The Wendys
by Allison Benis White
Four Way Books, 2020
Review by Augusta Funk
We Need a Dead Woman to Begin: On Allison Benis White’s The Wendys
For survivors of violence, the imagination can be a dangerous place. Writing one’s own story can be a self-fulfilling prophecy when you are at the mercy of an audience, or a culture, in a state of disbelief. How do we evadevictimhood while simultaneously enacting cultural change? Allison Benis White’s fourth book, The Wendys, exposes the patriarchal tragedy of fame. While the book as a whole is dedicated to the author’s mother, W, each of the book’s five sections are dedicated to a Wendy from popular culture. Stories and fates overlap as White’s speakers trace a lineage of tragedy, which manifests most acutely in the shifting forms. The remains of these lives, whether song lyrics, fictional stories, or photographs, guide the book’s exploration of language, and the cultural expectations of grief. While the speakers of these elegiac poems often identify themselves as writers, between the authorial gaps, White’s choice of epigraphs maintains a sense of presence. Hybridity forms a personal language—a mother tongue—which gives readers agency in how they construct meaning.
The first epigraph, taken from Wendy O. Williams’s suicide note, begin a series of long- line epistles, reminiscent of White’s previous collections. Two selves, one fated to live, and one fated to die, begin to blur throughout,and the original letter is jolted and shattered into a series of fragments addressed to “W.” “A boat made of paper gliding on black ice, but you have already / sailed without me,” begins the first poem. Yet, beyond the bounds of direct address, speakers begin to point to a larger narrative. “Unable to sleep, I drove towards the mountains until the sky was cold and feathered, pressing down,” one writes. And because the scene of death is always unfinished (unlike the plotline), the central figure—the writer herself—must remain at the periphery, in the company of snow, glass, blood, feathers, and ice.
Much of White’s prior work has approached confessional poetry through units of prose. Her first two books explore dancers and dolls, respectively, in the prose poem, which continually re-categorizes the speaker-object relation. By her third book, Please Bury Me in This, the private, interior world of psychological pain is rendered in the collective form of suicide epistles. While the pacing of these sentences is steady, the double-spacing heightens a sense of visual and semantic containment. Every line is an opportunity for a new voice to join the chorus, but under one condition: self-erasure. Completion of the sentence translates into death.
While the first section of The Wendys picks up where White left off, each Wendy casts a new shadow of form. The imagistic imagination, privy to scenery and landscape, is now a launching-off point for the lyric. The second section, a series of ekphrasis poems after photographer Wendy Givens, moves along the edges of wintery scenes, “where one can begin to imagine so many possibilities as to what befell this sleeping, injured, or dead character as she made her way through the woods at night.” White cuts images out of photographic backgrounds, and focuses her short-lined lyrics on physical descriptions that illuminate the over-looked details of suffering. From body language, speakers learn to communicate with the dead. “I will make trees of my hands—I will say nothing by shivering, I will say everything.” But searching for her birth mother requires a narrative movement beyond these images the self seems to resists. As one speaker says, “And relief: to bleed / in one place, for one reason, / to say I failed to live / sanely on earth / without you.”
The French theorist and poet Hélène Cixous defines the writer’s journey as an “ascent” downward, a climb up towards the bottom where we learn to die. We need to see the scene of the crime, Cixous explains, where the struggle for power takes place. In her book, “Three Steps on the Ladder of Writing,” death, dreams, and roots form a circular realm of self and other. In The Wendys, we don’t just play these roles, but witness the drama unfold. The act of reading gets reflected back to us when we read of other readers, terrified readers, readers who are so deeply affected by a text that they admit, “I tore out the pages, left them like feathers scattered in my lap.” Returning to the same, traumatic scene in The Shining over and over, one learns to “breathe through the writing,” one learns to “cry out.” Wendy Torrance’s ascent up the stairs with an axe— presumably to kill her husband—which actually moves her closer to herown death, as we read in the epigraph—provokes a layer of narration that is rooted in sound. “Lower your voice,” thespeaker seems to tell herself, so that Torrance can make her own language. Internal rhyme drives the poems forward untilwe are left with the end-words: “alive,” “ignite” “survive,” and “ice.”
When White’s mother shows up in the fourth section, she is speaking to the author in “the dream,” which White crafts like a diary entry: marking it up with slashes and parenthesis, and recycling phrases for emphasis. Even notes on ancient rituals are included. This layering creates a space for her mother’s voice to emerge as part of something beyond the self. “Because the love keeps breaking—goddess of death, / god of thunder, earth, and rain—all this to say / I miss you and I’m afraid.” The Wendy becomes a textual guide, a polyvocal agent of speech. Without her, the writer cannotunderstand herself.
Throughout the collection, White’s sense of pacing is often descriptive: little remains beyond the body, the physical evidence of experience. We return to the scene of the crime when we’re ready to arise out of solitude, to face what is incomprehensible, yet right in front of our eyes. White writes a litany of sorts as she documents her own emergence from a traumatic cultural narrative. It is this inevitable knowing that the central figure in The Wendys faces: how to hold life and death together simultaneously, how to continue in a world that feeds off the suffering of others. Byshattering the narrative, these women, as they climb, transform the reader into a writer. “If you open your eyes in the dark, the book ignites.