Echoes, Circles, and Aches in Jesse Nathan’s 𝐸𝑔𝑔𝑡𝑜𝑜𝑡ℎ
In Jesse Nathan’s Eggtooth, to issue a refrain is to invoke a multitude. From the start of his debut collection of poems, Nathan wields refrain as a structural and sonic device as well as an urgent means of reconciling with family history, geographic place, and past and present selves. With subtly mutating lines like “On days like this” and “On days like these,” Eggtooth performs the temporal complexities integral to Walter Benjamin’s “Excavation and Memory.” As Nathan writes, he enacts Benjamin’s maxim; he yields an image of himself remembering. He writes: “My job today is to dig.” Throughout this collection, Nathan turns and re-turns to early experiences of queerness in nature, church, and school before approaching liminal spaces, bodies of water, and adult desire, enacting his own poetics of excavation. The self is rendered with a stunning capacity to comb through memory and move forward in time with equal amounts of perseverance and momentum. Here, time is both intergenerational and immediate, the “I” more epic than lyric.
The idea of refrain is immediate in Eggtooth, as Nathan opens the collection with a poem entitled “Straw Refrain.” The reader, then, becomes aware of something being echoed—something being recalled—from the past, music, or memory. The source of this echo, of course, precedes the book itself. Meanwhile, “Straw Refrain” is full of its own echoes:
[...] That hiss
the hiss of grasses hissing What should
What should. Blank road shimmers. On days like this,
my mind, you hardly
seem to be.
On days like these.
Here, impressions of longing, bargaining, and vacancy flood the scene, the page-as-scene. The reader meets the speaker in unsettled observation: first of a cat, then “That hiss / the hiss of grasses,” and then summer itself. “Days like this” becomes “Days like these,” enacting multiplicity. While a refrain typically connotes some degree of familiarity—something that’s been heard before, something already uttered—the content of the poem feels unstable, sensitive to memory and experience alike.
In three short stanzas, “Straw Refrain” reveals the speaker in conversation with himself. The poem presents a dialogue of dismissal and admission: “No, no,” Nathan writes. “You hardly / seem to be.” The project of the book, then, feels existential—beingness is on the line. Still, Nathan nimbly sets an expectation of poetic form, one guided by irreverent musicality—as Nathan said in a 2021 interview with Kenyon Review, “off-rhymes, odd rhymes, nearly-not rhymes”—and enjambment that emphasizes the discursive motions of recollection and presence.
Jesse Nathan, Eggtooth (Atlanta, GA: Unbound Edition Press, 2023).
With an impressionable and simultaneous “I”/“you,” the book’s early mention of youth via the “Young gray cat,” and the fact of the title—the sharp bit of beak that an unhatched bird uses to break free—it feels intuitive for Nathan to turn to his own boyhood as a poetic site. We get to boyhood with “The breeze, quick-footed,” and find a young Nathan singing in “A Country Funeral.” He writes: “—Abide with me, free us to grieve— / and I’m nine, taking mama’s hand.” Notably, the “I” follows the hymn midway through the poem, as if located in the act of singing. And, from the “I,” the O, the O—though the longing and grief and yearning for freedom apparent in the hymn runs parallel to the nine-year-old’s position. Nathan writes of an aching; this aching feels separate, private, and veiled by the pastoral. In subsequent poems, early experiences of queerness and coming of age and discipline and violence take shape, undergirded by faith—in his foreword, Robert Hass notes Nathan’s upbringing in Mennonite central Kansas—and school, where knowledge is disseminated and repeated and inherited by choice or by force. The nine-year-old’s hand: “It aches for reach.”
Repetition is a force of meditation and urgency, and Eggtooth benefits from varied forms of refrain. In the opening pages, Nathan employs overt reiteration alongside like-refrains, namely hymns and adages. In “In Those Parts,” he turns to adage, writing:
A voice insists manure brings flowers
but also the more you stir it, the more you stink.
Sometimes the voice says, In the heart, a fire—
in the head, smoke. Sometimes
All good things are three.
Or, Words pay no toll.
Yet also
Speak so I can see you.
What begins as playful insistence becomes imperative, invocation. The book hinges on this “also,” as its following pages lean into explicit memory (of early queerness as a kind of being a “traitor” and of a family home being engulfed in flames), and Nathan writes into a more present “I”—one that still, always, bears the past. As the book progresses, what it means to bear the past is not just personal but social; Nathan situates himself as an observer and a cataloguer of “emptying”—namely, the displacement of Indigenous communities in Kansas. In poems like “Between States” and “Eggtooth,” Nathan utilizes lyric citation and allusion as a way of challenging cultural memory while still returning to common language like “I’m remembering” and “I’m seeing,” “I want to see.”
While the “I” of Nathan’s project is more subdued in the early pages of Eggtooth—the child-self mostly rendered in landscape, mid-scene—a poetic voice grounds itself in the act of remembering at the book’s midpoint, in a long poem entitled “Between States.” The “I” opens the poem. Here, the initial phrase and subsequent refrains, “I’m remembering” and “I’m imagining,” guide the reader through intersecting reflections on forced displacement, boundaries, borders, and what it means to willingly inhabit the “in-between,” to not “flow straight.” Gestures of family memory are alluded to, which he turns to in subsequent poems like “Shock,” expanding on the startling image of a family home engulfed in flames. In “Between States,” Nathan writes:
but I say a border is also a world,
zone of cottonwood hackberry luxurious weeds towering
and scarcely a human presence, a golden haze
where monarchs lunge and bounce
in private liberated gloom
that must from above look like interlinking
giant hooks, I’m imagining the bobolink’s view
who flies with the aid of the stars,
how a month ago the stream was ice,
how an hour ago a mare was stretching her neck
over barbed-wire fences
for the sweeter grass, and I’m imagining
these stinging nettles in my path
electrify my shins, imagining my stanza standing
for the grid within me, while my lines run on
like creeks across pastures, beneath a huge sun
of remembering, already halved by the line of the land,
land half imagined, half vanished
as a fog comes
not upon the earth but out of it.
Nathan finds his stride at the close of this poem, reaching toward disorder—that which “run[s] on”—as he simultaneously invokes his own poetic form on the page, rendering it as its own being. This moment—of magic, breaking-through—benefits from the spaciousness of the poet’s remembering, always sounded out onto the page as a reminder or a spell, a chant: “I’m remembering.” Though there is a sense of freakishness ascribed to the speaker in the early pages of Eggtooth, the refrain of “I’m remembering” also serves to amplify the self, to claim its past and present power in spite of indoctrination: “Best not to marry / on the other side of the creek.”
The disorder Nathan claims—not “straight” but fluid, hybrid—is tempered by the following poems, which depict mythic and domestic scenes alike with consistent composure. Still, the vitality of “I’m remembering” echoes like a pulse, as narrative threads from previous poems recirculate and as the landscape of Nathan’s poems shifts from Kansas to an unnamed coast, inviting transformation—in “City Beach,” as a woman dances, “the froth [becomes] her hair.” Some readers may seek more creekish chaos, more formal unpredictability and obscurity; others may find their bearings in Nathan’s voice as it moves to mimic the sound of a train, “so personal and clear.”
As much as Eggtooth enacts its own practice of knowing and being against “a system of culture, a school of / flak from an elder,” Nathan concludes the collection with an almost absurd return to the classroom in a poem proliferating with refrain and “odd rhymes.” In “Transplant,” he notes: “I am the stuff of pencils.” What follows, in “The Student,” is as musical as it is bewildering:
of wonder a student of blunder.
Wonder and blunder, blunder and wonder
I’d chant till I’d dulled any feel for either.
What does it mean to return to the classroom—to a “[set] course”—after so much else? The placement of “The Student” is odd enough, structurally, that it invites a reader’s own circling back through the collection, trying to place the “I” in its right time. This circling back, its own kind of refrain. Earlier, Nathan wrote, “I’m thinking of our work and what it means.” The whole of Eggtooth feels like this statement, drawing memory close and performing it on the page to enact a shared set of references with its reader, forging connections between the limited categories dictating what is artist and writer and human and teacher, what is adult and child, asking how much of learning is forgetting and how much of it is remembering, and how to be through all of this.
AM Ringwalt is a writer and musician whose work appears in Jacket2, Music & Literature, and Black Warrior Review. Her latest album Summer Angel is out now on Dear Life Records (Anne Malin). The Wheel, her hybrid memoir, was published by Spuyten Duyvil. Her poetry collection What Floods is forthcoming from Inside the Castle.