Jan Beatty
Dragstripping
University of Pittsburg Press
Reviewer: Erica Goss
Dragstripping, Jan Beatty’s new collection, centers on her lifelong struggle with displacement. Born of a child’s need for safety, such an existence imposes vulnerability and danger; as she writes in “The Body’s River,” “When my mother left me in the orphanage, // I invented love with strangers.” The book follows parallel narratives, each poem deepening her insight, whether she’s serving beers in a biker bar or reciting poems with deckhands on a ship bound for Alaska.
In “Drag,” Beatty invokes the metaphor of drag racing to depict the plight of an abandoned child: “my heart’s dragstripped / from the shredded tires / of predators. Go ahead, / think of me— / throw the red flag down.” This child is an engine, primed for flight, always one step ahead; turning her head, she spits at her pursuers: “you back there, / me running the distance.” This is skill born of desperation, that of an enforced precociousness. How quickly innocence erodes, the poem shows us, in the struggle for survival.
Danger, real and immediate, permeates many of these poems, notably “The Stripping Tools.” In a scenario every girl’s mother surely warned her against, a young woman accepts a ride from a strange man, who says, “Aren’t you afraid to hitchhike” and then, “I have a hatchet under my seat.” Terrified, she leaps from the car, bruised with new knowledge: “my face in the gray concrete // had me looking at the land in a different way … // Who was I at war with?” She has come face to face with a terrible truth about gender, power, and yes, war—what we used to call “the war between the sexes.”
Her response is to dress as a warrior, transforming the power balance. In these lines from “I Ran into Water,” she takes back control: “I’m wearing striker boots / to kick the straight men away, / spit-shined, with heel irons.” This is not a radicalization, but one woman’s response to danger, “Because inside my body, there is no home.”
“I’m covering myself with clothes—layers & layers,” proclaims the speaker in “Blues Shouter.” A blues shouter, Beatty explains in the book’s Notes section, “refers to singers who ‘belted out their songs at constant full volume.’” Beatty adds that the term, as used in the poem, refers to “the voices of unknown bodies of women, the women who can no longer speak, the women whose voices are marginalized.” These opposing ideas—the shouter versus those whose ability to speak have been taken from them—echo the paradox at the heart of the book: that an unseen strip divides the self. The speaker in “Blues Shouter” attempts to disguise herself, but in doing so becomes even more visible:
A woman making a noise of disgust with her mouth—tsst—
looks me up & down—look at her—what is she doing—to her male friend
& you have a good body—she says to me.
Later in the poem, Beatty writes, “I see all the metal bar beds in the orphanage & I need this coat & this large body” and “I’m afraid to walk among people—I don’t feel safe.” But courage stirs when she senses the presence of her dead father, who appears in the guise of a cardinal, “singing its trilling song of salvation.” At the end of the poem, validation arrives:
I’m growling, gravelling into blues shouts:
Who will try me now?
Who will come at me now?
“Blood Ring,” a poem about altering a ring from her father, expresses the power of family connections even when the family member is gone. The speaker asks a jeweler not to remove the traces of her father remaining in the ring he gave her. Her request is met with aversion:
When I asked the jeweler not to clean
the band & bridge so my father’s DNA
could bleed into my skin, he became stone,
looked at me like I was a baby-eater or a pod person.
Years later, a psychic tells her, “The energy goes through / that center stone & down into your body— / it’s a channel.” Something moves in her; her father’s presence is close; the garnet’s red color echoes the cardinal in “Blues Shouter:”
… I was feeling the ghosts
move through me in this crystal house
of meteorites & geodes,
this blood ring,
my father all around me.
“Scarline” considers the transactional aspect of giving a child up for adoption: “Mothers / selling us to / strangers with a wallet— // and the walking bodies say: / when I saw you, I knew / you were mine.” The child in question asserts, “I’m not yours. / You can’t own a split thing,” split between birth and adoptive parents, between ownership and autonomy, the “scarline” remaining after a surgical procedure. Even the reunion between adoptee and biological mother is tainted by the knowledge of that early exchange, the child in question fulfilling the needs of adults:
Bloodmother, finding you was like finding religion,
but without the cruelty and deception—
but then, what’s left?
This childhood as an adoptee included its share of abuse: “On any given day, they would lock me up … / the line bruises from slamming the edge / of the dresser—” Beatty extends the contrast between having been traded like a commodity only to suffer cruel punishment in “Miraculous:”
As a child I spent a lot of time in the closet. I sat, bent like a finger in arthritis.
Here I could become anything: a cloud, a C note, Michael Jackson’s rhinestone hand.
By the time my mother would finally unlock the door to say, “Had enough?”
I was able to imagine her as someone miraculous, someone saving me
from my mother.
Yet the draw of a child to its mother remains stronger than almost any other we know. In “the river of light is all we have,” the book’s last poem, Beatty writes, “she is an idea of a mother / she is the quiet part of weeping … // the reason you take a train West/ / the reason you shift hard into 5th and take the turn rough.” The promise of a deepened connection never wavers. We arrive, again and again, at the same place, attempting to decipher the motivations of our elders, how they bargained our helplessness, and how we survived.
Dragstripping is an eloquent account of one woman’s life journey as she negotiates the path between binary opposites. This place of uneasy opposition is not for the faint of heart, but Jan Beatty guides us through its twists and turns with skill and an abiding compassion.
