A thrum of malice vibrates below the poems in Christen Noel Kauffman’s prize-winning new collection, The Science of Things We Can Believe (Ghost Peach Press, 2024). “we’d come to hear the word,” announces the opening poem, “Bible School,” “and the word / was hemlock, hackberry, three-pronged leaf / of a poison oak.” The trinity echoed in the poison oak’s leaf suggests the complex interplay between the beloved landscape of the speaker’s youth and her evangelical religious upbringing. The natural world, like the religious one, cannot be reduced to simplicities. Beautiful as it is, and despite the speaker’s enduring attachment, predators and toxins hover at the edges, waiting. 

Wolves and rat snakes lurk at the boundaries, but whatever threats might be found in nature pale beside the dangers brought by man onto the living world. Dead and injured animals recur throughout the poems, often the prey and food of male hunters like the speaker’s father (since “a man learns to hunt while a woman gives / birth.”) Kauffman continues, in “Never Close a Knife Someone Else Has Opened:”

he asks me
to remove the skin with my hands

pull from the fur until I feel a hollow pop.
I don’t want to hold death like this, follow

god into a carcass

The imagery of Kauffman’s poems is often literally visceral, full of intimacy with animal bodies. This is a rural world where farm animals and wild creatures inspire affection one moment and are consumed the next. “sometimes I pretend / I’ve never seen an animal die,” mourns the speaker in “F(ire)arms,” thinking of the goats she feeds before they are slaughtered. In “Before She Came to Live in Ohio,” she rues “very little…gets to live / without contribution,” so the speaker’s eye for small natural beauties becomes a quiet rebellion. She describes fruit flies, alpacas, “committees of marigolds,” a small bat she will carry “as though / she’s a newborn” in “Acts of Protection.” Thinking of the landscapes that raised her, the speaker declares, “I love you like algae loves ponds.” The land is the source. 

If the speaker uses a language of reverence for these landscapes, it is partly because she has been raised for faith. Her father, the hunter, is also a preacher, and evangelical Christianity pervades the poems. God seems omnipresent and church gives structure to the day, but the speaker can never surrender her doubt. Even as an adult, she would “give anything / to see a satellite and think god.” as she writes in a poem of the same name. In the early poems, baptism is a motif for the belief the speaker never quite feels despite her efforts. Sometimes she is the dunker, as in “We Baptize Each Other,” holding “the others underwater with both hands.” Elsewhere, in “Make a Circle Around Us With Salt” Kauffman writes of

my body in my father’s hands
tipped below the water where the spirit never

shows itself to me, where my father brings me up 
the way he pulled me from a crib, gasping for air

in the dark. wanting someone to see.

There’s a direct overlap in these poems between being a good Christian and being a good girl. The speaker is drawn to wildness but strives for obedience to a world that punishes such desires, especially in a female child. The book chronicles how she reconciles with herself, learns to release the rigid structures of her youth, and embraces a loving and creative life without renouncing the bounty and beauty of her origins. The Biblical tenets of her raising supply the metaphors of her wholeness, as in the later poem “Aseity, Creation Myth,” when she proclaims

I was called from the mountain
but the voice was my own.
…
I refuse the rapture where bodies are made
into something outside themselves.

here is the body I was given. the smell
of rain on my beloved’s upturned wrist
pain of my daughter, crowned and pushed
into what she can’t escape.

rapture me in the presence of this yard,
unchanged under trumpet vines that
refuse to die, their blooms of parted lips
  to say I’m here, I’m here. I am.

Throughout the collection, Kauffman refrains from capitalizing “god” and the beginnings of her sentences. “I” is the sole capital, the speaker’s stake and holding. She believes in “the divinity caught in the racoon’s chin,” but even more, she believes in herself. Her “I” endures, upright and steadfast, despite what seeks to control it. The continuity of that “I” highlights the speaker’s sense of self, her desire to “burn bright as a lit match,” and it moves through the collection with the speaker, from her earliest, most uncertain youth to her adulthood, to a personal theology of creation’s power, the “holiness…in the stigma’s arm / lifted chin ripe for pollen’s soft touch.” The poem, “O Sweet, O Rebellion III,” continues

when a man put a child in me, the sky became
an ark, unfettered imagination of how salvation
could feel without a god

Kauffman’s “I” has brought her speaker through, in these rich and layered poems, to a life as sacred as that she was taught to seek. The collection celebrates a self shaped by a specific land and culture, one that transcends their strictures, but embodies, still, their beauty.

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