Review of Landscape with Headless Mama by Jennifer Givhan

by brianna albers, reviews editor

We three generations of women & a cat, & outside / whips of bare black branches scattering moonlight, / sat down for dinner, & ate.

– Jennifer Givhan, “Unexpected Visit,” Landscape with Headless Mama

Landscape with Headless Mama is, truly, an emotional landscape. Its strength lies in its performance of mother-daughter relationships, and the tenderness – the brutal honesty – with which the author portrays motherhood. Givhan writes with a subtle magic, twining familial tension with the cultural fodder of the folktale. In the end, Landscape with Headless Mama is a tale full of whimsy and the poetics of language – and yet, at the same time, a tale that doesn’t shy away from the dark forests of the fairytale. Indeed, Landscape with Headless Mama is a beast, its jaws gaping wide.

For example, “Chicken-Hearted” engages with and expands upon an undercurrent of interpersonal violence: “She’d peck at me to sterilize / my body like the kitchen, the chicken, my own pink pregnant / belly ache. She’d have me scoop out my own heart / to make a point.” Later in the poem, the narrator addresses her own pregnancy, emphasizing her determination to keep the baby, despite – in spite of – her mother’s disapproval: “The trick was to keep apart from her long enough for my heart / to sterilize itself & keep that pink baby from cleansers or flu / or Mama’s broken chicken heart. The trick was to stay pregnant.” It is this tension, attuned to the presence of strife, that sets Givhan’s writing apart from its contemporaries. In all things, Givhan remains aware of the emotional space – the dimensions that stretch between people, and how those dimensions melt and give way to certain dynamics. We are moved by the visceral, and left in awe of such cruelty.

Givhan goes on to lure the magical – the essence of the folktale – into her writing. “Landscape with Headless Mama” functions as an entire world, in which the narrator views her mother through a dark but whimsical lens. The intersection of cultural storytelling and familial threads is strong, here; while the narrative exists outside of reality, the author still manages to engage with the mother-daughter relationship that is so central to Landscape with Headless Mama, using myth and magical realism:

“Brother & I reached for a hug, but Headless / Mama scared us, her ribcage backboned to / the kitchen chair. The school kids say she is Doublehead in the sapodilla tree: as penance / for her nightly sprees, father rubbed salt to keep / her. We think he’s cruel. We miss our mother / stitched. We miss the scar on her neck.”

Ultimately, it is the heart of Landscape with Headless Mama that proves memorable. With time, Givhan moves beyond the mother-daughter relationship to address motherhood itself – in all its guts and glories. In “Nine Months Pregnant,” the narrator discusses the simple, transcendent pleasures: “My son lies napping in his bed. / My daughter sidewinds my gut. / Dreaming, both. / But hopes. Fears. Loves. Aches like soft loaves of bread. Weight / of worlds & oceans & maternity & eternity / in my blood. & my blood. & my blood.” And yet, in “Insemination,” the narrator miscarries, and her joy curdles into something sinister: “Now, fractured & borderless / I cling to hope that a pair of latex gloves & catheter / will raise from the dead what nature buried in the blood-soaked vines of our sheets.” In “Cleaving,” the narrator’s mother makes her bloody return, swathed in regret: “Mama says she wishes she’d never married dad, / never had his children, who inherited his depression. / She’s tired of being around sadness. Melancholia— / a beautiful flower in another family tree. / She’d wish me away for a happier heart.” The contrast leaves the reader in a peculiar state of drifting, without tether. How can motherhood possess such a grandness – a surfeit – of experience? Is it even possible?

In “Miscarriage Interpreted Through Animal Science,” the narrator puts forth a simple question: In the face of pain, how do we carry on? Is it worth it to carry on, or is there something to be said for surrender?

A beat of silence. Then, softly, an answer – not the correct answer, or even an objective answer, but an answer that is truthful: “Never. Never would I undo the knots.”

Landscape with Headless Mama is, at its core, a testament to mothers. To the labyrinths of their pain – the hulking beasts that lie in wait – but also to the mountaintops, and their dizzying heights. Indeed, Landscape with Headless Mama is for Mama. As Givhan writes in “Nocturne,” “For Mama, / who couldn’t keep us from aching, no—who gave us song / &, oh, she gave us song as gesture for the pain.”

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