Review: Rhienna Renée Guedry
On Root Rot by Rhienna Renée Guedry
by Tyler Truman Julian
Rhienna Renée Guedry’s debut chapbook, Root Rot, holds no punches. Embracing the condensed nature of the chapbook medium, Guedry skillfully explores themes of family and heartbreak, embraces a strong sense of place, and effectively navigates various poetic forms. Guedry traverses great distance in these poems—moving physically from Louisiana to Oregon and artistically from narrative to experimental forms to highlight different emotional moments in the chapbook’s throughline: the speaker’s pursuit of a lost “you.” As a result, Root Rot is a master class in the chapbook.
The opening prose poem, “Mt. Tabor,” sets the tone of the chapbook, referencing the volcanic peak in Oregon, and evokes its Old Testament namesake as Guedry’s speaker spends the poem seeking an unnamed “you.” “You were a combustible thing,” the speaker declares as she ascends the mountain, connecting both the mountain and the unnamed, lost subject in this moment. “I came in pursuit of fire. Induction to extinction—” This use of nature to describe the state of human affairs continues throughout the chapbook and helps the reader understand the personal emotions and memories explored in each poem. The effective movement between descriptions of nature and reflection on the speaker’s relationship to the invoked subject in “Mt. Tabor” allows the reader to later fill this void with various characters who appear in the chapbook: an absent mother, an aging friend, another friend who has already passed on, and even the speaker’s beloved. Immediately following the speaker’s claim that she came to the volcano to experience its power, she explains, “that described you, too…You lived for the heat, the ejecta; I am trying to, in your name.” For such a slender volume, the stakes are high from the project’s opening poem on.
The narrative takes the reader to the Louisiana swamp, employing experimental structures to depict the speaker’s childhood and the changing landscape:
like swamps, storms will come and go
everything this humid defies static categories: weather,
permaculture,
land as uncertain as floodwaters inside a house where
water ain’t supposed to be, a wild solstice thing
you know better than to sink your ankles in
when you’ve had too many whiskeys
the swamp is a shapeshifter from sci-fi:
they are the shoreline not the tide,
they are putting roots down,
they are licking oyster beds
because it’s that season
kneel down on what is land
today but tomorrow may be water (“The Swamp Is a Third-Gender Thing”)
The nature of the swamp, reflected in the changing structure of the poem itself, mirrors what becomes the upbringing of our speaker where she
moved on, and then on again
five times in five years to another swamp,
another state—though never home to me,
just another wet place—another damp suburb
where I learned to spell rhododendron
and chrysanthemum not because I knew
their blooms, but because we moved
onto streets named after them, streets
where flowers used to grow (“The Name of Streets”)
Outrunning floods and hurricanes put strain on the speaker’s family, and mildew begins to grow between their relationships, just as it does in their home. “You can’t forget the smell,” the speaker reports in “Mildew,” another experimental poem, highlighting this initial fragmenting in the family. She continues,
it’s a texture, the raised level on a Styrofoam cup
condensation white pepper it changes
with your fingerprints,
it reminds us that there is water under us all
The use of the narrative mode to relay information and the experimental mode to emphasize moments of increased emotion or complicated ideas that the reader needs to pay attention to, along with the continued use of nature to highlight the speaker’s relationship to those around her, builds narrative tension from poem to poem. This ultimately creates a more cohesive and fuller picture of the speaker and Guedry’s themes.
Ultimately, the rotting landscape and the outward gaze of the poems turn inward. Using the language of nature in “Entanglement,” Guedry’s speaker describes “the rot of me”:
My doctor called them cobwebs
She watched
as a surgeon wrestled loose
the parts of me he was tasked
to remove from the adhesions
none of us expected to be there;
detritus, seaweed tangles, my pelvis
a shipwreck whose rusted bulkheads
gave way to spoils and deep sea gardens
Now, the reader understands even more clearly how all these pieces fit together. Humanity is a part of nature, not an entity capable of controlling it. The family is a microcosm of nature, and children can’t control what happens in the family unit. The human body is an even smaller microcosm of nature, and it is equally as unpredictable. In “Disaster Planning,” the speaker tells the reader she moved, finally, to Oregon “because I was tired of the floods and hurricanes and I didn’t pick California because they have their own problems.” However, what follows this throwaway explanation is the more significant, more poignant engagement of Guedry’s speaker with the chapbook’s themes. Exploring fear and safety, she says, “Some demons you can plan for better than others, so we stick to natural-disaster planning.” Human relationships and human health are less predictable, less manageable than natural disasters.
Nevertheless, Guedry’s speaker comes full circle, returning to the ideas that appeared in the chapbook’s first poem. She chooses to draw power from destruction. In “Compartments,” she explores this dynamic, saying,
You know what they say
about other people’s trash
When they rummaged me
and found delights
A grapefruit appendix
little stones like boba
copper
I get the appeal; I’m part scavenger
searching for gems with skillful fingers
—rot never troubled me
This light sarcasm grows into a guarded freedom that she explains in “Departures,” the chapbook’s last poem, as
I think I’d like to do some leaving, too
Except I am locksmith and proprietrix, my metal
To stay put. Bolted seams of worn lock
And warped key, this mess of loving
Shadows in lieu of farewells
—the lesson I am teaching
myself before the next time:
when to lock up, when to hand
over the tangle, and when
to swallow the keys
The chapbook returns to the beginning here. The speaker is attempting to establish her own boundaries and decide who to live for, even amid the unpredictability of life.
Across 35 short pages, Guedry shows her strength as a poet and storyteller by crafting a chapbook that showcases the beauty and power of the medium. Root Rot’s condensed yet expansive nature captures the human condition, juxtaposing it with the natural world, making it a compelling read for both newcomers to the medium and seasoned enthusiasts alike.