Jessica Tanck’s poetry collection details how we survive our families

“Winter Here” is the most recent winner of the Georgia Poetry Prize, a collaboration among the University of Georgia, Georgia State University and Georgia Institute of Technology. The prize goes to a single previously unpublished poetry collection chosen through a yearly contest to publish with the support of the Bruce and Georgia McEver Fund for the Arts and Environment. Beginning with Christopher Salerno’s “Sun & Urn” in 2017 and most recently featuring “Winter Here,” the prize honors the late Georgia McEver — herself a singer and artist whose passing inspired her husband’s first poetry collection.

Credit: Courtesy of Jessica Tanck

Credit: Courtesy of Jessica Tanck

“Winter Here,” a four-part collection of free verse, deals with some intense content, namely suicide, mental illness and religious trauma. The collection centers around a mother’s suicide and the legacy it leaves on a daughter in particular. Throughout the sections, the speaker reflects on her loss and the failed efforts of faith to ease the pain. A family blends, then splits again. The speaker battles her own mind and memories, coming to a place of acceptance and understanding, if not exactly peace.

The complicated mother-daughter relationship present in Tanck’s poems, as in other contemporary writing, might be most accurately summed up in the ambivalence behind the poem title “Eating Flamin’ Hot Cheetos at Mom’s Grave.” If we get an air of indifference, it’s because instead of a warm, nurturing figure, the woman we first encounter in the opening poem, “So Below,” seems indifferent to her daughter. In answer to the speaker declaring “I can walk through fire,” the mother answers, ‘No./You can’t.’ Didn’t even look up, did not look at me.” The confidence of the little girl in her bold declaration, doused in a way a parent should not do — but unfortunately sometimes does.

Equally chilling is the revelation, “It’s true I can’t remember ever being hugged by my mother.” Where in the past, and to those outside the speaker’s home, this may not have been evident, Tanck grants us a peek behind the facade of a two-parent, two-child “ideal” nuclear family as we’ve come to understand it in American culture: “Leave It to Beaver” on the outside, “Anna Karenina” behind closed doors.

The unhappy — or perhaps just deeply troubled — family extends to the speaker’s relationship with her father, a man who seems to be playing his part in the family model as an authoritarian, religious widower probably overwhelmed by loss and having to raise two young girls.

This manifests in seemingly harsh choices. When the speaker gets in trouble at school for attacking a boy who snatched a piece of cardboard from her, the father “feed[s] my animals, the plush friends I slept with, to a black bag: my plump chicken, smiling bear & dog all gone,” leaving as her only toy the cardboard she fought for. Perhaps to prevent them from sharing the fate of their mother, he brings them to church and to a prayer circle that speaks in tongues and unnerves the girls. “This, he said, was God’s native tongue — the language we needed to get help. But I didn’t feel God in that room.” “Winter Here” reminds us that good intentions don’t negate the harm done by oppressive parenting.

Credit: University of Georgia Press

Credit: University of Georgia Press

Other family figures slip in and out of Tanck’s poems: a sister who passes away (adding further grief), a stepsister who’s a quiet and steady support and a stepbrother who turns to the occult, seemingly to break up a family unit he wants no part in. The speaker tells us of how her stepsister “peels home/on repeat” and “stays up with me all night,/perpetually lights and leaves” in an unconventional camaraderie.

On the other hand, there’s “Myranda (blood sister) half-absent,” who “in her aerie moves from floor to desk.” The presence of these sisters, bound not strictly by blood but by sharing in the strangeness of the speaker’s daily existence, enhances the complexities of family. We’re reminded how they can love and damage us simultaneously.

While family isn’t Tanck’s only subject, it seeps into everything, like the cold in the winter imagery Tanck leans on toward the middle of the collection. Ice becomes chilling and purifying, arresting the world and starting fresh at the same time.

To a romantic partner, the speaker says, “The first night/you sent me a poem, Chicago froze/solid.” Cold, here, is dangerous but sharp with insight: The things that test our limits ultimately make us stronger. Whether we walk through fire, survive family dysfunction or push ourselves into subzero temperatures, we persist. As “Winter Here” reminds us in the end, “Somewhere, the birdsong won’t stop,” and neither will we.

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Jocelyn Heath is an associate professor in English at Norfolk State University. Her first poetry collection, “In the Cosmic Fugue,” was published by Kelsay Books. She is an assistant editor for Smartish Pace. Her writing has appeared in The Atlantic, Crab Orchard Review, Sinister Wisdom, Lambda Literary, Entropy and elsewhere.

Credit: ArtsATL

Credit: ArtsATL

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