Navigating hybrid identity

Review of Eggtooth, Jesse Nathan (Unbound Edition Press, 2023)

In his long-awaited first full collection, Jesse Nathan offers complexly nostalgic takes on a rural past, crafts intricate stanzas and rhyme schemes, explores romantic encounters with both women and men, and reckons with the White conquest of the plains. Having known Nathan and his work for nearly two decades (his Bethel College days overlapped with my son’s), I am less startled than was Emerson when he famously wrote to Whitman, after reading the first edition of Leaves of Grass, “I greet you at the beginning of a great career, which yet must have had a long foreground somewhere.” I am mainly surprised that this book was so long in coming, pleased that this debut volume is at last in the world.

Eggtooth foregrounds Nathan’s hybrid identity; as Sofia Samatar and Daniel Shank Cruz have in their (otherwise very different) recent books The White Mosque and Ethics for Apocalyptic Times: Theapoetics, Autotheory, and Mennonite Literature. Nathan’s Jewish father and Mennonite mother, both trained as lawyers, moved to a farm on the Kansas prairie when he was young, and that landscape is central to the collection. Ambitious on formal and thematic levels, the book positions Nathan as a significant new voice in American poetry, with glowing blurbs from numerous distinguished poets.

At least on his Mennonite side, Nathan’s is an eminent family tree; he is a direct descendant of former Bethel president E.G. Kaufman and grand-nephew of theologian Gordon Kaufman. After graduating from Bethel College, he moved to the West Coast, where he earned a Ph.D. at Stanford and found his way into the Bay Area literary scene. He now teaches at the University of California-Berkeley and writes for McSweeney’s.

Eggtooth begins (after a lengthy foreword by esteemed poet Robert Hass, of which more later) with “Straw Refrain,” a poem in three stanzas in the seven-line form Nathan borrows from John Donne. The form lends itself to repeated sounds and rich word-play:

Young gray cat puddled under the boxwood,

only the eyes alert. Appressed to dirt. That hiss

the hiss of grasses hissing What should

            What should. Blank road shimmers. On days like this,

my mind, you hardly

seem to be.

On days like these. (1)

The poem invokes the torpor and stillness of a hot summer day on the prairie, wind in grass the only sound. Yet its form, the insistent repetitions (“That hiss / the hiss of grasses hissing”), sophisticated word choice (“appressed to dirt”) and attention to the speaker’s mind – which he tells us, only a little paradoxically, “hardly / seems to be” – signal that this speaker is looking back from a mature and self-conscious vantage point, with the literary confidence to nearly abandon syntax in the final stanza:

and the kingbird and the vireos commence

to warble on as heat bears down a day like this

my mind. You hardly

seem to be.

You road, you creek. (1)

The first section’s poems about the poet’s Kansas boyhood are largely warm in tone, but with complications and troubling notes. Nathan’s “teacher-farmer” mother grows basil, broccoli, and kale, letting the weeds grow only when “the classroom’s got her head” (11). Given the current moment, poems about a misfit classmate, sexual explorations with both genders, and an obliquely rendered killing of a stray cat “by my hand, hell” (15) seem nearly obligatory. Mennonite readers will be unsurprised by a footwashing poem, made strange in Nathan’s telling by the family’s unconventional dress (“Mother in her special vamps / and Daddy in his monkstraps”) and the speaker’s bookish alienation:

there I am, turning over a word

in my head—catenary—for parabolas that fountains

form, word for the U a necklace makes, curve

an upside-down arch, as I towel off a sprouting

cousin’s fallen arches, anklebone,

all thirty-three joints known and unknown

that carry me from home. (19)

The 10-page “Between States” begins with the memory of a house fire, but segues into a long examination of the forced removal of native peoples and breaking of the prairie. A main strategy is including fragments from a baker’s dozen diverse, often wildly distorted, texts as the poem traces this long-effaced history and his own developing awareness of it. Here nostalgia dwindles away; school is “the usual cruelty with a rural edge,” and “[o]nly the land was always a solace” (36). His former neighbors do not come off well; the poem names “Candace, Carmen, and the Hacker boys, who “don’t know what figures they seem // for whiteness and sex and bored destruction” (37). The speaker allows himself considerable distance from such harsh judgments, retreating to celebrate the “zone of cottonwood hackberry luxurious weeds” and the way his own stanzas and lines “run on / like creeks across pastures, beneath a huge sun / of remembering.” (38)

Section III returns to short memory poems, culminating in the title poem. An eggtooth is a small tooth that enables a baby chick to break out of its shell; here “John Donne’s ghost” speaks most of the poem, granting permission to use his stanza form and to much more: “I say / use me like an eggtooth, break // the shell that shields you. . . . shuck frank death / as you surge with goodbye” (50). The metaphor is potent, yet not without its difficulties – can Donne truly serve as “eggtooth,” when his poems and model come from outside the poet’s shell, rather than growing from within?

In the final section, mainly set in California, Nathan brings us closer to the present, including a number of moving poems of love and loss as a long-term relationship ends and another begins. To his credit, Nathan does not shy away from acknowledging his own betrayals in “Aubade Within Aubade,” recounting a breakup and infidelities on both sides. In a heartbreaking moment, his departing lover asks, “Was that love we had, or just a stab at escaping / to some other newfound stranded emotion?” (69)

The final poem returns us to Kansas, and offers a welcome final shift in tone. “This Long Distance” recounts a routine Sunday phone call; the distant parents report on the weather and the animals, while their son describes the tides and a recent tattoo. As the conversation runs down, the poet, “not really sure what then to say,” describes a radio tower that resembles a “comb jelly,” and in return the parents hold up their phone to a window “to let him hear / the call—so personal and clear—of the train out there.” (94) Especially for those who make similar calls, the image of connection even across distances resonates beautifully.

As Robert Hass notes in earnest, sometimes numbing detail in his 12-page foreword (for me, the least essential part of this book), Eggtooth joins the honorable company of books that trace the development of a poet’s mind. It may not quite live up to the extravagant praise that surrounds the poems, but by its end, we find ourselves in the good company of a skilled, humane, canny, capacious presence. Let’s hope Nathan’s next book is not so long in coming.