The Reformation (APR Honickman 1st Book Prize) by Katherine Bode-Lang

The Reformation (APR Honickman 1st Book Prize) Reviews

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  Literary Mama

  Dictionaries give the word "reformation" roughly ten definitions. Katherine Bode-Lang's book of poems, The Reformation, selected by Stephen Dunn for the 2014 American Poetry Review/Honickman First Book Prize, draws on almost all of them. Bode-Lang is very good at titles, and you can't help but feel her intentionality in the volume itself. With cultural implications of the Protestant Reformation resonating throughout, poem after poem falls under the egis of reformation—re-formings, restorations, redresses. These resonances are particularly striking in the ways she handles and interprets the expectations of motherhood as a woman, daughter, partner, and poet.
  
  The book's title poem, "The Reformation," explicitly connects Calvinism and the radical changes in her own body due to vulvar vestibulitis syndrome, a condition that makes vaginal penetration incredibly painful. Both situations are presented against the backdrop of family dynamics. This is not as unlikely a pairing as it first seems. Like most church schisms, the Reformation has the whiff of a family fight: All parties intimately familiar with the balance of power and unspoken codes of conduct are grappling, and those outside the family either excuse or politely ignore the tussle. For the poet, a preacher's kid, the Reformation is practically family history, with Bode-Lang occupying a front row seat to the in-fights and politics. Protestantism can be particularly demanding for women, its long silences punctuated by fathers imagining "V spelled wife" and stringent demands for virtue, purity, abstinence, and submission—such few threads with which to spin an identity. For those "raised under the hand of Calvin," there is the additional layer of predestination, the belief that God has already elected those who will be saved, a finite number revealed at the end of time. Thus, in a few deft moves Bode-Lang’s titular poem recruits both the history of Protestantism and the particularities of Calvinism as givens in the book's equation.
  
  Although the book is dense with riches, the poems about relationship—to self, to family, and to a partner—form an intense metric and display much of Bode-Lang’s technical finesse as a poet. Bode-Lang repeatedly examines the family image in much the same way a sixteenth-century reformer would examine a Roman Catholic icon. With the same critical eye, she presents photographs and family stories of her parents as false gods, representations meant to be taken as gospel, as evidence for a permanence of character and emotional state that never really existed. Bode-Lang limbs these images with vivid clarity.
  
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