Animal Bodies: On Death, Desire, and Other Difficulties by Suzanne Roberts (review)

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• Animal Bodies: On Death, Desire, and Other Difficulties by Suzanne Roberts
• Jennifer Sinor

Suzanne Roberts, Animal Bodies: On Death, Desire, and Other Difficulties. Lincoln: U of Nebraska P, 2022. 236 pp. Paper, $19.95; e-book, $19.95.

The opening essay to Suzanne Roberts's latest collection, Animal Bodies, prepares the reader for the journey ahead. She begins, "The essay is transgressive." And while many modern essayists would immediately consider those acts of transgression as related to form alone—risking the notion of genre, refusing a narrative line—Roberts is pointing the reader toward something much more fundamental to the essay: its fierce dedication to the mind at work. And the mind, much like the body, is unruly. It does not abide. At its [End Page 273] best the essay, like the mind it follows, plunges into the dark spaces where the fearful refuse to go; once there, it asks questions that not only cannot be answered but are rarely even articulated. Roberts offers a series of transgressions in this collection, and those acts are most often related to her subject rather than to her form. Such a move is refreshing when so many writers seem to think that form itself is the only way to risk, the only way to complicate, the only way to invite the reader into the process. While not all of Roberts essays are linear, many of them are, and that makes the magic of her collection even more astounding because we find ourselves in the gaps of unknowing even though gaps might not exist on the page.

The book is tripart in structure, and the first section tackles grief directly—the loss of a parent, the loss of a partner, the loss of the innocent to gun violence, the loss of millions to genocide. Because Roberts is a travel writer, these essays take place throughout the world, but they are united in their effort to grapple with all that does not remain. Roberts writes, "I cannot access grief without metaphor, a way to measure the unmeasurable" (14). And given the themes Roberts explores in this collection—death, desire, and our animal bodies that house both—it makes sense that Roberts turns to metaphor as a way to carry what cannot be held. Metaphor allows her to work small, to find meaning in the mundane and the ordinary, even when standing on the shores of Normandy or in an open-air market in Vietnam. For Roberts, grief seems to be stored in the things of the world—the birds, the bark of an aspen, the eye shadow worn by a dead friend, "fished from the garbage" and drawn across the lid. Each essay offers a new set of metaphors, a new way to capture what so often has passed.

The second part of the book moves seamlessly from death to desire by placing the reader inside the animal body. She writes, "I think that death's proximity intensifies our desires" (88). Because it all can be lost so easily, we crave connection. Those connections arrive raw and unfiltered. Roberts is invested in the unruliness of desire, the way it returns us to our animal selves, keeps us in our skin. Sometimes desire has nothing to do with love or even sex; Roberts examines how women's bodies have been violated, traumatized, [End Page 274] and overwritten. This collection is not a love story. A key moment in Animal Bodies arrives halfway through in a brief essay entitled "What She Must Do," an essay where the narrator addresses a version of herself who stands at the coast throwing her pages into the sea. Roberts writes, "I want to tell her she must eat each white page, one by salty one, let the ink catch in the vault of her throat, fill the stomach's grave, crowd the tomb of her heart" (137). The work of the writer, the work of this writer, is to ingest the difficult, the messy, the sorrow-filled and then hold them in her animal body, wait for them to find new form in language.

The final section of Roberts's collection falls under the caption of "other difficulties," but...