Reviewed by Deborah Bacharach

Empathy can take many unexpected forms in Michele Bombardier's collection, What We Do. Perhaps it's the unflappable clerk in the sex store who calmly helps the speaker find a vibrator for her post-cancer body. Or perhaps it comes from how this book is put together, with a poem about a violent father's attack being immediately followed by a poem about the father coming under attack. What We Do is Bombardier's first book of poetry, and these poems shine with both an intelligence that connects with others who might be easily dismissed and the heart to respect and honor that connection. 

Bombardier's background sets the context. She is both a clinician—she has worked in hospitals and her own clinic as a speech language pathologist—and a cancer patient. Bringing to mind Elizabeth Bishop's "In the Waiting Room," where the speaker struggles to hold on to her identity, Bombardier's "Waiting Room" is written in the second person, so you also "wait for the nurse to mispronounce your name;" you too are in that room trying to hold claim to your identity. In "Baptism," the speaker is by the bedside of a patient who pulls out his catheter, dousing her with urine. The speaker tells us of the patient:

He found my hand, I tell you, he quieted
like someone drowning finds a ring buoy,
holds tight, then swims, carried
by the current, back to shore.

In clear language, the poem keeps the focus on the patient and the connection we all need.

That language stays very clear, even while addressing life with a violent father. As the speaker says in "A Toast to My Ghosts," "a roar rises in my ears and I smell fear. / I'm four again and he stumbles down the hall." In these lines, as with most of Bombardier's poems, the reader knows exactly where they are and what is going on. But Bombardier also uses inference to great effect. The poem continues, "She put posters to cover the holes / in the walls." These lines contain a father's rage, a child's fear, a mother's determination—all implied with a single image.

Bombardier brings to these poems not just her childhood but her experiences as a mother. The collection is filled with those tiny details—"Car trip to grandparents / with no AC we called vacation"—that focus the reader's empathy for the morass of motherhood, for sending a son off to college, for wanting the world to be a better place for our sons and daughters. 

Faith and facing truth are themes that also permeate this book. In the poem "Belief," Bombardier writes: 

Tell me it's prayer when I write lines from Rilke
on a small finger of paper,
roll into a tiny scroll

then press to my alveolar ridge
behind my teeth to suck on when the plane 
pulls up its wheels, releasing

itself to the sky. If the plane should crash,
my mouth will chew sweet words
to counter the rushing, maybe, 

The sensory details draw me into the moment. I also love that "maybe" at the end of the line, holding the reader in a liminal space, just like the speaker is with her belief and her physical body. I appreciate, that for Bombardier, empathy does not require absolute faith or perfection. 

The collection's title poem considers what happens when we do not have empathy or when we do not have enough of it. The speaker communes with a doe who has lost her fawn, but eventually the speaker walks away. She does not have enough empathy for this moment. As is often the case in her poems, Bombardier sets a scene and lets the scene carry the moral weight. 

Careful with her craft, Bombardier often writes in blank verse sonnets, a form that can hold and contain big emotions. She creates smooth transitions between poems: fire to fire, cake to cake, father to father. I particularly love the juxtaposition of the poem about the speaker in a modern American city considering Syrian refugees in a refugee center with a poem where glass separates the speaker and juncos. When the teenage son says of the birds, "They know you," I also felt that distance and closeness resonating back to the refugees. Both poems, and their placement in the book, add depth to each other.

Many of these poems gave me chills or had me bursting into tears. I needed "What I Want to Believe," where the speaker forgives herself for bringing the completely wrong food to her mother-in-law's table, the way her daughter-in-law does to hers. I needed this empathy. Perhaps you do, too.