Filthy Labors
Lauren Marie Schmidt
Curbstone Books, 2017
Lauren Marie Schmidt’s newest collection of poetry, Filthy Labors, roars with boundless defiant empathy on every page. For Schmidt, poetry is earned communion, restorative utterance, the expression of a belief in a secular, music-bound, Eucharistic reality underwriting daily life, an affirmation of the fact that our mutual individual brokenness, made manifest in the word, is what constitutes true communion. The poems in Filthy Labors draw their inspiration from Schmidt’s work as a poetry instructor at The Haven House for Homeless Women and Children; Schmidt also draws on her personal family history, exploring the difficult affections and the dense connective tissues that bind generations together, and often tear us apart inside. Schmidt arranges the poems in Filthy Labors around six of the seven Catholic sacraments: Baptism, Penance, Communion, Confirmation, Anointing of the Sick, and Holy Orders; she leaves out Marriage, an omission that felicitously underscores the collection’s commitment to gender equity and female agency in the face of a rabidly misogynistic culture. Each poem in this collection works as an outward sign of an inward grace (the grace is love, emblazoned with the hard-fought duende of Schmidt’s tremendous heart). Filthy Labors posits a sacramental view of the world, unmoored from the false trappings and mystifications of organized religion. Schmidt’s only prophet and priest is Whitman, with his call and response: “Why should I wish to see God better than this day?/ I see something of God each hour of the twenty-four, and each moment then,/ In the faces of men and women I see God, and in my own face in the glass.”
Filthy Labors sees clearly the face of a young father running for miles after his daughter’s errant kite, the neck of a homeless mother with “Justice” tattooed on it, the face of a man changing his elderly father’s soiled underwear, a woman named Milagros breathing Spanish in her daughter’s ear, the faces of mothers blooming on the eternal verge of struggle, pain, fear, defiance, rebirth. Schmidt evokes the wounds and truths of the many worlds she has passed through. She deftly moves between forms and registers, exploring the limits of the ghazal and the pantoum, unafraid to shift from the vernacular to the vatic. Schmidt also bravely explores her own privilege and blindness, as she poignantly does in “The English Teacher Gets a Lesson in Inference,”
You got any kids? Dionna asks.
No, I say, I don’t have any kids.
You ever been pregnant?
I don’t have any kids, so…
That ain’t the question
that I asked you, she says.
Then she folds her arms across her chest
and waits for me to answer.
Schmidt’s poetry, here and everywhere else in this collection, calls us into radical sympathy with others, grounded in the conviction that poetry might shine and quench and slip its tongue between our lips and pray. Filthy Labors is the product of far more than mere astute observation fused to talent and training. Lauren Marie Schmidt’s work never wavers in its commitment to the connections that occur off the page, in the air around a dinner table, in the common room of The Haven House, in all havens and the unsafe spaces between.
Dante Di Stefano is the author of Love is a Stone Endlessly in Flight (Brighthorse Books, 2016). His poetry, essays, and reviews have appeared in Brilliant Corners, The Los Angeles Review, Shenandoah, Prairie Schooner, and elsewhere. He is a poetry editor for DIALOGIST and the poetry book review editor for Arcadia.
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