Blood Work by Matthew Siegel (University of Wisconsin Press, 2015)

Matthew Siegel’s debut (and winner of the 2015 Felix Pollack Prize in Poetry), Blood Work, is a collection of raw, personal and beautiful poems. Siegel writes clear and sparingly about illness, love, home, and the way a person begins to adapt as they learn who they are after being diagnosed with a chronic disease.

The book includes candid poems about the pain and unpredictability that is Crohn’s disease. My mother has Crohn’s, a disease she has described as random and restrictive. In fact, it was that personal connection that drew me to this book. I understand the mechanics and symptoms of the disease, but I can never entirely understand her experience. I was curious to see the disease through a poet’s lens. Indeed, Siegel’s poems are at their best when he’s able to adeptly crystallize the sensation of physical pain into words. The poem “In the Bathroom” is an extraordinary example of poetry about such a delicate and personal illness:

My hands grip my knees.
I’ll wash them and wash them

I lean into my body like a needle,
like a losing argument.

I cannot look at my living blood
in this tiny world where I am

more alone than being born,
more alone than dying.

Perhaps it was Siegel’s intention, or perhaps it is my personal connection to the disease, but many of these poems left me feeling like somewhat of a voyeur. It was a subtle sense; however, and a testament to how wonderfully written these poems are.

A difficult skill to master is the fusion of humor with tragedy, but Siegel nails it in an adept and surprising way. Perhaps my favorite poem in the book was “Matthew You’re Leaving Again So Soon.” The poem is essentially a list of items that the speaker’s mother wants him to take as he is leaving her home. The poem is perfectly comic in a way that moved me to (not at all comic) tears:

please take these pens I have all these pens
for you all with caps on them

…

take this umbrella this sweater these socks
they’re ankle length like you like them

and soup take this soup I froze four batches
in Tupperware four batches of broth and chicken

…

they will keep you healthy my son
my liver take my liver to help clean your blood
I’ll fly to you I’ll come to you tomorrow

you used to cling to my ankle and I would
drag you across the floor please
pack me in your suitcase take me with you

The “blood” in the book’s title seems to refer to family as much as it refers to actual blood or illness, as the theme resurfaces frequently. The obviously beloved mother figure is grieving a failing/failed marriage, and her grief, carried through the book, is heartbreaking and palpable. While the poems about Crohn’s are beautiful, they don’t always feel as deeply emotional as the poems about family. In particular, the poems about the mother feel less refined and more raw, and they are beautiful. In “The Girl Downstairs is Crying,” Siegel writes,

The girl downstairs is crying and no
this is not about my mother, not at all
…
The girl downstairs is crying
and I hear the echo of my mother’s small room
miles away in New York, remember
how I heard her through my thickest sheets
…
Tonight I listen from my bed,
as if the girl’s cries are a radio show in a language
I understand but cannot speak. Though
I fall asleep to the sound of a stranger’s sobbing
I’m home.

Perhaps the core issue in this book is the speaker’s changing and nebulous relationship with his concept of home. In many ways, our bodies are our first homes. Crohn’s is considered an autoimmune disorder in which the body essentially attacks healthy cells in its own digestive system. If we are to consider our bodies as our original and most important home, what does it do to our sense of self when this home begins to inexplicably and randomly fail?

Containment as a concept runs congruent with the concept of home in many of these poems. This sense of seeking an understanding of home seems to be intertwined with the sense of needing to be contained. As the speaker’s sense of self has been altered by a diagnosis with Crohn’s, so has his sense of place in the physical word. When your own body stops containing you, how can you rely on other people, places, or buildings to do so? In the poem titled “Blood Work,” he writes:

She lets me play with my filled tubes. Can you feel
how warm they are? That’s how warm you are inside

and I nod, think about condoms, tissues,
all the things that contain us but cannot.

The concept of containment is visited again in the poem, “[Sometimes I Don’t Know if I’m Having a Feeling]”:

Everything is different sometimes.
Sometimes there is no hand on my shoulder —
but my room, my apartment, my body are containers
and I am thusly contained. How easy to forget
the obvious. The walls, blankets, sunlight, your love.

The closing poem in the book, titled “Rain,” reads:

I am always halfway

to becoming ok with this.
But I can eat sweet dates,

steer a car with one knee.
I can look out my window and see grass

glowing green in rain and streetlight —
so many bright beads of water.

Despite the heavy subject matter — the emotion, pain, and restlessness — that the book wrestles with, this closing poem is indicative of the sense of hope and love that also permeates this phenomenal debut. I look forward to reading further collections by Siegel.

Have you ever chosen a book because you had a personal connection with the subject matter? How did your personal experience color the way you felt about the book?