Bonememory by Anna Veprinska

Reviewed by Michael Greenstein

With its courageous illumination, Anna Veprinska’s collection of poetry, Bonememory, belongs deservedly in the University of Calgary’s “Brave & Brilliant Series.” Where Margaret Nowaczyk’s Marrow Memory explores Polish adaptation to Canada, and Yuliya Ilchuk’s A Crash Course in Molotov Cocktails probes the trauma of war in Ukraine, Veprinska combines these backgrounds in Bonememory. The book is divided into three sections: “Bone,” “Metaphysical Interlude,” and “Memory,” but the fusion in the title underscores the poet’s combinatory techniques and themes.

The first poem, “Reacquaintances,” brushstrokes the page with considered sound, space, and empathy, its title stretching the experience of encountering examples of death. The opening section relies on several enjambed lines as the poet drives north on an early September evening: “my flesh reacquaints / with fall’s prodigal bite.” Bonememory mouths tastes and sounds from the internal rhyme in fall prodigal to the alliteration of “bite: bodies of raccoons / and squirrels hugging the soft shoulder / of road, crows guzzling the dead // in their gaping gravemouths.” Between bite and gravemouths, the onomatopoeia of hugging and guzzling voices Veprinska’s embrace of empathy. “How long / a body becomes a carcass?” The length of a line in the interrogative, and the end of life, as anatomy turns to dust, bone to memory.

The rhetorical question remains up in the air and below ground. “A squirrel I nearly / run over but don’t scurries to familiar freedoms -- / the pedal’s pause a mercy.” The space midline pauses fate, while alliteration dramatizes creature and encounter: squirrel scurries, familiar freedom, pedal’s pause, mercy memoried “in the blood / of unhurt generations.” Blood, bone, and body course through memory. Blank spaces recur in the second half of the poem to measure and reacquaint poet and world. Animal bodies in the first half turn to a human being of a hurt and heard generation. “When her body lay emptied / of story, a stilled dash of bones, I recoiled from the past tense.” Like the pedal’s pause, the stilled dash arrests the past, while the speaker turns God out of poems, “sneered / at the scar on the horizon / marking the passing of another day.” This dash of sibilants and empty space recreate the body emptied of story. The first stanza turns from day to night, and from the scar on the horizon to “I spotted a herd of dinosaurs / sauntering through clouds.” These fluid forms become thoughtful: “nothing / leaves this earth; it just shuffles / its spirit a little a vultured comfort.” The final phrase reacquaints the crows guzzling, and embraces all the earlier “ed” suffixes – memoried, emptied, stilled, recoiled, limited, turned, sneered, spotted – in the recoil from the past tense, the culture’s bite comforted.

Gaps in the lines represent synapses in memory and are precursors of spatial reconfiguration in many of the poems that follow. “Matryoshka” exhibits the shapes and sounds of memory nested in its stanzas. Against the sibilance of glass display, story, spells, stained, spear, and sliced, the hushed sounds of matryoshka, shard, sheltering, sharing and shielding embed the memory of Ukrainian inheritance. “Mama keeps a matryoshka doll / from Ukraine in the glass display / in the sitting room.” Each stanza is a fitting room for this heirloom, which “reveals / how one rounded body fits inside / another.” This bonememory is a story of fertility, but also “a carrier of empathy: “a shard / of mercy: a sheltering of other / within self.” Veprinska’s phonemes sparkle through trauma and phonemic memory, embracing (m)other. She includes one Szymborska poem within maternal love – “the domestic work of cleaning spills / onto war’s stained battlefield.” Among Amazons, “Each matryoshka grips / both broom and spear.”

Shapes are even more pronounced in other poems. “Evolution” fans out across the page from “humans” back “to bone.” “Kernel” indents stanzas from bones to “unlearn a tongue” in “the cradling voice of language.” “Mouthword” shapes itself according to a mouth, and ends with spilling lines of slips, spits, stills – as if mouthward were a direction. “Two Threads” appears on its side, while “Survivor” is scattered across the page to imitate a wandering fate. “Colon” shapes words across two circles, intestinal space ending a pun on “colon”: “porous: porous.” “Prayer” uses horizontal and vertical lines to suggest genuflection, while “Vignettes for Ukraine: A Prayer” also scatters words and letters across the page. “whiff” makes a reversed circle of “memory.” The two stanzas of “Escalator” are indented to form ascending and descending shapes for the child learning about these moving stairs in Kyiv’s metro station – a rite of passage before emigration.

“Papa” experiments with blocking certain letters to imitate the eye of a sewing needle. The first stanza asks: “What threads of yourself did you need to sever / to forsake your home?” Threads and severance of generations, languages, and migrations carry through the poem. In the second stanza the poet looks into her father’s eyes: “I watch your eyes, large as moons, the pupils / packed pockets of sorrow.” These visual suitcases mix with the music of Shostakovich and Mussorgsky, “suturing our lives with piano keys / like the good surgeon who cuts you open / to betray the prowess of a seamster.” The keyhole letters combine lock, needle’s eye, surgical skill, and various seams. Her father’s hollow slit gets stitched through language: “knocking not on doors but on barricades, / loosening your heart from every no as from a noose.” Just as no is embedded in noose, so is the negative knot, knock, and loner in the occluded g in longer. (Similarly, a sonnet “Of wings” concludes with an “echo bird”: “But are not. Are not.”)

Thus, “flowers in war” ends with

flower

lower

over

ow

o

Similarly, “Song” anagrammatically rearranges notes and language:

Take the words

sign and sing:

shift letters

and there is music

Within her checkerboard she blackens words in “Erasures in early pandemic journal entries.”

“Labyrinth” indents stanzas and concludes with multiple parentheses to shape its subject. “In the poem, the Holocaust survivor / invokes a labyrinth as he attempts / to surface a language.” Each stanza begins with a parenthesis to bracket the maze after Auschwitz. She concludes

(I am not

talking about Polish or English,

rather about shadow, about loose

bits of frayed thread))))))))))

Breaking down barriers through language, these frayed sound waves reverberate through the labyrinth of Bonememory.

In a similar vein “Witnessing Names” ends with a faded “witnessing,” disappearing at the bottom of the page. “Aren’t some names heavier than others, leashed to histories / slit with anguish?” Veprinska’s soundscape oscillates between sibilance and hushed sh. Auschwitz. Hiroshima. Chernobyl. Katrina – “trauma-soaked syllables.” In Ukrainian, the word for name (‘eemya’) sounds like the Hebrew for mother (‘eemuh’). The poet words through a series of unnamings – unyokes, unmouthed, and “Ungravestoned energies deferred // until another world.” (This negative prefix appears in another poem, “Un-there.”) Name becomes an ancestral scar, for the poet has a birthmark on her ankle shaped like the letter I. She concludes with homonyms “Aye, a howled affirmation. // Eye, an iris and pupil.” But also a retina or net for witnessing howls of silence. (If you remove the b from “remember,” it becomes a palindrome that re-members itself.)

Veprinska’s wit and witness are on display in “Dickinson’s Dashes.” The four quatrains are finely balanced “In the bruised knee of circulation” at the beginning, and “braided hair” at the end. The poem is an empathetic braiding of twin poets and cultures. “Dickinson’s dashes are expunged --.” The first quatrain ends “Like this –” before tethering to the second, “I plait your knotted hair into braids.” Veprinska reverses her precursor through flashes of language’s double entendre: “tell you death comes for other people, not you, / darling, not you. Like this – / I dig you a narrative instead of a grave.” Love displaces death in its dash to the final quatrain:

The living, who play hide-and-seek with death,

are endlessly found – and the finding is foul

and necessary. With d – ashes, they dance – buzzing

and buzzing as they let down their braided hair.

Veprinska’s dashes and bonememory braid, knot, cleave to heal bruises and trauma.

Just as she writes through Dickinson, so she also alludes to Franz Kafka in “Meanwhile, trauma.” The first section of the poem describes departure from Ukraine in 1993 to flee anti-Semitism, lack of food and opportunity. “There are different closures: / wounds, borders, bodies – in front of Kafka’s gatekeeper / the pain of unwelcome proliferates.” With her culture “unheld,” she turns to the next trauma in the 2016 U.S. election, “unravelling // in the grief of others.” The third section addresses the pandemic in 2020. Bonememory is “metaphrastic” from memory to language – “the puppet strings of words.” Veprinska is a puppeteer of poetry and matryoshka marionettes, healing trauma through empathy and memory. In tune with her mandolin, these metaphrastic poems are the perfect accompaniment on the long voyage between Ukraine and Canada.

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About the Author

Anna Veprinska is the author of Empathy in Contemporary Poetry after Crisis. She was a finalist in the Ralph Gustafson Poetry Contest, has been shortlisted for the Austin Clarke Prize in Literary Excellence, and received an Honourable Mention from the Memory Studies Association First Book Award. She is an assistant professor in the Department of English at the University of Calgary.

About the Reviewer

Michael Greenstein is a retired professor of English (Université de Sherbrooke). He is the author of Third Solitudes: Tradition and Discontinuity in Jewish-Canadian Literature and has published widely on Victorian, Canadian, and American-Jewish literature.

Book Details

• Publisher ‏ : ‎ University of Calgary Press (April 15 2025)

• Language ‏ : ‎ English

• Hardcover ‏ : ‎ 96 pages

• ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 1773856103

• ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-1773856100