Rounds

While not being a conventionally complete crown of sonnets, “Rounds” carries more than just the echo of the corona form, even as the poem itself eschews traditional meter and rhyme. It’s the perfect title for a sequence that explores, among other things, guns, family, violence, self-protection, art-making, cultural identity, and the mythological pull of the American West. Guns are, weirdly, at the heart of all these stories, as guns promise to do everything from protect our families to identify us as Americans. The gun is a weapon of self-protection and military might, global colonial expansion and Manifest Destiny. But the westward pull that Blankenhorn’s narrator feels here isn’t just to the violence of the American West but further still, across the Pacific to the Philippines where the speaker’s mother’s ashes are buried and “sometimes people look like [her].” But whether in the US or abroad, violence haunts every environment in this poem, much as the death of the speaker’s father and the loss of a clearly articulated connection to a Filipina identity haunt the speaker. In many ways, the poem’s strength is in what it withholds: the threat of violence makes pain—even the psychological pain of loneliness—more palpable to me than any explicit material. There is violence, too, inherent to the poem’s thematic repetitions, which suggest an intergenerational and even transcultural melancholy that the narrator shares with her family members and no one escapes. Even too much desire can be damaging, as the narrator admits, wanting to be like her older godsister, Sarah, “with a kind of violence.” In this sequence violence is attractive, even erotic, and it creates its own circular logic, as demonstrated by the form, in which the final strophe ends the way the poem began, with the repeated line “Not that I ever saw him shoot a single shot.” The self-referentiality of the sequence’s form reminds me that art, too, is self-conscious patterning, and perhaps the most surprising nod to violence in “Rounds” occurs in the speaker’s art-making practices themselves. In one strophe, she scrapes flesh from cow bones (an echo of the cow skull in Sarah’s home, perhaps?) to make art, while in another she mentions that her family is marked by “creative tendencies,” even as they are also “scrappy and military.” In that, art is no different to warcraft, proving the father’s adage in the first strophe right. “Anything can be a weapon,” he lectures the speaker, and indeed this poem proves how our most mundane acts and dreams can be menacing. Do we come to violence naturally, or are we so culturally steeped in violence that it becomes inescapable to our sense of self? In this deceptively plainspoken poem, Blankenhorn raises these and other complex questions of fear and identity while, wisely, leaving enough space for the reader to answer for herself.

—Paisley Rekdal