Book Review: Rotary Phones and Facebook* (Meg Eden)

Reviewed by Michael Northen

If the title of Meg Eden's new poetry collection Rotary Phones and Facebook (Dancing Girl Press, 2012) is not enough to pique your interest, the titles of the individual poems should be. Who wouldn't be curious about poems called, "Toaster Oven Hysterectomy" "Cambridge Women's Pornography Cooperative?" or "My Mother Buys My Underwear When I'm Not Around"? A random sample of almost any lines in the book show that Eden's titles are not false advertising. Take for example the opening lines to "Second Trip to an Onsen":

There's nothing more relaxing than sitting
in a lawn-chair, naked–
and forgetting the bacteria that inevitably
transfers from butt cheek to butt cheek,
or realizing you, unquestioningly, have
the highest concentration of body hair
in this whole country.

It would take an unbelievably cerebral person to feel blasé about such a sentiment. Eden's work is definitely about the body, specifically, the female body. She cautions however,

I'm only
interested in the stories. Even
in our nakedness, we say
something no other body
can proclaim

A reader who expects titillation or a feminist tract in verse will be disappointed. Eden's agenda is a good deal more subtle. One clue to her underlying concerns is in the title of the book itself. Another is in the book's dedication: "For my mother, who has guided me with her wisdom discerning the balance of pride and gentleness in womanhood." The question the book seems to want to explore is how someone who began life as a girl in the age of the rotary phone, with all its concomitant values and attitudes, is able to function as a woman in the age of Facebook, Twitter and text messaging.

Eden's ambivalence is expressed beautifully in a poem whose title is its first line:

I have never gotten an e-harmony account

because I told myself I wasn't that desperate,
that I was a woman, that this was good, I could do my own
thing until a man came out of nowhere, on a horse
like the old spice man, man.

At length the narrator capitulates and does write an ad. It reads:

Wanted. Single Christian man for potential relationship.
Asians preferred. Must be able to tolerate
rants, tears, narcissism. Must accept hand-
holding, photo-booth pictures, and watching
the cherry blossoms fall like years, over us.
Interested candidates should respond via email.

But,

I did not post it anywhere, except this poem,
which perhaps he will find, perhaps someone
can find this unstable poet inexplicably
attractive, and he will be the one and yes,
I will be the sleeping aurora, the woman
who slowly emerges, satiated.

It is hardly surprising that, especially in the United States, attitudes towards oneself are tied to the body and these attitudes begin at an early age. As with many American girls of her generation, learning the mores and rituals for care of the body fell to the mother. "Precautions" a poem that treats the ordeals and indignities of growing up with sanitary napkins, begins. "I am careful how I bleed. Mother/ taught me: wrap the napkins carefully /for the people who will handle the trash." The physicality of the events remains with her in memory as she recalls.

Sometimes I would swim in pools with pads
firmly pressed to the bottom of my swimsuit,
and I would return with it hanging loosely
between my legs from the wet

Her worst fears are realized when, coming home from church camp, she discovers that there is a hole in the bottom of her clothing bag and that a pair of underwear with red-brown stairs is blowing across the parking lot. The poem ends with a line that seems to invoke all the prohibitions of Leviticus "I am sorry now, because/ someone else had to touch the blood." It is the ancient guilt of being unclean relived there in a twentieth century church parking lot.

The body as something unclean is contrasted with the body as something desirable. A bit later in her youth, purposefully ignoring her mother's advice to put the blinds down, the narrator undresses in front of the window thinking:

I imagine the driver
who strains from the road to look
into my window, the horizon
of my naked breast, a subtle pink.

The lines are from the poem "Bathsheba." Eden is rooting these longings, also, in the emotional conflicts that reach back in historic time at least as far as the Old Testament. Even in contemporary times with the United States approaching something like sexual equality, an underpinning of inherited mores and prohibitions still persist.

Reading through Rotary Phones, one might think on first analysis, that Eden is trying to get back at Hemingway. The men in her poems appear only as foils. Those her own age seem to have nothing but sex on their minds. Older men like her father play chess or with a screw driver. They drive John Deer tractors. At the same time, the book's narrator does not seem to blame men for what they are:

When hearing about Bathsheba,
I didn't blame David, but asked–
What was that woman doing, bathing on a roof?

While she may be dismissive of men as rational creatures, the real target of her text is women. In "Cambridge Women's Pornography Cooperative", she charges:

Women are said to be fickle,
and I will stand up in wedge-
heels to testify. I am between loving two
men, and the test is which
one can't live without me. The number one
disease to afflict America is narcissism,
or maybe that's women.

Tongue-in-cheek? Maybe. But in language very reminiscent of Louse Bogan, lines from the book's title poem read:

women
take everything too much like a wound, they wound
themselves.

Women

talk about

the art of making themselves beautiful, but never
how to make other things beautiful.

perhaps answering a question Eden asks earlier in the book, "I wonder who gave them those wounds?"

Though consisting of only twenty-three poems, Rotary Phones and Facebook is a complex book, sure to draw criticism. This is not because it courts controversy but because the issues it deals with are too multifaceted for facile answers, and, despite the breezy surface, Eden does not try to provide answer to them. In the nature/nurture debate, she comes down on neither side, though assigning blame to both.

The question Eden seems to be exploring, "how does one become a woman in 21st century America?", still hangs over our heads, unresolved, at the end of the book. In the very last stanza of the final poem says:

Who cannot know these things? we ask. Isn't this
one of those life-skills that no one has to teach you,
but that you just know? That it is in your blood.
That is passed down from woman to woman. Some
things cannot be put on the tongue. But we search
for words for them. We try to translate our experiences.

In our financially-strapped times, poetry is probably word for word, the priciest buy in a book store, but it can also be the most rewarding. This is certainly the case with Meg Eden's Rotary Phones and Facebook. Dancing Girl Press also deserves credit for taking a chance on emerging writers like Eden and Kara Dorris who grapple with the issue of self-definition as diving into the twenty-first century we are still bungie-corded to the past.

*Editors' Note - This review of Rotary Phones and Facebook is based upon a manuscript version of the book. Poems cited may appear somewhat different in the final published version.