Reviewed: Thresholes, Lara Mimosa Montes, Coffee House Press
‘And, inside the curves, also love.’
—Lara Mimosa Montes, Thresholes
‘But what is grief, if not love persevering?’
—The Vision, WandaVision
I know I wasn’t the only person to cry when the second quote above was spoken on the Marvel television show WandaVision. In the scene, another character, Wanda, is watching a sitcom after the death of her brother, Pietro. The Vision is sitting beside Wanda attempting to console her. He implies that by allowing herself to grieve, she is keeping the memory of her brother alive. By reframing grieving as an act of love, Wanda is allowing for the process of healing to enter her life. The show positions grief as a journey that is neither good nor bad—it just is. It is how a person acts on that grief that determines how their journey will unfold.
Creating and consuming art are crucial in healing from trauma. This became increasingly apparent to me when the world went into lockdown due to the coronavirus pandemic in March 2020, enacting physical barriers and shifting social interactions to digital platforms, where communication can be limited and fraught with technical issues. It seeded simple yet gratifying gestures such as hugs and handholds as matters of public safety. During this time, I sought solace in art, which provided a space where I could enter a curated world and face my anxieties in a regulated manner. Lara Mimosa Montes’ book of poems, Thresholes, and indeed, WandaVision, allowed me to unlock these creative spaces. While their storylines are in no way the same, they share a common theme, exploring the different ways a person may act on grief.
Together they acted as metaphorical yet real-world mirrors where I too could see how others might navigate or interpret their own journeys of grief and healing. In WandaVision, Wanda buries her head in the sand and only accepts her grief when confronted with the consequences of her actions. In Thresholes, the narrator regularly questions if they have experienced trauma and simultaneously denies any signs of trauma they display. It is only through the continuous prompts from an acupuncturist and by their own ruminations that they are able slowly to confront their traumatic past:
We met a few weeks later in an exam room at a clinic I sometimes visited. ‘Have you ever experienced trauma?’ she asked. It was such a direct question, I had to recalibrate.
Maybe I had not taken enough B12, maybe I had overzealously taken too much, and what I was experiencing was not some deep metaphysical change, but actually nerve damage.
Thresholes is marketed as a book of poetry. But as with all poetry, it is often what’s not written that is just as vital as what is. From the beginning of the text, Montes writes about the grief that lingers through unresolved trauma: the death of a loved one, sexual assault, and the socioeconomic and sociocultural ramifications of living in a large city—including the decline in public health, gentrification and the connection between class and crime.
Throughout the book Montes shows how living through that grief enables a growing sense of healing. This unpeeling of grief, and the healing journey, often begin simultaneously, but Montes crafts her poems by combining these processes throughout the text. A significant way she does this is through punctuation, but they are not employed in the conventional sense. Instead, Montes develops her own punctuation through the titular ‘thresholes’, designated by the o symbol. A threshold is a passage from one thing to another; the cusp of a new beginning. One may carry their spouse over a physical threshold to signify their new married life. One might stand at a metaphorical threshold as they cross into a new phase of life. In Thresholes, the reader crosses into each new space via a series of literal holes:
o
I had seen so much violence, and yet I lived
o
To speak of the fracture that structures the telling
o
To exhume the past; to bury the present
o
This o becomes a break between passages, a breath between thoughts. Montes keeps the reader at these thresholes, creating an effect where they are prompted to reflect on what they have just read, and process what they have absorbed. Sometimes she prolongs the silence, making the reader pass through several thresholds to reach the next passage:
o
o
o
Inside me lead, arsenic ion floating
o
Rigorous grammatical investigations
o
I lick the brine that clouds my looking
o
o
o
Trampled, it forces you to find itself
o
Around the abattoir near the absence
o
These longer stretches between lines slow down the reading process, with the concurrent exit/entrance of ‘Trampled, it forces …’ acting more like a door slamming in your face than a warm welcome. By passing through each threshole, I am able to bear witness to the narrator’s grief.
o
If this leads me nowhere, close
to the nothing, where shall I go
o
o
o
o
As I read, I felt myself going through the healing journey undergone by the narrator, as if I—and they—weren’t experiencing this world alone. This is where grieving and healing in the book intersect.
o
From the inside the serrated edge scribbled
the words you
must, you can, inconsequentially, again
o
o
o
But Thresholes is not merely a poetry collection. This is why I am determined to use the term ‘narrator’ in this review, rather than naming Montes herself. Naming Montes as the narrator would also imply that the book is a memoir. Instead, it is a hybrid of sorts: where the affectiveness of memoir is not enough, the narrator takes an analytical approach and frames the narrative through art criticism; where prose is not enough, the narrator uses poetry.
And where there is poetry, there is a sense of stalling. Within the prose, however, there is more motion, giving context to the grief so that when poetry comes into play, meaning and healing flow more easily:
I conclude that the nature of our friendship is such that were I ever to inquire about these events, the confrontation of their having happened would never be as interesting as the person I may or may not know as A.
o
o
o
The open suitcase—is it a coffin or a boat?
o
A presence you cannot disclose erodes
o
The violent movement, a turning upwards
Interestingly, institutions one might enter to become physically healed are often the settings in the book’s memoiristic passage—
a hospital, a clinic. The world-building here is slow to navigate; they are portrayed as generic settings but their location is never stated. The narrative bounces between two locations: the Bronx, New York, where Montes was born, and Minneapolis, Minnesota, where she now lives. This dislocation is addressed when Montes writes:
Sometimes living in two places at once (Minnesota and New York) caused me to feel as though I did not live anywhere because no one ever knew where I was.
Here, there. Minneapolis, the Bronx. Inside my thought is always a second thought, an afterwards to where I originally was.
Here, the dissociation of the ‘I’ is reminiscent of how those who experience trauma can feel disconnected from their surroundings, their own thoughts and feelings, even their own memories. What this does to the text is remove the memoir-like passages from Montes herself and into the domain of the narrator.
The criticism sections are where the narrator denotes location more explicitly, which adds depth and further context to the surrounding poetry. It is often linked to the Bronx, suggesting the grief the narrator experiences is based there and that they are using the history and art of that area as ways to articulate their experiences. As someone who has never been to the Bronx and knows little about it, I felt transported. I was able to understand that it’s a place fraught with socioeconomic and sociocultural parameters of place: a place filled with art and a deep understanding of humanity, a place politically charged but that may lack resources, a place that values action over pretty words.
Thresholes further alludes to New York being a place where grief sprouts. In one section discussing a 1998 epistemological study titled ‘A plague on your houses: How New York was burned down and national public health crumbled’, Montes writes: ‘… Deborah and Rodrick Wallace chronicle the various ways parts of the Bronx and Brooklyn were systemically ravaged as a result of disastrous policies initiated as far back as the 1960s’.
By looking at the study with a critical eye, the narrator is able to distance themselves from the horrors within. Yet Montes includes evocative words (‘ravaged’, ‘disastrous’) that hint at the personal connection between the narrator and the Bronx. In July 2020, in a conversation with fellow poet Trisha Low (published in the Believer), Montes stated, ‘Here’s the thing: in talking about you, I’m narrowly avoiding talking about me, and how I might relate to this idea of vulnerability and its role in my writing.’ In the preface to Thresholes, Montes takes this further, quoting herself as saying, ‘It’s more like the book is writing me.’
As the book progresses, the lines between the personal and the impersonal are further blurred, as are the lines between critical and memoiristic paragraphs, with the narrator inserting themselves more clearly into the picture:
In John Cassavetes’s 1977 film Opening Night, an actress named Myrtle Gordon (performed by the inimitable Gena Rowlands), is preparing for the Broadway premier of the play-within-the-play, The Second Woman … I sometimes envy not so much Myrtle’s stardom as her ability to improvise.
Historical blurbs and literary quotes are also interspersed throughout Thresholes. Though not many, and only used as placeholders between critical and memoir-like passages, the notes are applied as pieces of trivia one might receive on a city bus tour, whereas the quotes—from notable poets, artists and economists—are presented as short stanzas, which give the impression of an inspirational Post-It note one might place on a desk:
The South Bronx is home to the second-largest number of art modern and art deco buildings in the United States.
If in the breakdown of the body there / Is nothing but smoke (Melissa Buzzeo).
These passages continue to muddy the lines between the poetry and prose Montes employs in Thresholes. However, they are not quite prose poetry either, as the structure of the two forms remains firm. The difference is that while the language is analytical, the narrator situates themselves as part of the narrative. By expressing her personal views on the lives of past societies, Montes seems to question the role of ‘history’, a discipline that likes to underscore its objectivity.
Regardless, there is an undercurrent of wistfulness in these lines. For example, in the line about the South Bronx, the narrator is simply stating a fact, yet they are also conveying that art is a huge part of the culture in the Bronx; that beauty can coexist with grief, trauma and despair: ‘And, inside the curves, also love.’
Thresholes is a journey from grief to healing. Much like WandaVision and its theory of grief as ‘love persevering’, Thresholes is a manual for grief and for learning to trust oneself following the aftermath of this grief. In life mistakes will be made and it will often be a heavy and fraught journey to the other side. But Thresholes is an example of the kind of art that tells us it is better to be scarred and healed than continuously try to patch up open wounds. ‘And, inside the curves, also love.’ •
Raelee Lancaster is a writer and information services professional based in Meanjin. She tweets @raeleelancaster
