MIXTAPES by Rachael Crosbie

https://elj-editions.com/mixtapes/

ELJ Editions, 2021

Rachael Crosbie’s MIXTAPES (ELJ Editions, 2021) takes a daring dive into grief, trauma, and home ––then sets the entire emotional journey to music. The chapbook, which, as its title suggests, splits itself into an A-side and a B-side, engages a myriad of pop cultural forms from music to cinema to explore a world complicated by violence, survival, and the dreamscapes a consciousness requires to navigate crisis.  

The urgency of these poems manifests  through Crosbie’s repeating form: the poems primarily resemble short prose paragraphs, interspersed and complicated by slashes. These slashes carve the speakers into distinct voices, sometimes “supercuts, sutured memory only a seer sees,” (“supercuts in absentia”), sometimes “when you cut / yourself with mirrors / broken by hand, broken for / modern bloodletting,” (“dreams in absentia”), and at others “daylight beamed / through a window, a dream / where you learned to love” (love in absentia). The cutting of these poems make fractals of fracture, constantly complicated, interwoven: in processing, trauma scratches like a  broken record. Crosbie’s themes, like musical movements, can only be understood in relation to one another: major to minor key, sharps and flats making even the shortest poem sing. 

The content of MIXTAPES is as fractured as its form; these are poems that live, poems which move, and breathe, and lash out against traditional narratives of healing and processing violence. The second person is necessary for the speaker to process trauma: “you were afraid / of the body manifesting and you / manifesting the body. / fevered fits shifted sweat to sickness / trapping you in this loop / where you woke up confused, choking” (“anesthesia in absentia”). These are worlds which swing wildly from grounded body horror to metaphysical psyche, dream, and memory. If I, the reader, am caught up in the lush, visceral nature of these poems’ relationship with body––if I am left stumbling in the chaos of the surreal as memory, reality, conjuring, and vision all collide––how can the speaker, genderless “final girl” in the horror story of their life, manage to find a way forward, let alone out? 

Like anything in Crosbie’s world, the answer is complicated. The speaker prefers psychological escapism to the material, relying on amnesia and euphoria to forget, hide, or numb the pain. One day, our protagonist “won’t sleep… seeking out amnesia” (“amnesia in absentia''); the next, “you’d dream / in periwinkle, whispers, / anything etched in light” (“euphoria in absentia”). Anything can be taken back, and the speaker repeats themself in some places only to say the opposite moments later; propelled by need, anything is fair game in order to make their life more livable. The phrase “in absentia” that ties together the titles of the A-side gives clues to how the speaker abandons, escapes, and breaks ties with their own life to escape the pain of continuing on after trauma. Even when these poems offer harmony, the counterpoint murmurs quietly underneath: that grief makes even this joy a fallacy. Something darker, some heavy truth, always intercedes. 

Where the A-side provides distance in the “you,” the B-side of MIXTAPES introduces the first person, displaying a more intimate and detailed examination of the trauma, perseverance, and emotional turmoil that makes up the literal happenings of the book. Where, in the first half, Crosbie offers frayed edges of dreams, lyric leaps made no less poetic by their ungroundedness, in the B-side, a firmer purchase takes place, “Here, there is a frozen / long island to commemorate, / a breakup. Dizzied and frayed, I stumbled / to the parking lot alone, / holding on to the dead” (“Birthday in Tableau”). Even the language I use to speak of the B-Sides must be explained, now, in difference: these slashes are my own, not Crosbie’s, indicating to you more traditional line breaks that now find themselves interspersed with prose paragraphs. This change lands the reader in the realm of form’s certainties and refusals: while the slashes have disappeared, emotional turmoil remains firm. Where previously solid text emerged, line breaks now leave white space. And what are we to make of this white space: has the dense precarity of Crosbie’s speaker’s world been cured, or simply been hidden away? 

The B-side ends in a poem that most firmly illustrates the emotional turmoil central to much of the book. But in the aftermath of pain stands an ars poetica; the speaker, finally saying plainly their desires, illustrates the emotional and artistic work of MIXTAPES itself, “I want a house sliced with hidden rooms… memories from an unknown period of time. You’d tell me that this was a metaphor for something, that I’m using unfamiliar territory as a barrier for what I never want to uncover,” (“On Navigation”). I couldn’t help, reading this final poem, to feel like some layer of the book had been uncovered: some illusions of the speaker, peeled away. Both A and B-Side poems enact curtain and stage––the past the speaker wants to leave behind, and the urge to uncover, recover, and re-uncover, again and again, reliving  painful moments to try to eke out understanding, permission, or relief. 

The placement of the literal content/plot as the final poem in the book enacts the kind of meaning-making Crosbie’s poems themselves are interested in. The reader becomes infused with new purpose to reread MIXTAPES, scouring the text like a map missing one torn piece, hidden away until now. But it’s the truths of this book that remain the same, however the shifting landscape of literal happenings changes: pain as its own recursion. The A-Side offers a lyric establishment of emotional themes, while the B-Side establishes the real-life interpersonal conflicts that sparked these feelings; read together, the reader understands trauma as ungrounded, and ungroundedness not necessarily antithetical to truth. The B-Side, where events are “clearer,” feels like the part of the book where the speaker is hiding some part of their intentions; whereas the A-Side, layered in thick imagery, metaphor, and other abstractions, never feels dense, bogged down, or opaque. Psychological trauma breeds a need to make psychological escapes, trapping victims in a loop. And how did I feel, reading the poems again, only to understand that this is what the book had been saying all along: that the speaker felt trapped, looped, in a world they didn’t understand? In a complex history of healing, the pain remains. But as the trauma bubbles and spits songs beneath the surface of consciousness, I’m left with the feeling, not of clarity, but of scar tissue. Echoes aren’t, after all, the same song again. Even as the repetition in the mind feels like torture, sometimes the repetition is itself a necessary reminder: what has happened is over. Even if we can still hear it.