Family, Memory, and Truth
Bess Cooley’s debut poetry collection grapples with language and loss
Florence, the debut poetry collection by Knoxvillian Bess Cooley, is a euphonic meditation on family, memory, and truth that plays with time and form.
Florence’s titular poem, which opens the book, guides readers immediately into the epicenter of Cooley’s story: her late grandfather’s dementia. “My grandfather tells me of the bunch of goldenrod / he’s named Florence because he sees / a face in it,” Cooley writes, recalling her grandfather’s inanimate companion. “Some things, he tells me, I make up / for a little joy, but there is no / denying what is there.”
This poem introduces readers to the complex impact Cooley’s grandfather’s disease renders upon him and his family. “My stranger grandfather asks me where I grew up,” Cooley says, then answers: “Here / in this house, though the kitchen’s / been ripped out and replaced.” Within this opening piece, beauty, love, isolation, and grief coexist, a juxtaposition that colors Florence as a whole.
Watching the deterioration of her grandfather’s mind leaves Cooley with questions about perception and truth that she explores throughout the collection. In pieces such as “There Is a Snake,” Cooley muses on whether writing can or should depict reality literally. The poem begins, “This isn’t a metaphor. And I’m / not the snake.” It ends, “While the snake / disappears, you can see much more / than the outline of my body.”
This poem and others also seem to tie back to Cooley’s grandfather’s beloved goldenrod. Do our minds play tricks on us when we personify plants and animals, or are we deluding ourselves if we deem ourselves separate and distinct from the world around us?
At the intersection of humanity and nature, of course, is death, another theme central to Florence. In the poem “On the Day My Parents Leave the Country They Leave Instructions for What to Do after Their Deaths,” Cooley writes, “Where to mingle / my parents’ ashes, to bury them, to plant / a tree overhead like we would grow above / my grandfather.” So, perhaps, Florence the goldenrod does have a face, Cooley is the snake, and her family will live on.
Cooley also experiments with form as a means of demonstrating how logic and language can be a barrier to understanding ourselves and the world — a lesson perhaps gleaned through witnessing her grandfather’s dementia progress. As if she is experiencing her own form of aphasia, Cooley scatters found poetry throughout the collection, taking one or more previous poems and erasing the majority of their words.
These new poems leave us with a new, distilled message that doesn’t quite make sense, and yet we understand. In the first of two reprises of the original “Florence,” five stanzas are reduced to, “pretend / My grandfather / sees / Some things / a little joy, but / Still, / he leaves.” The images are no longer there, but somehow the feelings are still vivid.
Notably, as is the case in most erasure poetry, Cooley preserves the formatting of the original poem. Thus, we are forced to remember that there is absence, that there was loss. But through Florence, absence and loss become art.
Bianca Sass, a Nashville native, is a writer, director, and scholar whose work probes the intersection of the personal and the political. She’s a recent graduate of Amherst College, where she majored in English and Law, Jurisprudence, and Social Thought, as well as wrote and directed many theatrical productions. In 2023, Bianca workshopped her play Babydoll at the Looby Theater in Nashville. Bianca is now based in Boston.
