THE NAMELESS, Brandi George. KERNPUNKT Press, 2023, 191 pages, $18 cloth, www.kernpunktpress.com.
Open The Nameless and you are immediately submerged in an overwhelmingly lush and surreal world:
Dear creatures from the underground, nematodes, earthworms, tangles of synapses, dirt symphonies, the ruffled collars of pea-green lichen who sing only about the sea, indigo air humming with moon-strings.
But as you tiptoe through this stream of consciousness, narrative strands emerge. They take your hand and gently guide you through this singular book. Captivating, otherworldly, and precise, George’s writing takes you on a journey unlike any other.
The Nameless is not a collection of individual poems. Instead there are chapters and two distinct threads that are interwoven throughout. Both threads follow the same narrative but in vastly different styles. One is autobiographical while the other tells the same story through magical realism. These threads ultimately converge, and both the separation and convergence mirror the complex and traumatic experience of the author.
The autobiographical sections are written in stream-of-consciousness and use a first-person plural point of view, a speaker named we. There are liberal amounts of white space so that, visually, the words and sentences look fragmented. The white space also stands in for the missing punctuation, of which there are only ampersands. Unexpectedly, within these sections are many sonnets and sonnet fragments that maintain only pieces of their previous form, meter, and rhyme. The sonnet fragment on page 55 is fourteen lines long and written in iambs, but the line lengths are not consistent, and there are only two rhymes. However, there is still an echo of a sonnet, felt most keenly in its final, iambic pentameter couplet: we see it’s dark too late at last we read / our love will transform darkness like a seed.
The acknowledgements tell us that this book was originally a sonnet sequence, and the reverberations of that can be felt throughout the book, the form contrasting with—and perhaps balancing—the experimental.
The magical realism sections use prose poems in a third-person point of view that renames we, Thumbelina. These sections each describe a death, i.e. a trauma of Thumbelina’s. They read like fairy tales, strange and violent as Hans Christian Andersen’s stories. The first time Thumbelina dies, she is trampled by a horse and taken to a hospital: she was pronounced dead. But when her grandmother, Monarch’s, tears rained onto her forehead, she came back to life. The doctor warned her that her left arm […] would belong to mammals, her lungs to birds, and her head to stones.
Instead of the literal narrative style found in such books as Bianca by Eugenia Leigh—which also deals with mental illness and abuse—George uses the surreality of trauma itself as the basis for the text. The fragmented and fantastical writing is a mirror of the surreal experience of trauma. There is no intermediary here: She kicked him with her hero tennis shoes, but the Knight was older and stronger. He raped her. Then he grabbed the talon of a golden eagle who swept him into the sun.
I was drawn so close to the events in The Nameless that there were moments where I would need to stop reading and breathe deeply as emotions washed over me. The intimacy of passages and entire chapters begged to be re-read.
Poetry gave her the power to rewrite her memories.
The Nameless is such a satisfying read because it is ultimately about triumph over trauma. Two things make this healing possible—making whole what trauma has fractured and naming what trauma has obscured.
In chapter 4, the beginning of the denouement, the two characters from the previously separate threads meet each other and merge into one woman: She reached out her hand and grasped Changeling-Thumbelina’s hair, hugging the older woman to her chest as hard as she could. The two Thumbelinas slowly became one. Once the women and the narratives merge, healing begins to be possible: we practice each day fighting for air fighting for life.
She continues to struggle until she names Death, the personification of her trauma:
Death floats toward us […]
They are The Nameless
They are Shiva Shakti Ishvara Patanjali.
There is birth and healing after this naming: our eyes open for the first time. The book finishes with a simple yet powerful ending couplet: Thumbelina wanted nothing / but to live. What was murky at first blooms into a daring, raw, radiant, and healing narrative of triumph: poetry gave her the power to rewrite her memories. With so many books about the traumas women endure, it is extremely satisfying to read one that is equally full of hope, possibility, and even joy. There is a Lucille Cliftonesque buoyancy, a rising above trauma made all the more powerful because the struggle toward freedom was as difficult as the traumas themselves.
The Nameless is a naming of all that was unsayable in the speaker’s youth. It breaks the silence on which trauma feeds, a silence that many women hold. The style George uses to accomplish this may seem fantastical at first, but it is not. If the trauma of mental illness, abuse, rape, and neglect make no sense, why describe them using literal language? Like Frida Kahlo’s paintings, this work may be labeled by some as surreal, but George, like Kahlo, is simply painting her reality.
Autumn Newman writes poetry and book reviews. Her poems have recently been published in Cider Press Review, Rise Up Review, The Tiger Moth Review, and River Heron Review. She has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize, and her chapbook, A Flower Burst Open, is forthcoming from Finishing Line Press in 2025. She lives in Sacramento, CA.