pagesofjulia

Where I recall feeling both impressed and flummoxed by The Last of Her, this earlier essay collection feels more accessible to me. The Last of Her is a story about Kim’s mother (or about Kim’s investigating her mother), a single cohesive storyline – not that there aren’t other storylines as well! But I Just Lately Started Buying Wings is a collection that ranges widely in subject. Allowing each essay to tackle its own beast has a different result. Somehow I felt more comfortable with this book, more like I was able to grasp the whole. All of this sounds more like a criticism of The Last of Her than I want it to be; I enjoyed reading that book and am wowed by the writing and the organization within; it’s just that I didn’t finish feeling like I understood everything that went on. I enjoyed both reading experiences, but felt more settled, contained within this one. I wonder if reading them in the order they were published – this one first – would have helped.

I Just Lately Started Buying Wings is a lovely series of meditations. I want to call it comforting, which is a strange adjective to choose, since many of its subjects are uncomfortable or painful ones: deaths of family members, romantic and marital strife, domestic violence, nuclear fallout (literally), personal uncertainties. But Kim Kupperman’s approach to these is so easy to relate to, so honest and open, and so thoughtful. She made me feel supported as (I felt) we entered these tough places together.

I read the title essay, a very short one at just two pages, a year or so ago, when I was considering attending WVWC’s MFA program. (One of the toughest pieces of advice I got in considering programs was to read the work of faculty members. If each program has an average of 8 faculty and they’ve published an average of 3 books each, and I’m starting with a long list of 15 schools, I’m supposed to read 360 books? So a nice short essay here and there…) It stuck with me. First, the lovely title, “I Just Lately Started Buying Wings”… it has such a dreamy sound, so many figurative possibilities; but it turns out it’s a direct quotation, spoken by a woman applying the prosaic, literal meaning. She’s just recently started buying chicken wings; she used to stick to breasts and short thighs. This turn, from lyric to literal, is the kind of surprise I savor.

Not that the symbolic wing is ignored, though. In this collection, I found that wings were a major theme: “Wings over Moscow,” most obviously, deals with a number of wings (airplanes, birds), but other essays as well see dropped wings, grounded airplanes, a father compared to Daedalus, “the maker of wings.” In the closing essay, Kim’s mother leaves secret treasures for her young daughter to discover: a list of these items includes a moth wing, and a blackbird feather. Secrets or silence (as in the subtitle) form another leitmotif. Likewise the body, meaning the physical: Kim’s own, and the bodies of three immediate family members (mother, father, brother) she cared for after death. Lovers, and the women and children she tries to help at a shelter for victims of domestic violence. When she seeks her grandmother’s mysterious personal history,

I sense in this silence my grandmother’s decision to sever herself from a body politic she adored but could not bear. Perhaps it is from her that I inherited this yearning to return, which might explain why, when she died, I wanted so badly to go back to her homeland. I was coming into my body–breasts budding, hips widening–as her physical familiarity and its comfort ceased to exist.

Note the two different uses of ‘body,’ and think about the meanings of ‘bear,’ as in the “body politic she adored but could not bear”: think about a woman bearing children, which this grandmother did, by definition.

This kind of recurring theme or image defines the book as a whole, as well as nearly every individual essay. This is the kind of trick I am strongly drawn to (I’m remembering Eula Biss’s Notes from No Man’s Land). There is much to praise here, in sentence-level writing, as Kim shifts from the starkly sensual to the lyrical and back again. She has a razor-sharp eye for detail, an uncanny gift for noticing and recalling the physical world, something I’m not so great at. But what I’m most excited about, most wonder at, is the tying together of theme and image within and across essays. It never feels forced: these are the things that make sense together, and also they match.

Kim Kupperman clearly has several strengths. I think she must see the essay form as flexible and beautiful and serious. She observes the world with great attention. She is thoughtful, and opens herself to criticism (for example in the hospital scene when her father is dying and his survivors are fighting). She has an ear for language and an eye for parallels. I can’t wait to get to know her better: her writing, her editing (I’m looking forward to her small press’s anthology You), and hopefully her teaching.

Filed under: book reviews | Tagged: creative nonfiction, essays, nonfiction, WVWC MFA reading list |