Review by Leslie Hayertz
Number 1: The Seven Kitchens
Press ReBound Series, 2009
I first reviewed Notes from The Red Zone, Christina Pacosz’s gem of a chapbook from Seal Press, in the Fall 1983 issue of Calyx. Now, almost twenty-seven years later, I revisit these eight poems, pleased that they have found new life on fresh pages as the first chapbook in The Seven Kitchens Press ReBound Series.
In Notes from The Red Zone, Pacosz observes life near the Hanford Site, a 586-square-mile nuclear reservation adjacent to Richland, Washington. The fact that Hanford’s nine reactors have since been decommissioned does not, unfortunately, date the book. Fifty-three million gallons of high-level radioactive waste make Hanford the most contaminated site in the United States. A commercial nuclear power plant and several research centers continue to operate there.
Poet David Chorlton, in his forward to the new edition, speaks to the chapbook’s continuing political and ecological relevance. He also praises Pacosz’s work for the “breadth of her view” and her “universal compassion.” It is precisely these qualities that have kept the poems in my heart and the original book on my shelf all these years.
Notes from The Red Zone is more than a mere collection of poems. Its recurring images and themes, and its controlled, forward movement make for a journey.
The setting takes us far from Washington’s iconic rain forests and mountain peaks to a flat, semi-arid landscape dominated by the Columbia River.
In Poem 1 and 2, in few words and with strong images, Pacosz takes us firmly by the hand into that desert place. She gives us the terrain, sets the tone: “…Skunks forage beneath locust trees / buzzing and clattering / in a deadly wind,” as well as introduces the issue of contamination: “…plutonium / uranium isotopes / lapping at my feet…”
In Poem 3: “…where the mesas strain / to come together / and make the hard land whole again.” Pacosz expresses a longing for health and wholeness and the inevitable veering away from the heart’s desire. Then, moving away from the river, to job and town, she lets us see deeply into the lives of the people caught there. Poems 3 and 4 are about the fear you don’t speak of. The men have separated themselves from the land, poisoned and exploited it. The women are trapped. Poem 4:
These women walk, sit, gaze
at themselves in mirrors,
hunched shoulders shaping
fragile rafters, tentative roofs
over caged hearts.
But the women are also complicit, trying to make a life by denying the danger, by not speaking the truth. Poem 4: “…A mute chorus they lament / the nuclear horse on their doorstep…”
Poems 5 and 6 speak of a culture gone astray and its men adrift. Turning their backs on wholeness has created fragmentation and emptiness:
They toss beer bottles at the stars
and tell dirty jokes. They act out the jokes
on the bodies of the women, grab at a breast,
an ass try to fill the empty places
with some part
of some other.
Pacosz captures a place and people eerily well. She is as adept writing about human frailty as about the fragility of nature, and does both with pity and grace. In Poem 6, the poet describes a mallard duck mounting a female: “…She spreads her orange feet in the mud. / her breast, with its swift, small heart / rests on the earth…”
And then Poem 7 brings a whisper of hope, and 8 leads us away from the geographic
“Red Zone” in Eastern Washington and into ourselves with a cautionary and cautious meditation on the heart and the “other”: “…Given time, the heart / could contemplate the enormity, / purify the blood, the word…”
In the years to come, when I pick up Notes from the Red Zone, I’m sure it will speak with the same clarity as it has over the last 27 years.
Join the Her Circle 
This is exactly my feeling:
Pacosz’s work for the “breadth of her view” and her “universal compassion.” It is precisely these qualities that have kept the poems in my heart and the original book on my shelf all these years.
I ‘ve written a review on her work in Farsi and it is not eay for me to translate it into English. The poems by Christina , translated by me from English into Farsi have found real fans in my country.
Farideh Hassanzadeh-Mostafavi