Dressing in the Dark
Poetry
Lynx House Press, 2025
$26.95, 76 pages ISBN: 9780899242040
On the opening page of Kathleen Flenniken’s fourth collection, Dressing in the Dark, appear three lines from Roethke’s “The Waking,” each later repeated to form a section of the book: “What falls away is always. And is near./I wake to sleep and take my waking slow./I learn by going where I have to go.” A woman is diagnosed with breast cancer. She loses a breast; she loses a cat. Memories clamor around her, layered over the landscape, as everything falls away and is changed. Each spare, exact poem is a response—a note struck, a vibration.
I imagine that receiving a breast cancer diagnosis would feel like walking out into fog. There is a before and after. Routines are upended; the destination is unknown. Flenniken’s cancer journey also unfolded during the pandemic, when we were all collectively stumbling in the dark. As the title suggests, we feel around for something familiar–a shirt, a sweater. Our form is changed, yet our fingers remember buttonholes. We learn by going.
This collection feels distinct from Flenniken’s three earlier award-winning books. It is sparser, gentler, yet carries a lasting power. The opening poem imagines reconstruction as building a new house from rubble; slowly it grows upwards into “upstairs rooms with walk-in closets/and views over a waking garden.” The speaker says, “and I didn’t even know/I didn’t even know I’d thrown the door open/I didn’t even know there’d been a door.” The repetition leads to wonder.
Flenniken is masterful with memory. Like Roethke’s line “What falls away is always,” she evokes how lost places, people, and selves can remain present, in constant conversation with the now. In “Five Paragraph Essay on Time,” she describes waking at 5 a.m. to write school essays in the bay window of her childhood home: “The loops of my words leaned like they meant/what they said.” She looks up to see beams of a passing car and the big sycamore outside. We are lulled into this teenage memory, only to be jarred in the final stanza when we learn that a car smashed through that same bay window fifty years later. “We sold the house years ago,/no one was home,/but I sit at the center of destruction,/writing and running out of time.”
Many of the poems are embodied and sensual, particularly those that address the missing and remaining breast and the altered body. “Your Goodbye” describes seeing a picture of the breast a week after surgery: “the doctor’s eyes/directed mine/to your picture/taken while I slept/my beloved/departed/unblinking breast/in your first and last/look back.” In “In My Hand,” the speaker learns how to live with the changed body–in silence, like the silence of a long marriage. “Silence strikes me now/as the truest answer/from what’s missing./I can cup the silence in my hand/and feel its warmth/the way anyone touching me could.”
One of my favorite poems is “Split Infinity,” with its deliciously playful title. Here, the speaker is positioned between her mother and her daughter in time. “Even stranger than time passing/is being and unbeing./I had no daughter,/then there was you.” Her mother enters the poem, moving from giving birth to the speaker to starting dinner while the speaker watches Star Trek reruns on a tiny kitchen TV. The mother hates “to boldly go,” then she is gone. “I think of her rolling her eyes/every time Captain Kirk/launches into it,/reconciling my ‘to’ with ‘go.’/I’ll do that for you someday.”
So much of what I admire in Flenniken’s work is here: the pacing, the humor, the spaciousness, and the everyday details—Star Trek reruns—that belie their emotional power. That final line, addressed to her daughter, lands with quiet force. We do wake to sleep, and in taking our waking slow, so much accrues that matters. A missing cat in “The Cat is Missing Day Eight,” is apotheosized by absence, transformed from “annoying to priestlike.” Existence itself—like “beautiful May”—is unstoppable, even as we blink in and out between to and go.