Book Review

Laura Dennis on
essays by Jessie van Eerden
Dzanc Books, 2024

           

When I traveled in Europe in the 1990s, one particular, if mundane, sight never failed to move me—couples carrying a single duffel bag, each holding a handle, as they made their way on and off the trains. As I hefted my backpack like an overburdened turtle, I would envy them. Not so much for their couple-ness—even in my 20s, I liked traveling alone—but because of the intimacy and trust implicit in the act of mixing together belongings and sharing their weight.

This memory came to me as I read writer Jessie van Eerden’s latest essay collection, Yoke & Feather, in which disparate entities are mingled and burdens shared. This volume, van Eerden’s second essay collection and fifth book, features 21 braided essays, 22 if you count the Prologue, which I would, as it too features the braided structure.

The title could tempt the reader to view the collection in terms of the sundry binaries evoked by the dualistic image of feather and yoke—light and heavy, profane and sacred, ease and burden, weightlessness and gravity. The braided structure, however, renders such a reading impossible, for a braid typically has at least three strands, if not more.

And what strands they are. Consider the elements brought into conversation with each other in “A Thousand Faces,” originally published in River Teeth and one of the strongest pieces in the collection. As the speaker and her lover canoe through the Rio Grande’s Boquillas Canyon, her thoughts move among the COVID pandemic, the border with Mexico, a burgeoning romance, and Moses watching God’s back as he passes by, the whole mixed with various outside references including Barry Lopez, Teju Cole, Emmanuel Levinas, and Judith Butler. 



Another notable feature of the collection can be found in the vivid reimagining of stories from the Bible. Well-known figures are most often featured . . . Ruth and Naomi, the hemorrhaging woman who touches Jesus’s cloak, the woman with the jar of nard, a newly resurrected Lazarus, to name a few. However, lesser known and 
even imagined characters find their place as well.


As one reads, certain memories from the speaker’s West Virginia childhood recur, along with their attendant images, from dollar stores to fifth-Sunday singings, from demolition derbies to her mom braiding her hair. Then there are the feathers, so many feathers, especially in comparison to the yokes, which are far fewer in number (physical yokes, anyway). These images all contribute to a longing for connection, both romantic and in the form of the daughter the speaker never gets to have. Consider this passage from “Blessing for the Lice Check”: 

We cannot be less than we are, less a mother, less a child—but maybe we can be more than we 
are named. And if our hands reach to touch and do touch, so gently, another, it’s as if a new meaning congeals with each moment of contact, a new nameless form of relation fused between two that were 
once strangers, as even my mother and I once were, at the very start.

Another notable feature of the collection can be found in the vivid reimagining of stories from the Bible. Well-known figures are most often featured—not just Moses, but also Ruth and Naomi, the hemorrhaging woman who touches Jesus’s cloak, the woman with the jar of nard, a newly resurrected Lazarus, to name a few. However, lesser known and even imagined characters find their place as well, for example in “A Story of Mary and Martha Taking in a Foster Girl:”

They tell Maud together about her period when it comes. Mary with a gift of a silk scarf and a 
kingfisher feather. And Martha with gravity and a voice of decorum and dust, grave but also 
comprehensive anatomically. 

These (re)created Biblical scenes are striking for their extraordinary sensory detail, their emotional range, and for the deep humanity they convey, especially when juxtaposed against scenes from the speaker’s own life. While the connections are sometimes explicit, as in “When the Season is Fitting,” where the story of Elizabeth and Zechariah is recounted alongside the speaker’s own childlessness, at other times the connections are a bit more far-flung. 

Readers are sure to find many points of connection in these essays, which vary both in theme and length (the longest comes in at 20 pages, the shortest at barely 2), in large part thanks to the writing. In “Meet Me at the Dollar General Across from the Family Dollar,” we see the wry humor of the writer at work, her essay-in-progress refusing to obey the parameters she has set for it: “Today I meant to write an essay on prayer, not fool around with this business of the Apocalypse and the dollar stores and a breakup. But anyway, this is the essay I’ve begun.”

We laugh too at passages like this description of a potential match on a dating website: “He prefers no drama. He prefers that my drama be so minimal that it fits in the plane’s overhead bin.” Elsewhere, however, our hearts swell in recognition at lines such as “Stuck and narrowed, I need to pull on the natty sweater, light the lantern, and write all night for love’s possibility despite the givens.” As we go deeper into our text, we find ourselves looking for the words and phrases that function sometimes as signposts, other times as litanies, still others as refrains— “that place is real,” “the bowl of her body,” “the light is late, but not forever,” “a desert era,” “the new story in the husk of the old story.”

That final image seems a fitting note on which to conclude this review. It offers hope and new possibilities not just for the writer, but also for all of us as we move through the world. As the speaker says, “it is possible, in time, for a thing strange and new to emerge.” The interwoven pieces of Yoke & Feather will inspire readers to find their own connections, whether to random strangers in European train stations or to something else entirely.


Laura Dennis is a Kentucky writer, mother, Mimi, and professor with family roots in northern Appalachia. Her work has appeared in a variety of publications, including Change Seven, Northern Appalachia Review, The McNeese Review, Still: The Journal, and The Red Branch Review. She reviews books for several publications and co-edits book reviews for MER. She enjoys music, photography, hiking, and spending time with her friends, family, and pets.



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