Heaven Cake

Kim Fahner is the author of You Must Imagine the Cold Here.

Linda Rogers’s latest collection of poems speaks with a number of
voices. Human relationships are woven together in a glorious spider web
of poetry. Family too, and especially the links between women—from
grandmothers to mothers to granddaughters—plays an important role in
this book. In “You Hear Them,” Rogers writes of “girls ascending
ropes,” “our children and grandchildren ... slowly climbing our
hair.” In a Rapunzelesque reversal, the daughters of mothers reach out
for their ancestry, struggle against the nonsensical societal
expectations imposed by gender alone, and define themselves in these
poems.

The struggle is a hard one. All does not always end as it should in
fairy-tales, but Rogers offers an alternative. While critical of the
need to struggle, she fashions pieces that speak of strength. The values
passed down from grandmother to granddaughter in “Reading the
Leaves” are good ones, even though a physical separation caused by
death means the end of one kind of relationship. There is a teaching in
the final stanza, as the poet writes: “Now the game is over. / The
grandmother has read the leaves, / told the child everything she
knows.” Individuals may die, but there is no erasure of the family
narrative that is lovingly passed down through the matrilineal
bloodline.

Love too is passed down to children and grandchildren. In “Tumbling
the Stones,” Rogers writes of the love that grandparents share. The
grandfather, as a younger man, once brought stones home to his wife,
tumbling them until they were “round and smooth,” so that “like
her, like him, so many/nights in the same bed / until they fit, /
perfect stones in their setting.” Rogers depicts love in an almost
geological, evolutionary manner.

The perspective of a child, unlike the fairy-tale colorings that are a
staple of popular culture, can be brutally honest. In this book, Rogers
uses old stereotypes and fairy-tale formats to transform the myth,
rending the veil of what is expected and revealing the reality of human
relationships. The poems in Heaven Cake refuse to bend to anything other
than the sheer force of imagination.