Inheritance with a High Error Rate by Jen Karetnick

How do you keep going when you know that the world is hurtling toward disaster? If you’re Jen Karetnick, you write. Inheritance with a High Error Rate is the most recent of her five full-length poetry collections. But she is also a food-travel journalist, an educator, co-founder and co-curator of SWWIM (Supporting Women Writers in Miami). For twenty years she lived in the Mango House on the historic homestead of Miami’s first postmaster, along with her family, various animals, and fourteen mango trees that needed care and harvesting. No surprise that the book is dedicated in part to Mango House, or that of her three epigraphs, all taken from Mary Oliver’s work, two focus on mangos.

Karetnick’s poems never pretend that climate change is not an existential threat to the planet and all its living beings, but they are not doomsday prophecies, either. She gives us the world in language that is both scientific and intensely lyrical:

It’s clear
that spring has come on gopher feet
to the prairie, bringing the time
to restore the blended colors
of the mesic turf with the seeds
of black-eyed Susan and smooth
blue aster.

“Mesic” sits alongside gophers and the common names of flowers we all recognize. The range of Karetnick’s diction allows her to capture the natural world more completely. At the same time, her mastery of form gives her poems a certain distance from the grief and pain that might otherwise be unmanageable. Without forcing her lines to fit the rules, she writes in villanelles and other repeating forms, in sonnets and rhymed couplets, blues and contrapuntals and sestinas. The evaporating villanelles she invented follow the traditional rules, but the lines decrease as the poem moves forward, incorporating loss into the form itself. Yet she finds ways to laugh and to provoke laughter in the face of disaster:

We are not allowed to write poems about birds
anymore, the poet at the podium said before
she read her piece about pelicans. There were already
too many verses about insectivorous swallows
eating on the wing, barn owls making spirited daylight
appearances and, oh, the amount of murmurations
has made the poor, darling starling a visible cliché.

It is not just the almost unimaginable losses brought about by climate change and environmental degradation, but also more personal losses that are held within tolerable limits by Karetnick’s skill with language: her brother, a neighbor, her own health, her father’s diminishment, the increasing proximity of death. Yet she does not give in to that darkness but reaches for the light: in a sonnet that enacts the ritual of sitting shiva after her neighbor’s death from cancer and then after his widow’s death, each line includes the word house, and she concludes:

Later, back in my house, I woke to find him
housed in light at the end of my bed, the same
as when he worshipped at the house of the sun.
Now his widow departs this earthbound house.
Vacant house, I wait still for luster after loss.

She herself becomes the house that stands empty, waiting for someone to raise the shades, let in the light. The final poem of the collection will bless a new home that, despite downsizing, will be as full as her heart, blessed by the traditional prayer hung at the front door.

A woman goes rogue, winging wide, apart.

Though the recourse to form in poem after poem can begin to feel too tidy, the boxes in which she packs away her grief too firmly locked, the strongest of these poems remind us that we must move beyond those limits. However ineffectual our individual efforts may seem, we must continue to invest in the world we live in, our private world and the larger world outside us. The title poem is addressed with humor to the fruit she gathered from the fourteen trees she inherited at Mango House, riffing on the jazz standard, “The Nearness of You:”

The slick gush of you. The stain and stick
of you. How you fill cheeks like the residue
of a tongue bitten nearly in two.

In a later poem, “Babka,” that praises another food come to the US in the recipes of immigrants who did not find a warm welcome in our country, she evokes the gestures of blessing over the Shabbat candles. The women of her family waved hands over / three times inwards to signify the gathering of flesh, / mind, and soul. These were the

                                                            gestures for energy
to return from where it dwelled in the scrubbing of floors,
feeding of children, endless brewing of coffee to go along
with the smokes their spouses quit too eleventh-hour to live on.

The women of her family, and by extension all of our families, expended themselves all day every day to make a home, to prepare the weekly ritual of the Sabbath meal, to care for the ones they loved as each one died, and then these women called back the energy they had invested in this home-making to fill themselves up so that they could do it all over again.      

As the collection moves toward its conclusion, the speaker finds a child’s bank filled with coins her grandmother had given her, and it “exhumes” for her a larger bank filled with memories. She is downsizing, getting rid of everything she can, but holds onto the coins and implicitly the memories, enough / wealth to grip. A few poems later she lets us see how hard it is for her to leave things behind, as it was hard to accept her dog’s death, as it was hard to walk away from the fourteen mango trees though they had become too much for her. But if she regrets the house that is not quite vacant, she also welcomes the new house, the one with a prayer at the door, the one where she can be a bird in flight, where A woman goes rogue, winging wide, apart. There are compensations; poetry is an essential one.

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Susanna Lang’s chapbook, Like This, was published in 2023 (Unsolicited Books), along with her translation of poems by Souad Labbize, My Soul Has No Corners (Diálogos Books). Her poems, reviews, and translations have been published in Prairie Schooner, Asymptote, The Common, Tupelo Quarterly, Circumference, December Magazine, and The Slowdown, among other publications.