to neighbors and having one of those honeyed afternoons when I don’t know who I am.

I know everything else, though, and it’s ringing in my head. Then there she is
in a pool on my front steps, laughing, asking about lunch, as if the bones
of at least four different animals weren’t loose inside her, scurrying this way and that.
Someone needs to find her a place to live, a hidey hole we can cram food in
and get away quickly…

This passage—which reminds me of John Berryman’s Henry, who is sometimes the narrator and sometimes the subject of The Dream Songs—isn’t one of my favorites, but I think it’s a great link in the book’s longer narrative. It highlights the narrative thread of the physical body as unreliable, and more specifically, it focuses on the insatiable appetite of Miss Peach, which is a unique aspect of the book, and one of the main character’s most important characteristics alongside her desire to be understood and loved, which is the drive behind her methodical examination of the world. I also like this passage because it suggests that while we as readers are immersed in the narrative of Miss Peach, she may not be the only one hyper-aware of how the body and society shape us. Miss Peach's neighbor is having, "one of those honeyed afternoon when I don't know who I am." Peace, in Gold River, exists outside of awareness, in a forgetfulness of the self.

Gold River seems to be sort of an anytown USA—my first thought was that it was a variation of Gerard Manley Hopkins’s Goldengrove, a place of childlike wonder that loses its magic with maturity, and Gold River does seem to be an advanced version of that mythical place, though now unleaved instead of unleaving. And Miss Peach is the fully disillusioned version of Margaret from “Spring and Fall: To a Young Child.” If anything, Miss Peach is Margaret after sex and the avant-garde, still grieving over her cruelly ordinary world while simultaneously aware that it is herself she is mourning as well. But she doesn't need anyone to explain that paradox to her at this point, in fact, when introducing Gold River, Miss Peach explains it to us:

There is wolf behavior here. Families around fires,
packs at safe distances. Just like the stars,
we make sense in groups. When asked about trees,

some say that branched things are lies
we’ve been telling about ourselves for years.
Some say you can’t walk by a thing flooded with sugar
and not know yourself better. Some say we are fire to things
that just want to be wooden…

When we walk back to the circle, the fires split each of us in half,

neatly at last, into what can be lit up
and what obviously cannot.

The passages about Gold River are enjoyable not only because they expand the world of the book, but because they provide some welcome relief from the desperation of Miss Peach. In passages like this, with the rhetorical we and us, Miss Peach almost seems like she’s fitting into the whole, a part of the group lounging around the fire, though this poem, like most others, ends with the discomfiting lines above, that continue to separate and ostracize.

Some of the later poems about Gold River are beautiful, such as “New Year’s Eve,” which begins with a group venturing out onto a frozen lake, and continues to incorporate imagery of the body:

The lake wouldn’t let us in. We had to walk on it
like a family of children talking to a mother’s grave.

The snow lifted from the ice like a face
breaking apart. Our own skin held tight
but smelled crushed

like mint. The wind had licked the sky clean,
but then we showed up with our pulses

tucked in gloves…

After reading the book, I’m impressed with how Rosemurgy is able to dwell so long on the same themes without straining her subject matter or feeling repetitive, and part of that comes from her resistance to any one particular form, and her self-aware, lyrical language. In the very first poem of the book, “Miss Peach Is a Cross Between,” the title of the poem syntactically leads into a series of comparisons culminating with, “A little black period/that holds down words like a tack/and a bright little universe/that loves to turn black.”

Attempting to blur the boundaries of control between author and authored, or between the reader and the page is a popular move these days, and ending the first poem with the above lines promises that it will be an important theme throughout the narrative. But now I’m freely interspersing the terms narrative and lyric. So which is The Stranger Manual? I would say the poems are lyric, though the book itself follows a strong narrative. And what is lyric poetry, again? Poetry that…affirms? Praises? Stems from sources of religious or poetic authority…? Here’s what Miss Peach has to say (57):

…There have only ever been two kinds of poetry:
narrative and lyric. And some other kind that is sort of lyric but in a new way that
sounds like a breakdown but doesn’t lead to the hospital because that’s a narrative...

I say, don't worry: narrative and lyric hate each other, but like the rest of us they share
a house and make babies. They buy one another the perfect gifts....

And that works for me. If, at times like this, The Stranger Manual is a little too self-conscious of its own self-consciousness, Rosemurgy’s wit and sense of exploration make them worth reading. She approaches the body and language like an amnesiac discovering them for the first time. And if the book is at times dark and sad, or unsettling rather than endearing, it has heart, and these faults are slight when weighed against the focus and originality of Rosemurgy’s lyrics, and the vision of Miss Peach moving through Gold River, estranging two worlds at a time—ours and hers—through language.