In Kingdom of Glass and Seed, Jules Jacob initiates a fascinating and tender dialogue between nature and family. Both literal and metaphorical, the language of the natural world permeates the collection to describe the plant ecosystems around us while simultaneously capturing the dark sides of living—addiction, family dysfunction, and illness, among other subjects, take center stage.
“Down ground deep/ mycelium carry signals/ maple leaves her sugars on/ too long/ oak’s falling acorns/ are too green to root,” she writes in one poem early in the collection, paying homage to the invisible yet wondrous workings of plant life. In another, “Retrospective on Seedlings,” she humorously describes the frustrations of bringing this life to bear: “I battle wild violets in the vegetable beds/ fertilize their hybrid cousins’/ ‘Sherry’ and ‘Adonis’ in window boxes/ Acorns carelessly blown from the deck/ last fall, tap deep into worm castings/ daring to toast a shoot—to light—this spring/ Saplings are dug up, tossed in trash bins/ Eight-foot oaks in buckets are picked/ out of a lineup at local nurseries.”
These poems, which extoll the virtues of vegetation in wholesome tones, are interspersed with ones about the complexities of the author’s life, which nature is made malleable enough to express. In one poem about childhood abuse, for example, Jacob writes: “You punctured my vein and feigned surprise/ when my blood ran forsythia yellow, leaving/ Rorschach blots on your favorite Italian suit/ (I saw a glass shatter into a thousand seeds breaking free.)/ You watched my Larkspur eyes and cried/ You kicked the dog for my reaction/ And me without scent or color/ hidden from other pollinators.” As though the difficulties of her life are too heavy to explore without such a buffer, Jacob employs the metaphor of nature over and over. Diseased lungs are rendered as “upside down trees,” and abuse is rendered as a “commanded tide.” The result is a conversation between the natural world and the world of man. The former explains the latter and the latter heightens the beauties and necessity of the former.
Jacob does not only speak metaphorically regarding the incidents of her life, however. Some of the most gorgeous and invigorating poems of the collection speak baldly about the harrowing things she has faced. Exploring the difficulties of familial life, she writes in “Note to Parents,” “To bio fathers who disappeared/ your children are not tattoos/ Why ink their names on your bodies/ when you already forgot them/ To beautiful, imperfect mothers unable/ to protect their children while providing/ food and shelter, forgive your mothers/ Children, forgive me.” Here, she links the failures of her forbears to her own as a parent. Similarly, in another poem, she recites a family history of addiction, painting a picture of a lineage of imperfection. “When I first gasped air, my grandfather quit drinking/ Forty years later he drank a Coors Light at a holiday gathering/ My biological father left cocaine behind in the ‘90s, me in the late ‘60’s/Addicts burn cash and kids like kindling/ A drug addiction counselor said asking my daughter to stop/ using (opioids) was asking an amputee to walk across a room.” These verses, written in plain language, are all the more moving for their lack of artifice. Sometimes pain must be captured as pain to be spoken about authentically.
Across the collection, Jacob also balances these negatives of family with lighter aspects, bringing a holistic picture to the audience. Stepfathers are shown to present, brothers are depicted in their kindness, the author is portrayed as a loving grandmother. The positivity of these pictures undercuts the darkness of the other content. Many poems standout, but one, “The Limnologist’s Song,” is worth mentioning for the feelings it evokes and the picture it draws. Jacob writes: “My granddaughter maps bacteria/ in fatigued streams, sings my constant friend to tide pools and freshwater bayous/ I know, I know when her booted feet plunder mud-choked springs/ She serenades Lake Winnipesaukee/ why should I feel discouraged?/ when she spots black rain/ because I’m happy swimming/ to a plastic, magnetic letter/ and why should my heart be lonely/ as she weds it to her ring finger/ Before diving through algae blooms/ Oh, oh-oh because I’m free.” The gruesomeness of the subject’s childhood and her failures at motherhood are made right in later years, presenting an image that is both inspiring and hopeful.
In fact, the entire collection while laden with sorrows refuses to end on a sour note. “We’ll prove time loops backwards/ current actions changing the past/ You’ll toast the hours. I’ll break/ our glasses, set the year forward,” Jacob writes at the tail end, signaling to the readers what is possible. We might fail, we might take wrong paths but ultimately, we can loop backwards should we choose. While a lesson often fed to us, Jacob’s honesty and precise moves of language make it land in a fresh way. Whatever wrong turns we may have made, we are left to think, we can indeed, start over.
Zainab Omaki is a Nigerian writer currently pursuing a PhD in Creative Writing at the University of Nebraska, Lincoln. She has a Masters in the same field from the University of East Anglia, where she was the recipient of the Miles Morland African Writer’s award. Her essays, fiction, and literary criticism have appeared in or are forthcoming from Callaloo, L.A Review, Passages North, Transition Magazine, and The Rumpus. Her novel-in-progress been supported by the University of Bayreuth in Germany, the Jan Michalski foundation in Switzerland, and the Nebraska Arts Council.