Weapons Grade by Terese Svoboda

The University of Arkansas Press, Fayetteville, 2009
Review by Georgia Ann Banks-Martin

Weapons! Everywhere!

In her latest book of poems Weapons Grade, Terese Svoboda takes on issues of war, politics, and everyday life. These are themes common to poetry, but Svoboda’s work asks the reader to consider events both as wholes and within context, and as events that we thought no longer were possible within our current moral context.

The first section of Weapons Grade comprises poems speaking to the impacts of war. The first selection, “Picnic Portents,” captures our attention by placing us in a park for a picnic. A young mother ties balloons, unaware the area is infested with spiders; she wears herself out hollering directions for those who are helping her decorate the park, unaware that her husband:

While parachuting down,
he pinned on stripes and medals—a corporal’s—
so they would treat him better.

These moments are rarely offered in a context such as this, yet they occur in every moment of our lives. This poem also reminds us of our constant risk to misdirection, and the threat of pre-packaged, incomplete, half-truths relentlessly distributed by twenty-four hour news engines. Throughout Weapons Grade, Svoboda repeatedly challenges that notion. In one instance by way of a young mother, who finds a way to care for her child in the absence of his father away at war. In Svoboda’s version, her experience will be left out of the final story.

In “Code Name: 731,” Svoboda speaks to the live human dissections performed by the Japanese Imperial Army’s Unit 731 during World War II, their aim being to see how chemical weapons affected the tissue of potential targets: live humans.

To be sure, this isn’t the first time the world has heard such stories, as we are all familiar with German persecution of homosexuals, Jehovah’s Witnesses, and Jews held in camps such as Sachsenhuusen, Dachau, Natzweiler, Buchenwald, and Neuengamme. Here similar experiments were carried out to see how potassium cyanide and arsenic affect the body. Some were exposed to deadly diseases like typhus and tuberculosis; many died or were disabled. But we find ways to absorb such stories and lull ourselves into believing that now that the details are known, we will never hear of them occurring again.

Svoboda’s work shows us that such hopeful thinking is misguided. In the 90s, this type of medical experimentation occurred again. This time civilians in Japan were infused with AIDS-tainted blood. The poems in this first section are dark. They make us nervous, but not without good reason.

Section II concerns marriage. These poems focus more upon intimacy and the search for balance. In “Susurrus of Sheets Goodbye,” the husband finds his wife’s body attractive, though she does not look like a model:

he leans across his arm, peeks
at her nose-crotch bed-height
her breasts doubling over.

In “Bicoastal,” a wife left at home with her young child struggles to understand and make sense of her husband’s absence from their lives while he works away from home. To the narrator, the time he will be away equals:

a month of cold phones, only food
children eat, not a marriage.

Section III recalls some of the themes from section I, but this time the fear and hate happens within our own homes. One woman is beaten by her spouse, yet cannot move beyond her love for him. The narrator justifies her abuse by conflating her wounded body with the vegetables that, as a “good wife,” she would have chopped and made into a proper dinner served in a white Pyrex bowl.

Section VI brings the book to its end, where we find the central point of the book in the closing lines of “Cycles”:

But Death says
we must, both of us,

and the road
we followed, the road
the car left,

will disappear.

This is powerful imagery, reminding us that no matter what we survive–be it war or personal struggles–all paths converge on a road where death will eventually overcome us. Weapons Grade is a challenging read, but well worth the extra time and thought.

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