PANK Books, 2020
72 pages. $18.
“I know what’s necessary for survival,” Kim Young writes in her second collection, Tigers. These poems are necessary for these times, but also timeless in the way they portray young womanhood, motherhood, and the world of addiction and recovery. The overarching narrative and language keep the reader wanting to move forward and see the story progress, begging the question of both the reader and the narrator of many of these poems: how will this all end? Tigers is a striking collection of survival, memory, and ultimately, a reclaiming of self from trauma.
Animals stalk these pages in many forms—tigers, elephants, a mare, raccoons, each functioning as a representation of self, or the ghost of the self. Tigers, in particular, are used as a type of fierce, often dangerous shadow self. “I want to tell you that when tigers come, meet tiger with tiger,” Young writes the collection’s title poem, “Tigers.” This meeting is hard fought in this collection and so often in the lives of many women. In the poem “I Dream of Tiger,” the narrator explains how “At night, Tiger pads into the room while I’m asleep / Tiger in the corner of my dreams.” In this poem, the archetype of the tiger is “a test,” an animal that stalks, ready to pounce. The tiger of this collection represents the shame one experiences after trauma. The shame is fierce, strong, ready to tear open. The speaker of “I Dream of Tiger” says that
when Tiger stalks me I think the lesson is to be steely
I finally learn to pass Tiger without the animal pouncing
But shame is a crater I move toward
In the prose poem “Aimlessness,” Young writes, “My suffering is so ancient, a thick rope I hold & hold.” Her tiger has been trauma and the shame of addiction, as in the list poem “Tramp Stamp,” where the tattoo on her lower back is “the one tattoo I try to hide.”
The speaker’s shame of her shaved head, addiction, chain smoking, casual sex, begins to wear thin as she becomes a mother and works to reclaim herself. In the last section of “Tramp Stamp,” Young acknowledges this, stating “It is made and it stays. Her hair is lighter than mine. I can’t quite see her but I know she’s there. Looking up.” Here, the woman in the tattoo is also watching, like the tiger, and is a representation of another life lived, one previously regretted and causing shame. But now, older, the narrator of Tigers owns these events, begins to refuse the shame, and uses the tiger energy in her new life as a mother. The tiger in these poems, which account for so much fear and shame, becomes a source of experience, of power, of fight as the speaker transforms. She doesn’t leave the past behind, but carries the experiences with her in her memories, growing from them, watching how they shape her world as both a woman and a mother in the twenty-first century.
This shame, this fierceness, this transformation from adolescent to tiger to mother is explored beautifully in Young’s “Mother-Ghost” series of poems. The idea of a “mother ghost” is used to depict both the child and the mother/woman women carry around.
In the poem “Mother-Ghost: Eternal,” Young explains that “A mother-ghost is a hawk. A mother-ghost lives / only by riding inside.” Young goes on to state that “The becoming of a mother, the ghosts the girls absorb,” illustrating how women carry their mothers with them and how women carry their girlhoods. How just like shame and trauma, they don’t separate, don’t exist in a vacuum, aren’t one without the other. In “Mother-Ghost: Post-Traumatic,” Young acknowledges this, writing “I don’t want to say that the girls pluck and scrub and tug—how that won’t unloosen, won’t release, won’t rid the girls of the parts of themselves they don’t know how to love.” Likewise, in the poem “To You I Bequeath,” Young explores the notion of what is handed down from mother to daughter—that inheritance of both hope and abuse, the “ancestral shame” and “ancestral anxiety” as seen in the poem “Mother-Ghost: Possessions.”
Tigers is a collection of experience, of grief, of toughness, of sorrow, of strength. The poems are crafted in gritty detail, with fine attention to structure. The prose poem form used throughout many of the poems in the collection only serves to highlight the narrative that Young so tightly weaves. It’s the “impossible light” (“To You I Bequeath”) that carries us, the strength, the animal of the body, the skill crafted from shame and patriarchy. Young brilliantly gives us these testaments as a means to show how we can gather our pasts, our ghosts, our tigers, and use them for channeling strength. The speaker in Tigers, like us, is “not ready to die. / I stay sharp, pointed. / I won’t resemble prey. / This is mine” (“Birth”). These are important poems rendered beautifully, poems that strike a nerve, feel like a familiar glance in the mirror, and teach us how to reclaim ourselves. And we are better for it.
