This past March, I was moving through the AWP book fair in a way that, were I another kind of mammal, might suggest grazing, when my attention was caught. It was the cover of I Now Pronounce You that stopped me – bright spring green, yellow text, hands lifting glasses of champagne to clink together. But bones showed through those hands – a skeletal toast making a dramatic contrast with the wedding imagery conjured by the volume’s title. I had to know more! 

Caroline Earleywine’s volume of poems plays with the reader’s assumptions and expectations around weddings throughout its 126 pages. From the titles of sections (Prelude, Something Borrowed, Something Blue, Something New, Recessional), which also subverts the order of the familiar refrain and drops the “something old” element, to the titles of poems (“I Now Pronounce You” is used as a title by three different poems – more on those in a bit). But weddings are not the only rite of passage considered: funerals and other endings, coming out, naming (or not naming) events, and the many changes in one’s life that don’t have ceremonies to mark them, but are still significant.

Most of all, the poems here are about pronouncement, the secondary definition, meaning to announce or declare, the meaning most attached to the word’s Latin origins of “messenger.” Earleywine is indeed a messenger, with news to announce and declarations to make. 

Grief and joy are the twin stars of this collection, each presenting in various guises. Grief presents itself for consideration in poems about parents’ divorce, sibling relationships, deaths of family members, the stifling confines of traditional roles for women, being closeted, the small and large traumas of a life, and the very difficulty of grief itself. In several poems the specter of sexual assaults in college relationships, before coming out, goes unnamed. The poem “Why I can Never Call It _____” introduces this theme, using mid-line spaces to effectively replicate the difficulty of talking about and naming what happened:

Because he didn’t hold me down.
Because I returned the kiss.
Because I drank the beers.

The far-reaching effects of these experiences resurface here and there throughout the volume as the speaker continues to process her experiences. 

So many of these griefs are bound up in the societal scripts given to women, that it perhaps is only natural that in “A Conversation with My Period,” the speaker accuses her period of many things, but the worst is that “you bring that heavy ache / unburden your sorrows so I have / no choice but to sink into / them”. The sinking into sorrows is uncomfortable and unpleasant – as unpleasant as a period “overflowing again / with one last story / one last point to make.” Even so, she acknowledges “[w]ho else / gives me this permission / to spill out all this sadness?” Grief as something that spills out, that leaks, that stains, that makes life harder, is also redeemed as something that we need to feel and express, even if by force.

The counterweight to all this grief is joy, especially queer joy, as in poems like “The World’s Smallest Pride Parade,” where after marriage equality is legalized, the speaker and her partner “throw the world’s smallest Pride parade” with “our dogs’ necks adorned / with rainbow bandanas, fairy wings and tutus.” This poem, appropriately written in couplets, is only sixteen lines long, but the ending delivers what I found to be one of the most emotional endings of the volume:

We walked to a last-minute celebration at a bar,
We did what we were so often afraid to – 

We laced our fingers together, in broad daylight,
And walked down the street.

It’s a joyous ending, but it is also overlaid with the grief that comes from being “so often afraid” to do what comes so naturally when walking with someone you love. 

As a reader might expect, there are poems about coming out, and the precursors to coming out. “The Only Girl Out at My High School” tells us the speaker lives in a town where “women are supposed to be silent / and gay people were going to hell” and yet, there is this girl who is “her own marching / band, parading down the halls, // and even the religious ones / respected her.” The speaker remembers sitting with this girl once, listening to a playlist. She remembers feeling “Like I was hearing an overture // collecting the melodies / so someday / I could sing them.” 

The singing begins in the second section, Something Blue. The poems “Are You Gay?” “Bible Belt Gay,” “GSA,” and “The Conditional,” all touch on different aspects of coming out. A student poses the question of the title “Are You Gay?”, and the teacher chooses “words / to make the smallest / ripples” before answering yes, which leads to more questions, to a boy laughing, to students approaching after class to thank the teacher. These thanks become “A well / I drink from / again and again.” The poems that talk about teaching are especially moving to me, and the list of students in “GSA” will be recognizable to anyone familiar with Gay-Straight Alliance clubs: 

… One student gave us a new
name and pronoun to call them, but only at club meetings

one made rainbow cupcakes for a bake sale before
her parents banned her from attending. One boy

wears nail polish and eyeliner and reads us his poetry
about boys and manatees…

These sharp, succinct portraits continue through several more couplets, and the poem ends with the declaration that these students, hungry for heroes and community, “become the heroes themselves.”

“The Conditional” introduces another kind of coming out, one that Earleywine handles with such thoughtfulness. Each sentence of this poem begins with “If” and while the stanzas are still couplets, now the couplets are off-set, out of sync, the second line indented from the first. 

If your gender was a secret –
a lost child who wouldn’t tell us

their name.

begins the poem, and from there it explores the questions of what role gender plays in love, if love changes, and what choices they will have to make. For me, as a reader with an LGBTQ+ child who has been through a change of name and pronouns, this story became the most compelling thread in the book.

On a reread of the book, this story actually begins in the previous poem, “You Tell Our Therapist We Got into a Fight Because I Wanted to Pop Your Zit and You Wouldn’t Let Me” – a funny title that quickly segues into “my shame at all // the gross ways I try to squeeze out the truth” and by the end when the speaker asks, “What happens when we // have to stare at [what’s inside] every day, / these parts of us we can never // put back inside?” it is clear this is not really about zits. It’s about what we might be afraid to look at inside ourselves, what we don’t want other people to see, and what we think we might be able to ignore forever and it might just go away. The speaker of these poems already knows that doesn’t work, and so do we.

The thread picks up again in the third section, Something New, with the poems “I Read That to Love Someone Long Term Is to Attend a Thousand Funerals of the People They Used to Be,” “I Now Pronounce You,” “Ode to My Wife’s Gender” “The (Un)Conditional” and “On Growth.” Each of these has lines that have stuck with me:

“Their new pronouns, new label – here lies my fear // that our love couldn’t survive such a change.” (“I Read That to Love Someone… “)

After starting to use her wife’s new pronouns: “Like all this time I’d been // mispronouncing your name / and finally said it right.” (“I Now Pronounce You”)

“My dearest theyby.” (“Ode to My Wife’s Gender”)

“If you gender was a catalyst // that set us both free” (“The (Un)Conditional”)

“The morning of your top surgery / you tend to your plants with careful / attention.” (“On Growth”)

“On Growth” is the last poem before the final one-poem section, Recessional. In “On Growth” we see the speaker’s wife tending their plants (because the poems continue to use the term “wife” with they/them pronouns, I have also), cutting away dead leaves to ensure the continued health and growth of the plant. Because the poem begins by telling us this is the morning of their top surgery, we can see the surgery in this light too: a cutting away to keep the body healthy and growing, an act of caretaking. This poem sets the stage for the final poem in the book: “I Now Pronounce You.” This is the third poem with this title, and the final pronouncement of the book. In this poem we find the speaker giving her parents back their names, letting them put down “those titles: Mother, Father // Wife, Husband.” This poem is about giving her parents back their individual identities, an act that, as a reader, I have seen the speaker struggle with doing for herself, for her relationship, and for her wife over the course of many poems. To see this struggle result in this beautiful poem really feels like a culmination of everything that has come before. Perhaps, these poems all taken together suggest to me, we have to be able to pronounce ourselves before we can pronounce someone else.

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