[Matt Q]

Hi Cameron,

I also like this one a lot, and echo the praise others have given it. Reading it especially in the light of your other poems on ancestry, I read this is as much about cleaning as (not) "cleaning up"/"whiting out" one's ancestors, hiding/disowning one's ancestors -- and those who did not "clean up" in the sense of not being able to be made respectable or to pass.

I have a few crits/points:

Given the colon, "cockroach, plaster, brick-dust & the dead" reads like a list of the N's ancestors. Also, the list (cockroach, etc) seems to be the referent for "their" in "here are their ashes". I'm not objecting, I like the idea, just wasn't sure if you intended it.

One thing stuck out for me a bit, given the freshness of the rest of the language was the stock metaphor, "primordial soup". I guess soup can suggest cooking, another domestic task, and the soup image may fit in with the poem that way. But if I'm reading the poem right it's more about cleaning than domestic tasks in general, so the soup image seems a little at odds with the poem. A thought, and maybe a bad one, but I guess you could go with "primordial soap", playing off the "primordial soup" phrase, but tying in with the cleaning motif.

& here are the hundred other women
before me who did not clean up:
the thin arms, aborted broom; the startled eyes
confronted by her dustfaced predecessor:

she is caught in a new religion

I get very confused here. We seem to shift midsentence from looking at 100 women to only one woman, without a clear indication that this change has occurred or how.

First two lines are clear enough. 100 female ancestors are here. I have a clear image.

The next two lines, I wondered if they were speaking of the general case -- that what follows the colon applies to all 100 other women that the N now sees. The N sees 100 pairs of thin arms. That's the natural reading, I think, given what precedes. But then "broom" doesn't fit. The N sees only one broom. So having said here are 100 women, it seems the N is only seeing/talking about one of them?

Then we come to, " the startled eyes / confronted by her dustfaced predecessor" but I see nothing in the poem for "her" to refer to. Whose dustfaced predecessor?

But since there is a predecessor here, and I'm back to the idea of a line of 100 women, stretching back in time, each eying the their predecessor.

Then with next line, "she is caught", we're very clearly talking about one woman.

Anyway, I hope I've explained my confusion clearly enough.


best,

Matt