Self-Portrait with Housewife Jennifer Saunders Tebot Bach, 2019 In Jennifer Saunders’ Self-Portrait with Housewife (Tebot Bach, 2019), this housewife is no tame, domesticated creature. She hums, not with placid contentment, but with barely contained electric current. Notably absent are mention of spouse or children, except as reference as how she is minimized and dismissed: “You think I don’t see it, how your eyes shift/when I tell you I stay home with our boys” (16), she says in “The Housewife Makes Small Talk at a Cocktail Party.” Each poem in this collection is spare, sharp, full of images, often with hints of menace: wasps’ nest, bees, knives. These poems are a meditation of the housewife’s interiority, her often dark thoughts, thoughts sometimes in sharp contrast to her external life. In “Housewife, Evaporating”, she writes:

Here, as in many of her poems, Saunders uses images that linger for the reader. The “…eyebrows/that almost/resemble expression” hint at an undercurrent of depression and despair. The claustrophobic image in the second stanza is consistent with the speaker’s recurrent thoughts about drowning. In the poem, “The Housewife Said,” the poems goes on: “drowning is almost always/deceptively quiet.//When I said,//drowning is almost always/deceptively quiet,” (30) with the speaker in the poem in internal dialogue with herself. In the poem “In Line at the DMV, The Housewife’s Thoughts Wander”, the poem starts with image of a submerged car with the speaker contemplating a plan, what she would do next, how to crack the window, as she considers equalization of the internal pressure to the external, another wonderful image showing tension between her inner experience at odds with literal outside pressure pressing in on her. While driving home, she admits to the occasional desire to swerve into the median, a hint at both possible suicidal ideation and a move to the chaotic. In “The Housewife Wonders”, the poet writes of the tension between longing and the repetitive domestic demands of her life: “…the world/is full of lessons I could study/if I weren’t so busy sweeping them up.(23) ” The tone here is contemplative. “Why keep it all at bay?” she asks of the relentless upkeep of laundry, spider webs, the things that break and need mending in a house. When she concludes with “…Why pretend/things don’t blow away?”, and here the poet concludes the poem with considering impermanence. There are no weak poems in this collection. Saunders shows us things may not be what they seem and that a life defined by domestic expectations may hold challenges invisible to the eye. In this way, Saunders nudges the reader toward compassion. She concludes, “I am trying to leave the wasps/in peace beneath the eaves” and we are left with an image of coexistence with danger tucked at the edge of home. Visit Jennifer Saunders' Website Visit Tebot Bach's Website

Glass: A Journal of Poetry is published monthly by Glass Poetry Press.
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