Self and other. Identity and persona. Biology and destiny. The fear of annihilation and the ineffable allure of individuality. These are the themes of Amanda Chimera, the stunning new book of poems by the master wordsmith, Mary B. Moore.
In her sixth poetry publication, Moore explores the phenomenon of the “vanishing twin,” in which one embryonic twin does not survive in utero, its cells and part of its tissue absorbed by the other embryo during gestation; this accounts for two DNA profiles in the surviving twin. The potential psychological and existential ramifications of a “lost twinship” provide a wealth of material for Moore’s rich and incisive poetic explorations.
There are multiple portals through which the reader is invited to view the duo of Amanda, the surviving twin, and Gloria, the vanished twin. Consider, for example, the three meanings of chimera: one, a chromosomal anomaly in humans; two, a tailed beast with the head of a lion and the body of a goat; three, a hoped-for impossibility. Like a three-headed hydra, this tripartite definition finds its full expression in the marvelously rendered Amanda Chimera.
In the opening poem of the volume, “The Gone Twin, an Origin Myth,” the poet tells us: “Gloria’s no saint. / Amanda is her haunt.” Amanda is the “jangle girl,” (“Awake at six, hair gelled and spiked / by 6:05”) and Gloria, the “jilted girl,” having been denied an existence outside the womb: “She can wash you in feeling, which is all / she is now—having disavowed breath—and hovers at your edges, weightless as vows.” As to their own shared origin story, the two are as peas in a pod—but not really: “Amanda thought their ancestors came / from the steppes. Gloria thought Paris.”
There is much to admire here, for laced between the lilt and wit of the jitter and jangle are intimations of something darker: the ever-present threat of annihilation anxiety, the sense that the self is undergoing an ominous change: the risk of merger, of losing self-cohesion, of disintegration, being numbed, becoming “not-me”—for if one’s twin, one’s counterpart can vanish so readily, then what keeps the “me” here, in place, in one piece, cohering?
Even postmodern “monster theory”—in which notions of the monstrous can exist within us as aspects of both self and other, and can fuse with one another— finds its place in the collection, as in the title poem, addressed to Gloria: “They tell me you’d / have been winged or horned, / two-hearted, / one-eyed: a moon-calf.”
But neither is there an easy path to life in the physical world for Amanda, fully embodied, but bearing the weight of being the “shroud and skin” of her vanished twin, and subject to her own physical wounding. In fact, a red thread of trauma runs through the Amanda poems, as in “The Birds of Cutting”: “the little mouths / I cut on my arm, bleeding and being / bled, hurt me into feeling, / a festival of hurt. // Look at my red letters: / read me, tell me I am.”
If Amanda sings a litany of red, Gloria blooms Van Gogh-blue in Moore’s ekphrastic poem, “To the Miscarried Child”: “And you, dear jilted ghost // of almost, veined iris-blue / in the dark womb water, / still porous, a skein.” But even Gloria’s blue blossoms are subsumed by the vitality of her sister, “Tuesdays in Amanda”: “It’s Tuesday, bruiseday / when the blue patches / under Amanda’s skin / go public.”
And as the volume unfolds, we come to learn that Amanda must also bear witness to the father’s exhibitionism: “What was it for? / Did he show it on purpose? … // useless finger, pipe / without a song, // nothing I needed, / nothing at all.”
This is the work of a mature poet in full flight, with a penchant for internal rhyme, mythic references, and delicately turned phrases, all fueled by what poet Frank Paino rightly refers to as “blazing intellect.” But Moore is engaged in something much more alchemical than mere wordplay: call it soul-play: the creation and vivification of lives and half-lives upon canvases both rock-solid and vitreous, with bodies as translucent as sea glass, as solid—and as permeable—as human flesh.
This remarkable collection choreographs a delicate yet quite specific dance, one designed to fend off engulfment and fusion, to remain whole and intact. For Amanda and Gloria, it’s all about the imperative contained in the book’s closing poem, “The Atomic Girl”: “read me, rhyme me, / make me cohere.” With Amanda Chimera, Mary B. Moore has skillfully harrowed and harvested the deep, fertile abyss between mother and sister, self and other.
