Content warning: This review contains depictions of sexual violence.

Books about violence and trauma are tricky. Poets, memoirists, and novelists often ask themselves similar questions: Am I telling too much? Am I not telling enough? Will readers stay with me through this disturbing story? Should I offer guidance for others in the same situation? And is that even the role of the writer?

Poet Sara Quinn Rivara, in her full-length collection Little Beast, seems to say that just telling the story—a chronicle of pain, danger, and two abusive marriages deep in the hunting country of the upper Midwest—is enough. But of course it’s not that simple; it takes a skilled poet to know what to reveal and how to keep a reader reading. And Rivara has the chops for it: a talent for elegant language, along with a sharp knife of reality that she slips in several times per poem, as if to say, Are you paying attention? This is how it really was. And what she’s wrought is something miraculous—and thankfully, miracles also happen in this book, so hang on until the end.

Right in the first four poems, Rivara lets us know exactly where she’s taking us, a sort of roadmap for what’s to come. The opener, “Wolf,” is a muscular prose poem that reads like a stirred-up fable, mixing images of romance and sexual assault: “We met in a garden where tea roses bloomed”; “He pressed my belly into the dirt. My new dress, a jagged tear.” But the poem also plays with subtle internal rhymes (“gun”/”undone,” “Let his hand slip”/”My feet tripped,” “There are ways a woman can disappear and stay right here”), transforming its martial rectangularity and shattering images into a kind of song, forlorn and strangely beautiful.

The second poem, “Leda after the Swan,” owes its title to mythology—which, along with witchcraft and folklore, figures prominently in this collection. But this prose poem’s setting is starkly mortal: “I bought a pregnancy test at the party store near the river,” and later, “the Elks Lodge bathroom where afterward I stopped to pee.” The test comes out positive—and we have to assume it’s the result of the assault in the previous poem—so the story that came undone from the start of the book is spiraling even more. Then the narrator has to walk through a gauntlet of men at the Elks Club bar just to get out the building—“one of them slipped his hand up my skirt and called me sweetie, another whistled at me like a bird.” This, we soon find, is a constant in the speaker’s life, a land of men who hunt (deer, orange vests, and camo are everywhere) and belittle, abuse, and entrap women. And the women are raised to endure whatever hand is dealt them. 

The next poem, the more conventionally lined “Confession,” jumps a few years into the future to show us what’s coming in the near term: a marriage, a small son, “a husband who hated me, / nights in the fishing cabin,” and 

how a man
can claim anything:
a tree for felling,
a woman’s small shoulders
beneath his hands.

But “Confession” also offers a lifeline at the end: 

I did not understand
until long after
that I too
was a song
worth
singing.

This is important: Amid this story that seemingly has no way out, the poet wisely offers the reader what she didn’t have at the time: Hope. And hope, told in short glimpses like this, is—paradoxically, almost impossibly—what drives Little Beast.

And then “Housewitch” sets up the next section of the book by invoking in its terse couplets two other themes that will recur: magic and a white-hot rage: 

I won’t stick around

when this spell shrivels his dick
like a kidney bean.

The anger provides another lifeline: This speaker is much more than the sum of misfortune and victimhood. She claims her place in the world by both surviving and writing.

What comes next is a terrifying journey, poems that ask the reader to inhabit the world the speaker lived in—“the house where I learned rape. Learned no. Everything becomes normal after a while,” from “Winter Aubade.” But Rivara’s deftness and restraint, paired with searingly gorgeous language that explodes when it needs to, is on display all through. In these stories and themes that might be weighed down by a less steady hand, these poems amaze with their virtuosity, even when they’re showing us a speaker in the absolute depths of despair.

Scattered throughout the book, six prose poems hold the narrative together like towers on a bridge. With short sections set off by asterisks, these six poems let the reader breathe a bit while absorbing what we need to know to fill in the blanks, such as the toxic patriarchy of the upper Midwest and a second disastrous marriage in “Instructions for Surviving the End of the World,” and family history and intergenerational trauma in “My Mother the Bear.”:

Once my mother told me, after she’d lost her job, that she wished my father
had some empathy. But that’s not his job, she said. No one gets to be happy
in this life.

“Talisman” unfolds a hopeful relationship, while “Augury” describes a health scare that threatens it. Later, “Bird Poem” explores the symbolism of birds appearing at key moments in our lives—more magic and folklore—and “Malus Domestica” chronicles the perils of raising a son in a society where men do violence:

Imagine a man once said I love you or I love your body but not your mind …
Imagine he says you are a bad mother for leaving. It is your fault, everything.
Imagine you walk away, into the orchard, your son on your hip, your hands
sticky, your belly soft.

One of the strengths of Little Beast is that it doesn’t contain delineated sections; it’s poem after poem, a continuum without pause. Poets working on a manuscript struggle with this all the time: to section or not to section? But if this book were partitioned, it might lead the reader to think, Okay, that part’s over, when one of the unspoken points of the book is that, in our minds, nothing is ever really over. And to say that it’s over would be a disservice to those who have lived in this reality.

The story of Little Beast could have happened thousands of years ago, or a hundred years ago, pretty much any place on Earth. Because, unfortunately, it’s a universal woman’s tale. Even in the poem “Witch-Wife” Rivara says, “This is a woman’s story. You know how it ends.” But actually, we soon find, we don’t know: In the last third of the book, Rivara proves that that old axiom is wrong. 

And reader, you’ll want to stick around until that last third—because that’s the part that elevates Little Beast into something much more than a catalog of pain. The major shift comes in “Love Song, Cannon Beach.” We’re in a new place now, a new state, a new marriage. There’s joy here, and even another child in this newly blended family: “My new husband and his son make sandcastles / while we watch starfish slip beneath the waves.” The narrator’s young son is there with her too, and it takes a couple more poems for us to realize that she did it—our speaker escaped the unescapable, she powered out of it somehow, and now she’s far away and … free of the past? No, the poem smartly reminds us, nobody is ever free of that: 

To call a thing by name is a kind of spell:

Mom, S___, love. Even so, the past wolf-whistles
bitch, unlovable.

And the poem ends with more glints of hope and fear: 

Today the ocean is calm. Tomorrow,

the weather will shift. Big rollers, north wind.
One rogue wave could swallow us.

The last 20 pages of the book maintain that balancing act: The speaker is now in a life worth celebrating, but even then, it’s not perfect. The uncertain world is still all around, along with the tidal pull of the caustic, harmful messages she received from her parents and our culture (always in our heads somewhere, no matter how much therapy and meditation we do). And yet, even though the narrator can’t rid her head of the devils, the possibility of joy—and what’s more, that she deserves joy—has moved in to stay. But it will need tending, we intuit; it also is a journey.

---