A REVIEW OF ROSEANNA ALICE BOSWELL’S IN THE HOUSE IN THE WOODS

In the House in the Woods lives the memory of a family and lives the memory of a girl. Rosanna Alice Boswell’s second full-length collection examines what it is to be a part of a family, and more specifically, what it means to be a sister and a daughter. It traverses the landscape of the speaker’s childhood and how those relationships evolve. This is a book about grief, but this is also a book about the unique relationships between family members, siblings and parents, mothers and daughters, and it questions one’s place within the family. This is a book about a speaker leaving home and then coming back to find she doesn’t fit into the space as easily as she did when she was younger. For instance, home becomes part of the self, even as the self grows beyond it in the poem, “Queen Anne’s Lace.” Memory inundates the speaker as she drives through the night to the childhood home she shared with her sisters:

No one believes the beginning

of this story, the part where we are born in the woods

& stayed there. Found fairy circles & left them undisturbed

& unsalted. I come home to visit & I think the trees have

missed me. I feel a gnawing in my bark-bones

I try to pretend I missed them, too.

In these woods the speaker abandoned their belief in magic. She comes back with only the impression of what once was, and she can only “try” to fit herself back into the landscape of which she was a part. She can only try to believe. In this collection, the speaker “tries” to find her way back to the land she left behind, but she knows it’ll never be the same because she is not the same.

 The speaker’s journey in this collection is to remember herself here in the woods, in this place where she learned her place, where she learned to be a girl, learned to see her body. Boswell’s poems deftly explore the connection between body image and lessons passed down by the family. In the poem, “Elegy for my Body,” the speaker learns to question her body in relation to the bodies of the women she grew up around. When the speaker was younger, she could play dress up with her mother’s wedding dress which connected her with her mother and her mother’s body, but when her own body matured, she learned to judge herself as different, as less than:

I grew fast after that. My period

arriving in a February snowfall, my hips unfolding

like a monstrous cardboard cutout. Breasts & fat

& thighs all overspilling corners. I became

unlike overnight.

In another poem, “I Don’t Know How to Tell You That You Didn’t Prepare Me for the World,” Boswell’s speaker contemplates being a woman in a world where being a woman is dangerous. The “you” refers to her parents who she feels didn’t equip her for this bad world. The only things this speaker feels she has is fear and she has questions like “how could I possibly fight / or flee / on these legs / these watered thighs / my trick knee / is the only thing I inherited / from my father / this unruly joint / never staying / where it should”

 Just as the poems circle the speaker’s thoughts about her body and her placement within her family, again and again the speaker in these poems revisits her grief after losing two women she loved—a sister and an aunt. In particular, the loss of her sister haunts her. In “Two Months After My Sister’s Funeral, I Wake,” she contemplates ghosts, the failure of her sister’s body, and where her sister may be now that she’s gone:

 I keep dreaming her here, at home.

Where else would she have gone?

I didn’t know I’d lost god until he didn’t

make me feel better. The hospital staff did

all they could, I guess. There were tubes

& I wasn’t there.

 The sister’s death impacts the speaker to the point where she questions her faith and feels abandoned by god. In this poem she opts for a lowercase spelling of god where people who believe typically capitalize the term as if it were proper name. This further shrinks the speaker’s connection to the idea of god.

In addition, home in this poem reflects the physical space in which the sisters grew up, but it also refers to heaven or the idea of going home to that god. This speaker questions that religious homecoming though. She asks the relatable questions we all ask when someone we love leaves us: Where could they be now? Is there something after? In the end, the speaker has no real answers. All she can do is “dream her home again & / again she knows she’s dead.”

Rosanna Alice Boswell writes a collection that thinks through the selfhood in relation to the family, especially the women she grew up around. This speaker is looking for herself in these women: “My mother is kind & I am like her in many ways or most ways / but I am something else, too, & I want to know if this is where / my aunt & I overlap.” The collection also questions the lessons we hand down from woman to woman and from parent to child. The poems in this collection are not bitter but tender. They grieve for what is lost and search for what still may be found.

Rosanna Alice Boswell’s In the House in the Woods is available from Cooper Dillon Books.