Reviewed by Philip Sorenson

In Carrie Lorig's raw and dense The Blood Barn, she undertakes an investigation of a self that is buried in the real as a self and the ways in which these selves are remade by a language of citation and expression. How do we write? How do we write ourselves? Through the book, Lorig answers provisionally: this is an investigation of language, the way it dresses us, or perhaps, as Saussure had it, the way "Writing is not a garment, but a disguise." It's this trouble that Lorig partly plumbs. The difficulty emerges in language and in the poet. How does one turn one's inside, a primary site of the poem, into the outside, a place of exchange? Lorig tells us: "I can only never write poems / that are my body here / strong as life strong as violets . . ." She climbs through tangled boundaries, a webbing or the difference between an "ever" and a "never," and through the difficulties of voice, sociality, gender, hunger, trauma. Ultimately, she comes to a kind of empathic practice for being in world: "To move a hurt cardinal out of the road when before / you didn't." The Blood Barn is a book that ties memory to Pluto to the lyric to citation and to the scar. The lyric is a residue; the poem moves from us, and it can displace us.

Near the beginning, Lorig relays her route to work: "every morning /  I push a button for X-ing safely . . . I notice / I feel / webs touch me." She goes on to write, "As I X, I pull a part of a web / velvet sea / from my hair and walk slower / so I can look up / at light." This description of the body moving in space follows and is followed by a question that is raised throughout the text: "What happened to the lyric?" The lyric is lost, has been forgotten or misplaced, has decayed, or is no longer in use. The lyric is a missing thing. In the lyric, though, is the poet's body remade. The poet has given her body over to the lyric, to the text. The body is confessed into the text; it is a citation of itself. The body is displaced: "But how it felt, / what I came to feel while writing this surprised me / It displaced me."

In writing her trauma, the trauma of her eating disorder and—more importantly—the violent conditions that promote anorexia in women and girls ("we hate all the forms that women take"), Lorig has found herself displaced in the writing. Is this an exorcism or a suspension? It is a turning of the inside out. The route outward, though, is also inward. On the one hand, each poem gathers invisibly into its form. It makes itself as it passes from the "oldest cell in your body . . . located in the cerebral cortex." This cell, Lorig tells us, "is most likely located in the part of your brain responsible for thinking / for language / for awareness." The poem fulfills itself in its form by working to say what it is not: the body outside. But the poem's life before it lived was outside. While describing the body's oldest cell, Lorig also indicates the source of this knowledge: "The oldest cell in your body, we know thanks to all the C14 in the air from atomic atrocities in and around WWII." The world and its history construct us; the poem grows in the place "responsible for possibility." The poem arrives from the outside as an "earlier" and elsewhere and then as memory, as scar tissue, as trauma: a blood barn.

Through our diagnoses we are known. But, what is knowing other than summary, which is itself a displacement? We are captured and remade. At one point, Lorig reprints an image from a medical form. In it is shown a blank human body; the right hip has been circled in red. Some pages later, more of this document is reproduced. She writes of it, "Place a mark on 'Yes' or 'No' to indicate if you've had any of the following." Both "Anorexia" and "Bulimia" are marked "Yes." The plainness of this. The way in which the medicalization of our bodies contains a matter-of-factness that belies the lived truth of "ha[ving] any of the following." The way in which the medical form parallels the poetic form as a form of capture. However, the medical form and its blankness, its confounding of having and being, is not the poet's expression. The patient is an institutional object. The speaker is a poetic object woven together by lyric probing. Lorig defines the blood barn: "There is a pain in my hip that I call / the Blood Barn / The right side / is just scar tissue . . . I feel a lost sea in / this space in my body / It is a swell and a poem and a secret / that gets seen and unseen again." The blood barn is a residue, "A form of oil," or a hypostasis: "There are textures that sit behind the world / that refuse our delusions." In other words, there is a textless text that remains unsaid, and it is the only thing that is ever really said; that is to say, it is the memory of the self in the world. 

The body in the world is formed by the world. It is like a stone. Lorig writes, "I know because the life of a stone / emphasizes the heavy soreness of the body stuck to the rock about to burst." Like Niobe, who lost her children to divine revenge, or the grieving women in the caves of Alice Notley's Alette, our bodies are hardening into rock. Everything is being formed, or becoming itself. The self becomes a boundary, a thing that must be known: diagnosed, made object, policed. The form (the lyric?) is a disorder. What goes into the body must be controlled: "I touched the ketchup bottle last night and remembered how I used to measure out exactly how many servings I had eaten. I felt how I used to write it down." This policing of the form works to form the self into "a perfect girlstudent / to prove I was not a guest / a thief." And because it is a reforming of the self for others, to whom it must be proved, the self is negated. As Andrea Dworkin writes, "Under the male-positive system, the masochistic pleasure of self-negation is both mythicized and mystified in order to compel women to believe that we experience fulfillment in selflessness, pleasure in pain, validation in self-sacrifice, femininity in submission to masculinity." In forming the self, the self is sacrificed. This is a negative and violent negation; but Lorig also makes space for displacement as a nonviolent exchange between texts and selves.

As in her previous book, The Pulp VS the Throne, in The Blood Barn, Lorig writes intertextually. She includes images of medical documents, Pluto's surface, a postcard from poet Brandon Shimoda, a photograph of her mother taken by her father, and so on. These images are only a portion, though, of the complex intersections of the self that the text embodies. Lorig's own poetry shifts deftly between modes, through its embodiment of the poet's self, to ultimately displace that self as sign for its intrinsic dis- and reappearance via representation, its inherent polymorphous sociality, the I, the me, the she, the they. One significant section of the book fully displaces the poet. In it, she quotes at length a letter "written by Leora Fridman and originally published on VIDA's  website. . . . This whole poem is dedicated to her." This is a radical and loving act, suggesting the necessary links between people, and the ways "To pack against To melt against yourself: / The ability to insist on being close / to the unspeakable revolution / of thought's texture / / someone else's We read in a wreckage." This is a text of citation as an act of memory, as an act of love.

A few years ago, I was high on our couch with O, and I was trying to decode a passage from Timaeus—the one with the Platonic solids—and O was reading Lorig's The Pulp VS the Throne. The passage from Timaeus was cosmological, and we were trying to understand the argument or the shape of the argument. Reading it together aloud.  Then, weirdly, O read from The Pulp and it seemed to be an exact mirror of the passage in Timaeus, like a cryptic retelling.  Now, thinking about The Blood Barn, I've been trying to track down both passages. But it's impossible. It's two halves without a center. I don't know how to locate either passage or to understand how they were related or if they were. What happened to the lyric?