chigger ridge
By Nicole Callihan
Word Works | 2024 | 78 pages
chigger ridge, winner of the 2023 Tenth Gate Prize, is Nicole Callihan’s latest collection of verse. The book gets underway with an epigraph from Paul Celan: “There was earth inside them, and / they dug.” At first glance, it is a tad curious that Callihan would choose to excerpt Celan—a consummately European poet whose work is often avant, elfin, and lavishly obstruse—for a collection that is, in both its topical subject matter and line-level musculature, as quintessentially “American” as chigger ridge. But any confusion is quickly dispelled when, a few pages further, Callihan puts her own heartsore, colloquial spin on Celan’s aphorism: “and what we dug deep into dug into us too.” Inflected with the nasally consonances of Central Appalachia, Callihan offers a slight correction to I-centric culturalism of the Celan epigraph, resituating it within the rooted, silicosis-ridden materiality of her highland stomping ground.
This brief to-and-fro also illustrates the book’s undergirding political subtext. While never coarsely polemical—you’ll find no syrupy tirades against strip mining, clearcutting, or absentee ore barons in the abstract—the epoch of production that the characters in chigger ridge exist under (extractive, borderline colonialist capitalism) is ever-lurking, crouched always at the margins of the sayable. And Callihan’s speaker, an unnamed pubescent girl, gives tacit recognition to the outsized role that the homeplace’s political economy plays in not only the physical and fiscal unwellness of her makeshift “family,” but their carcinogenic self-conceptions besides.
In “mine,” the speaker laments, in diction that is by turns childishly guileless and primordially knowing, that while “other mountains had iron or coal / something good beneath,” her native soil has “nothing[,] we panned for fool’s gold / and though it shined it was not real.” The logos of neoliberal extraction necessitates that human “worth” is measured as a vector of production—who, as a worker, can create the most while requiring the least in terms of recompense and general upkeep—and, early on, the speaker presumably accepts this “logic” as gospel. Because she and her commonweal were not chipper enough proletarians, or were summarily picked clean, the powers that be have left them behind, “finding absence [they] moved deeper uphill / in west virginia,” which has damning ramifications for the psyches of the used-up and discarded. And this societal pressure, this cargo cult itch, to put blind faith in the profit-driven and the technocratic, to kneel at the altar of free market rationality and parrot “Culture of Poverty” tokenisms, begs critique throughout the collection. In “class,” the speaker, pondering the deficits and dysfunctions of her daily life, wonders aloud (albeit half sardonically) whether the scientific establishment has any answers for her congenital woe: “somewhere there’s a machine / that can look inside and tell you why it hurts.”
But, more often than not, these characters are wise to the vampiric agendas of the corporate mineral class and reject outright the narratives and stereotypes that distant interests seek to impose on them. It is an act of radical agency to renounce the prisoning self-hatred of the colonized, and the speaker’s ongoing tooth and nail slugfest to make authentic sense of herself and her situation embodies this. Procedurally, her seedling class consciousness reveals itself in moments of hardbitten clarity—“sometimes it’s better to be hollow / to have nothing is to have nothing to take”—and eco-sensitive epiphany: “you can’t blame the land for what dwells inside / or what does not bother to dwell / cause you ain’t got jesus nor man nor love.”
Barbed political commentary is only one commendable facet of chigger ridge. Callihan’s clever storyboarding, turbocharged versification, and relentless aesthetic vision also warrant heaps of praise. Lecturing on the do’s and don’ts of impactful poetry, Charles Wright once remarked that if the body of a poem is “loose”—too campy, swooning, or overly abstract—then, to ensure the work remains legible, its title must by necessity be “tight.” While no critic in their right mind would accuse any poem in chigger ridge of being unduly “loose,” Callihan’s exclusive use of punchy, one-word openers does inject a healthy dose of discipline and organization (in academic parlance, they function like mini abstracts or guiding précis) into poems that, while gorgeously wrought, hinge on overripe idiom and frequent stream of consciousness caesuras. But do not mistake me: the heartwood of this collection, its matchless duende, resides in Callihan’s freewheeling prosody. Eschewing any and all punctuation, capitalization, or prolix, postmodern formatting—each poem is limited to a single stanza of fairly uniform shape and length—unbridles the speaker, allows her to let her proverbial hair down, to psychologically unspool.
All this stylized anti-artifice serves a purpose. Rote, linear narration cannot encompass the speaker’s breakneck swings of mood and mentality. Therefore, when a hostile memory or a stray dagger of stimulus overwhelms her, she takes refuge in rhetorical play. Textually, this coping mechanism manifests as litany (“potbelly soggy eyed / australia bethleham china d.c. egypt / florida gastonia heaven”); frantic anaphora (“what’s a girl to do with a monkey / what’s a girl to do what’s a girl / what’s a matter what’s a matter babyface”); starry-eyed conjugative cycling (“incant / enchant enchanted”); and faux, syllogistic philosophical proof-speak (“if self is to self as self is to other then / the crawlspace in which the self / has hunkered is the crawlspace / in which the self will stay”), alongside countless other iterations of linguistic frolic.
Likewise, Callihan’s line breaks are multipurpose. They not only enact what the formalist critic Paul Fussell has called “vigorous enjambment” (which translates to “playing possum” in the hillbilly lexicon)—i.e. when a line lulls the reader to complacency immediately preceding its break, then with vicious expertise yanks them into the unexpected, affecting whiplash—they also serve as sites of dialectical pushback, exposing slippages and spidering chinks in the speaker’s curated persona. If the manic bouts of wordplay discussed heretofore are the speaker’s attempt to maintain a solvent identity, to sublimate overawing trauma, then the line breaks are a lawless borderland, a liminal zone where the beastly truth is always on the verge of taking flesh. “cold metal knob i might forever feel / beneath my fingertips the old man / had won a horse from someone,” or so says the speaker in “ajar,” but we do not really buy her face-saving sleight of hand. And the opening of a poem like “secret” only confirms our suspicions:
of the color the shape the exact dimensions
of the whispers the old man with his knife
to his apple on his porch in late may says
well you never seen a fish quite this size
Given how attuned this collection is to the high psychological plights of its narrator, the generous reader would likely forgive Callihan if she chose to phone it in a bit on the finer points of character and plot. Thankfully, chigger ridge does not slouch in these departments. Though not character-driven in the traditional sense, it does feature a compelling, textured core cast. In addition to the landscape itself, there are three recurring characters: the girl, the old man, and Malachi. The collection’s main fount of conflict is between the girl and the old man. Ostensibly her caretaker—we get the watery impression, however, that he is not her biological father—the old man stifles, flummoxes, and torments our speaker in a manner that mirrors the rebuking landscape: “the river / pounds the rocks pound the sky / pounds the hot nickel sun pounds / the old man’s hands pound me.” Malachi, the speaker’s love interest, is just as uncouth and morally shaggy as the old man, but his faults are leavened by boyish winsomeness and a moonshine charm.
But, as the speaker readily admits, “everything wasn’t always terrible.” Despite the endemic hardships of life in a corporate fiefdom, these characters find solace in their traditions and their history. To them, reverence toward the bygone is a nonnegotiable. And, in the leanest of times, doing without is much more palatable expressly because they feel such a shatterproof connection to those that came before. So, with this fact in mind, lines like “a wall in the kitchen / with twenty old spoons for décor / but not a soup nor a jelly nothing / to dip the rounded side in” could be read as hopeful metaphor, not patent absurdity. Dislocation and atomization, rather than abject privation, are the real intolerables.
Which leads us to the epilogue. Composed in a style and tone that are the polar opposite of its sister poems—antiseptic, academic, prosaically boilerplate—the epilogue is set indeterminately in the future, where our speaker has “taken unlikely refuge in the academy.” But escaping the hangdog poverty of her youth, exchanging the hollers for lecture halls, has done little to quell her soul-sickness—“In these quarters, / I am as unseen as I was on chigger ridge.” How should we as readers metabolize this ending? There are no easy answers in chigger ridge, but something tells me the moral of our story is acceptance, pietàs. As Callihan’s speaker so sagely proclaims, “sometimes you just have to be the self you are / break bread drown it in buttermilk.”
Ian Hall was born and reared in the coalfields of Southeastern Kentucky. His work is featured in Narrative, Mississippi Review, The Journal, Southeast Review, and elsewhere.
Header photo by AnnBoulais, courtesy Pixabay.
