Customer Reviews

Stateside: Poems

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Many excellent poetry books deal with war from the point of view of the participants, but rarely does one find an examination of the life of the military spouse left behind during deployment. Stateside by Jehanne Dubrow is a gripping, thoughtful, and unsparing portrait of the author's responses to separation, anxiety, stress, longing, and the often prickly friction of reunion.

The book has three sections, which are roughly divided into before, during, and after the deployment. In the first section, Dubrow catalogues the fears, dreams, and preparations before her husband's departure. In the nightmarish sonnet "Against War Movies" she runs through all the war movies she has seen, imagining that she sees her husband in every character who is killed: "Each movie is a training exercise, / a scenario for how my husband dies." In the second section, Dubrow uses The Odyssey as a lens for viewing her life while her husband is gone, but this Penelope diets, gets a new haircut, fends off passes from divorcés, walks the dog Argos, takes Telemachus to the mall. Both of the first two sections are highly effective, but my favorite is the third section, which faces up unblinkingly to the difficulties of re-entry after a long absence, each spouse newly awkward around the other.

The feelings are both raw and nuanced in these poems, and Dubrow's technical mastery of the wide variety of forms--blank verse, rhymed quatrains, triplets, couplets, sonnets, nonce forms--acts as a sort of protective gear for handling potentially explosive emotions. Her approach to form is flexible, often using loose rhythms and slant rhymes. Thought and feeling do not cancel each other out in the poems, but pull against each other with a tension that also creates a bridge

I read this book from the perspective of a military spouse who has experienced deployment. I could not put the book down -- I had to stay up to read it all in one sitting. The poems resonated deeply with me. Dubrow expresses beautifully and accurately the churn of emotions that a spouse experiences, from the time that one receives the news of the impending separation and the preparation that goes along with it, to the realities of life during the deployment and the anxiety that goes along with it, to the re-adjustment of a husband and wife learning to live together again. The poems skillfully reflect how deployment changes our perspective on daily routines and the coping mechanisms that we develop to get through it. Dubrow also ties her emotions to the experiences of so many women throughout history. Her poems serve as a reminder that war, and the families that are left behind, is a phenomenon that been going on for hundreds of years. Although the world, and wars themselves, have changed significantly, the emotional struggles of the family members who remain "stateside" have not changed all that much.

I very much enjoyed this book, and I highly recommend it. It will be on my recommendation list for any family that is preparing for deployment, has experienced deployment, or anyone who wants to understand what it is like for those of us who love and support those who serve on the frontlines in our military.

Jehanne Dubrow's Stateside is a wonderful collection. This poet's exquisite formal poetry seems especially appropriate in a collection about the traditional subject of war, a subject that, sadly, is as relevant today as it was when Homer composed his epic poems. Dubrow gives us the story of modern warfare from the perspective of a military wife left stateside during the months of her husband's deployment. Stateside is the personal side, the woman's side of war.

The collection's forty-three poems are divided into three loosely chronological sections. Part I precedes the husband's departure. The wife experiences anxiety over the coming separation and her husband's safety. The poems in Part II focus on Homer's Penelope, the traditional model of a military wife left behind by her husband in time of war. But this is a Penelope transported into modern times. The speaker imagines Penelope, identifies with her, and speaks for her. The poems in Part III occur after the husband's return. Now the wife must become wife again. The marriage is strained by the effects of war and the long separation.

Stateside is both a delicate and a forceful collection. The story rings familiar, but is told anew. The poems are beautifully and skillfully written. Dubrow has a remarkable facility with forms. They are handled with such deftness and grace that the reader is barely aware of their presence. This collection simultaneously satisfies the reader's intellect and pierces the heart.

Jehanne Dubrow held a contest/giveaway on her blog recently and I won a copy of her book of poetry entitled Stateside. Sadly the package did not arrive with a giant sized box of Kleenex which I highly recommend you purchase before sitting down with this book.
I admit that I have always had an intense respect for Jehanne. She is a faculty member at Washington College, which I find very inspirational, since I still think I want to go tenure-track. So far, she's the only milspouse I've met that has managed to swing my dream job. That makes her tough as nails in my book.
I haven't read every word yet. I think it is too weighty for me to digest in one sitting. I found that each selection I read as I flipped through the book brought me back to some moment of my marriage. Reading felt so personal, like she was at once essentially "strumming my pain with [her] fingers" and at the same time I was voyeuristically watching her lay bare the very essence of herself in a way that I do not have the courage to do.
I found her comparisons to Penelope from the Odyssey incredibly clever, providing a familiar place for people who don't live this life an easy entry point into our world. And, as someone who has read the Iliad and the Odyssey in Latin for my Latin classes in high school, I found it refreshing to see these stories humanized and put into the perspective of the modern world.
I strongly suggest you buy the book and read it for yourself. It is a very portable version of every military spouse's story and a window into a world that most Americans find completely alien.
I feel incredibly lucky to have had the opportunity to win such a wonderful book. I want to thank Jehanne for hosting the contest and providing me the opportunity to see myself reflected in another's eyes.

Author of two previous books, From the Fever-World, (Washington Writers' Publishing House) and The Hardship Post (Three Candles Press) and a chapbook of poetry, The Promised Bride (Finishing Line Press), Jehanne Dubrow's third book Stateside focuses on the emotional tides of the milspouse experience. Here we find Penelope stateside while the marriage bed waits with "branches splayed/ like fingers," "glum /suitors" via for her affection, Telemachus tantrums at the mall "his voice an ambulance/ at siren pitch", and the family pooch lifts his head "to sight each ship".

But Penelope is not the antiquated Penelope of The Odyssey alone, but a contemporary metaphor for and lyrical chronicle of military life for wives who remain while their loves are deployed elsewhere and when together again, how the couple traverses those distances created by time apart, by promise of future separation, and by fear of death, as Dubrow writes, "We're arguing about his death again." But these are navigatable waters, for Dubrow offers readers poems such as "A Short Study of Catastrophe," "Instructions for Other Penelopes," and "On the Erotics of Deployment."

In Stateside, one is "hardly a ship lost in the storm."

Although "Stateside" has a military/Navy orientation, it is equally applicable to the U.S. Foreign Service/diplomacy or, indeed, for all of those who in the 21st century find their professions cause extended separation. Ms Dubrow plays honestly with her readers: these are real events before/during/after a deployment or "hardship assignment." But although sometimes the tone is sober, in other poems it is light-hearted, e.g., "Penople, on a Diet" touching the reality that eating alone can mean over-eating alone.

In a society that once put poets in the front rank of literature (Keats, Shelley, Poe, Whitman, Frost), they are now, more often than not, a niche market. "Stateside" and Ms Dubrow demonstrate why poetry should return to societal prominence.

I enjoyed this poetry book very much, I liked the way the poet used classic forms, for instance, the iambic pentameter, the triolet and rhyme in general in a modern way. I particularly liked the poems in Part One, which I think the best of the collection.