Not Black and White

    St. Louis often learns about herself through her poetry. For example, in the aforementioned poem (and others that deal closely with cancer) she employs the second-person perspective (“you”) as a distancing device. However, she says the impulse to personify is never a surprise. “I talk to my can-opener, for heaven’s sake!” she says.

    Humor is also plentiful throughout the book, coloring her landscape of hospital hallways and medical machinery. St. Louis says the phenomenon of confronting a serious subject with humor is well-illustrated in literature. In particular, she recalls the “Riddikulus” spell in Harry Potter, which allows witches and wizards to transform the embodiment of their deepest fears into something laughable. St. Louis uses a similar device to convert what is mundane or somber into something more easily confronted. Through this lens, the sounds of medical instruments become a “classical robot jam” in a poem entitled Magnetic Resonance. “Dig it!” she writes.

     In the last poem of the book, also entitled Zebra, St. Louis unblinkingly examines the strange and beautiful existence of zebras – literally, medically, and metaphorically. In a powerful moment of frankness, she writes, “Life is not all / (you know this) / black and white, / but zebras are.”

    What is clear to me is that, while staring “straight into the eye of the beast,” St. Louis’s poetry stands the surest.

    Nadine St. Louis’s book, Zebra, is available at Crossroad Books, 301 S. Barstow St., Eau Claire. The LE Phillips Memorial Public Library will welcome Nadine on March 12, at 7 pm, for a reading from Zebra.