Saints and Cannibals by Christine Hamm

Plainview Press, 2010

Reviewed by Georgia Ann Banks-Martin

She Did What?

Many books have been written and praised for their complex depictions of women. However, few writers are able to present readers with characters who seem as realistic and multifaceted as Christine Hamm does in her new book of poems, Saints and Cannibals.

In the first poem, Up from the Root Cellar, we are introduced to Ruby, whose mother, ravaged by intense labor pains, yells to her from the furrow in which she has fallen. While many daughters would run to their mother’s aid without hesitation, Ruby does not, her resentment at being forced to care for her mother’s other children palpable. For a moment, Ruby watches “the younger children shriek like crows, stuff dirty fingers in their mouths, clatter into the house.” The youngest child, Rachel, stays behind trying to get her mother to come into the house. This powerful poem comes to a close when Ruby “… remembers the elephant she touched once at a carnival, big as the sky, wrinkled as a map, dark eye fixed ahead.” In the end, Ruby does go to her mother, but only out of a sense of duty or expectation rather than genuine concern for her mother’s condition.

After Ruby we shift our attention to Enid, whom Hamm introduces in a poem titled Caldwell, Idaho, 1941. Enid, the daughter of a farmer, “hates it when the cats give birth in the hay; the afterbirth molders the straw, the cows won’t eat it/too many cats anyway.” We might be able to dismiss this statement as a throw-away statement made out of anger had we not learned in the first stanza that Enid’s shoes are held by strings. In the next poem, Enid Has a Visitor, we are again reminded of Ruby as Enid lies in a corn field bleeding and suffering from harsh cramps. We next meet Enid in a poem titled Fertility Rites For a Daughter. Enid’s desire to have a little girl is so strong that she tries sleeping with bottle caps and barrettes beneath her mattress. Her story continues:

She has opened the cupboard door and taken out the salt
Strewn it into stars on the floor
So a daughter will sit and stay, fascinated
By the constellations stuck to her soles

While this poem is humorous, it underscores the notion that there are “too many cats anyway.” Considered together, these few poems present us with a fresh look at the unique problems affecting women that resonate throughout the first half of collection, including the fight for control over the female body. Through these depictions we learn that this issue is not limited to concerns surrounding rape and male domination. Ruby wants her mother to stop having so many children, and Enid is raised by a family so poor they can’t buy shoes; yet, when Enid can’t have children, instead of relief that the same fate will not be suffered by her child, she is driven to desperate actions to increase her chances of giving birth.

There are moments when the women of Saints and Cannibals are independent and courageous, but the choice to be so is costly. In The Weight of the World, we meet Claire, whose mother would do anything to keep Claire thin. She is happy with the doctor’s declaration that Claire is underweight, because this means that “the chocolate laxative,/the prune juice,/bananas, the enema bulb like a clown’s nose,/the suppositories/that glisten like worms, have worked.” Claire fights back, getting up before her mother each morning to eat cereal and milk, some of which she saves for later snacking. In Memoir of an Unrepentant Thief, the narrator is the daughter of a woman who spends her time reading romance novels instead of caring for her child. The poems opens as follows:

“If you were to shake my tiny sticky hand
You’d see a thin girl
With a rainbow-striped dress she’s outgrown
yellowish hair matted to one side of her head”

The narrator goes on to describe how she confronts the matter by breaking into the neighbor’s house, eating what she finds in the kitchen, and watching “…Sesame Street / until someone comes home.…”

Near the end, Hansel and Gretel appear in How the Witch Got Started. Once again, the setting is one in which there is too little food and too many children. The mother begins to kill the children and eat them; “afterwards she knew/ her daughter was safe.” By the poem’s end, only two children have survived, and they run away. Over the next few pages, we watch Gretel grow too tired and too thin to keep going, but she survives; in fact, Hansel, Gretel, and their mother live, and the mother even gets so fat by the time we reach the poem The Next Season that “she has splintered a chair/ just by sitting.” She spends her time giving food to the poor, never speaking of what she has done to her children.

In the end, Saints and Cannibals resonates with its readers because of Hamm’s skillful depiction of feminine characters capable of both good and evil. The poems in this book are memorable because, even if inspired by fairy tales, the women and their situations exist in the world. In reality, there are no fairy godmothers or evil step mothers, just human women.

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