The Book of JANE: Poems
by Jennifer Habel
University of Iowa Press, $19.95 paperback, 110 pages
Jennifer Habel’s third collection of poetry The Book of JANE focuses on a central character whose name is taken from the “Dick and Jane” children’s books published from 1930 to 1965. The books themselves were largely innocuous books of suburban life using simple language to teach children basic language and reading skills. In this book, Jane has grown up to serve as an archetypical figure who fulfills the roles of a mother, wife, and daughter. Her experiences are often quiet and domestic their settings or scenarios, but Habel manages to place these roles and duties into poems that provide emotional context for tasks that have historically been taken for granted as simply the natural order or a woman’s place or just the way things are.
I have read books with similar aims and concepts. There have been a number of major poets who have wanted to look at the gender stereotypes and expectations of women through figures of childhood. These poets—Victoria Chang and Denise Duhamel come to mind—use Barbie for this central role. In many ways this makes sense. Both figures are classics being made contemporary, but Barbie is still a more modern creation (1959, about the time the “Dick and Jane” series was on its last legs) that continues to move into the homes of millions of children each year. Barbie is a type of role model and teaching tool for the roles women have or can have in society. Barbie is a recipient of simultaneous praise and criticism for the image that she projects. But Barbie and Jane are not the same character. For one, Jane is much simpler in concept than Barbie: In the books, Jane is presented as an ordinary child while Barbie is a glamourous adult with a luxurious life, a resume that ranges from veterinarian to Olympian to astronaut, a full cast of supporting characters for friends, and a long-term love interest. Barbie is a much more grandiose character than Jane, but by using Jane as a character instead of Barbie, there are far fewer pop culture connotations to interfere with the poetry, and Jane—as an allegorical figure—is in a better position to scrutinize the ways in which many cultural expectations both treat women as necessary and useful, but then fail to give the women credit for their contributions to society.
The Book of JANE is filled with examples of deconstruction that tie into this breaking-down of the role of a model woman. There’s deconstructed language and grammar in a series of poems that place the character of Jane in the proximity of a part of speech or rhetorical element. Often, this feels like a way to eavesdrop into Jane’s private life. In “Examples of the Interrogative in Jane’s Kitchen,” we hear fragments of conversation which give the impression that Jane is always fielding questions that are unrelated to her task at hand, always having to balance something like feeding her family with:
Is the fifth sense talking?
How do you do a capital G?
I have to, don’t I?
Do you want to be just like me?
Why did you put on makeup to go to the grocery store?
The anonymity of these questions and the way in which the conversations accompanying them are stripped from the dialogue makes it one-sided, pestering, but also the questions themselves let the mystery sharpen the edge of the question. Some have simple answers while others can not be brushed off so easily. And arguably, the questions were not even intended by the asker to be so fraught with psychology, but in the quiet space of this poem, of this kitchen, they shake the foundations of the self, the home.
The collection opens with “Jane and the Relative Adverb” which, through clever observation discovers language inside of language, ultimately finding a kind of final thesis or maxim for who Jane is and what she represents:
Inside “where”
is “here”
and inside “here”
is “her”
[. . .]
(“Where” is “her”
inside “we,”
she sees.)
By the end of this poem, Jane realizes that she is a single pronoun inside of a plural, a collective. This collection of poems operates under many of these same principles. The poems themselves are a collective, often more rich as a result of their interplay and how one poem may evoke another later or earlier in the collection. Further, while Jane is a singular character in this collection, there are other Janes who have been treated as footnotes (or less) to history. This collection uncovers them with gusto.
Early on, the poem “Einstein’s Dinner” puts us in the home of the genius physicist who “did not like fat. / Or waste.” And it’s Einstein’s whims and desires that are what take precedence in this poem, as he feeds his sister, his daughter, and his lover (who has a husband) the scraps from his dinner after eating “a single bite from the center of each of six lamb chops.” We even see the similarities between Einstein and the man whose wife he has taken to bed:
His lover’s husband was, like Einstein, a gentle man.
A sculptor, Russian, he worked
on West 8th, though, like Einstein, lived
in the immensity of the cosmos.
That little “though” indicates how this life in the cosmos comes with a cost. Despite their gentleness, they are considered important men, and this relieves them of their duties to the terrestrial. We learn that Einstein’s lover, while feeding him, also has to clean up the mess of her sculptor husband who is feeding the mice and cockroaches in their New York apartment. Comparatively, their large works feel frivolous compared to her labor and dependent upon her, a woman who receives no name in this piece. The poem’s speaker knows “She spoke five languages, or seven. / At any rate, a lot,” but this is effectively a footnote to the story. Who cares if she was an exceptionally capable and learned woman? The implication is that what is important was that she was a wife and had an affair with Einstein. What’s presented as important are Einstein’s quirks.
This modern anecdote parallels Jane’s story: “Jane is smart, but not as smart as her husband. / Jane was smart, but not as smart as her father” (“Jane and the Bushel”). There is a constant sense that a woman cannot be enough, is by default, a secondary character or subservient to the needs or aspirations of men.
Habel’s long poems, “Mary’s Year” and “Matisse’s Great-Granddaughter, or Jane the Long Way” are other poems that provide alternative, real-world examples of women being seen and treated as afterthoughts. “Mary’s Year” is a kind of half-way point for the collection and is made up of eighteen smaller poems in alphabetical order which all are titled by a single word beginning in the letter W. Cumulatively they come together to show the year 1870 as interpreted through twenty-one-year-old Mary L. Bowers’s pocket diary as she touches upon subjects like “Want,” “Wealth,” “Weather,” Weight,” “Welcome,” “Welfare,” etc. Many are various lists in differing forms, some numbered, others not. Some are compact free verse. Some are more experimental, such as the section titled “Will” which begins with nine-and-a-half lines of periods in varying amounts. The section “Woe” is written as a circle that begins “I loved him and now I can not forget him” and ends “I am determined to give him up but”. This series represents a kind of revival of artifacts that give us a view into the complex life of this young woman, a life recorded meticulously, but then buried in the archives.
The final poem in the collection is another massive effort, as “Matisse’s Great-Granddaughter, or Jane the Long Way” is composed in thirty-eight sections over the course of twenty-four pages. In this poem, the poet appears to make her only notable appearance in the collection as these sections (all labeled “1.” except for the terminal section “38.”) as the poem leads us into a study of the paintings of Matisse’s Great-Granddaughter Sophie Matisse who found notoriety in the art world by remaking famous paintings of women figures while removing the women from the scene. With all but the final section labeled “1.” the poem shows a series of promising false starts while the speaker (presumably our author) wrestles with attempts at chronology in Sophie Matisse’s life, including her short stay in a Parisian arts school. Habel’s speaker wonders “What can a descendent of Matisse who paints paint?” She worries why she is so bothered about Sophie’s beauty or the prominence of Sophie’s chest in photographs of the painter. She’s shocked when she has trouble googling a list of famous women painters and is corrected with a list of famous paintings with women subjects. And what does it mean in the art if Sophie has erased these images of the women that helped make the art so famous?
Outside of these two massive poems, you can find numerous examples of how dynamic and innovative this collection is when it comes to its uses of varied structures or just the visual form of the poem on the page. There are poems that are undecorated litanies, but sometimes those litanies are accompanied with a special character like these checkmarks—from the Wingdings section of Special Characters in Word—in “Diagnosis: Jane”:
☑ Has the warranty in her files
☑ Knows where the yarn is
☑ Knows how to French braid
☑ Would really like some help with this duvet cover
☑ No, won’t be lonely if her daughter goes upstairs to read to her doll
She also has concrete poems such as “Pedestal” which maintains the shape of a classic Doric pillar. “The Vocation of St. Thérèse” is accompanied with track notes of deleted lines or comments. “Basic Reader” presents a thirty-nine phrase numbered list with most of the words lightened to gray to reveal a secondary poem: “Jane said here I am oh look a want he something away she went,” but the effect can only really be experienced with the poem itself.
The Book of JANE received the Iowa Poetry Prize in 2020, and perhaps this was a result of how integral it is to see some of these poems on the page to fully experience them. Perhaps it’s how this collection grows larger as you read, each poem being a more significant piece than it first appears. It’s certainly a book that takes nothing for granted and makes us look closer at the women around us to reflect upon and show the proper respect for what they have made and contributed to our world.
