In Paran by Larissa Shmailo

BlazeVox, 2009

Review by Georgia Banks-Martin

I live in Paran

Larissa’s Shmailo’s collection of poems, In Paran is a mix of vibrant and audacious selections narrated by people that we might say are just a little odd due to their unabashed frankness. Yet, there is something about the people we meet in In Paran that leaves us unable to dismiss them.

In the first poem from the collection, Personal, the speaker seems to simply appear before us, forcefully declaring:

I want to know
what makes you
tick.

I want to know
what makes you
fickle; I want to know
what makes you stick.

However, it is not the speaker that makes us feel uncomfortable: It is the fact that the reader is being made to search for that which is almost unanswerable. Most people never seriously consider why they stay in one place or with one person, and if asked they normally offer the questioner a stock answer such as “I like it here”, or “I love him.” These answers will not work for this narrator, because the questions that he poses are fundamental to who we are:

which ion propels you
which soothsayer spells you
which folksinger trills you
which hardwood distills you
which downward dog twists you
which protest resists you
which neural net fires you
which siren desires you

These are the questions for which we fear we have no answers. The poem ends with:

what
makes
me

forget the right answers
consult necromancers
allow the forbidden
ignore the guilt ridden
unlearn all the learning
embrace this new burning

to know
what
makes you
tick.

And we realize that our failure to answer these questions, our failure to know ourselves completely, means that the narrator is losing the chance to learn something about himself as well. In this way the poem establishes a theme that reoccurs in the collection, the idea that we are always involved in a relationship with someone else, and that we all share in the pain that is encountered in our lives together.

At the top of My Lungs is a poem about a mother who feels unloved by her children:

At the top of my lungs I scream at you all,
Babies, I am your mother!
Love me! Let me in!
Excited by my love, I shriek and bang at your door:
I love you, let me in!

What?
You don’t want to?
Then I will slash my wrists,
And from my wrists will come ants and tired shopkeepers,
All the things you ever imagined or dreamed,
Bits of glass and fear
Will pour from these important veins:
You’ll see how much I love you then.

What is most striking in these lines is the admission that without love life isn’t worth living. This thought is further developed in stanza three, where the narrator notes more things she would do for children:

Like a scorpion I would carry you on my back,
My stinger poised, ready to kill;
Oh, how my babies would love me then!

Babies, I would bite off my hands for you,
Like an albatross or a whale, I would swallow you whole
And keep you safe in my stromach;
I love you that much;
Surely that’s worth something.

This is the real problem; the speaker doesn’t feel that all the work, and the protection, the declarations that she loves her children are worth anything to her family. Again, it is pointed out that our lives are shared and that we owe a debt to one another. This concept isn’t new, yet it feels new when we read In Paran because rarely are we confronted with honest demands for payment. If given the chance, In Paran is a book that that will inspire positive changes in the way the reader conducts relationships and lives life.

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