Kristine Esser Slentz re(view)s: If Some God Shakes Your House
by Jennifer Franklin

Jennifer Franklin’s third full-length collection, If Some God Shakes Your House (Four Way Books 2023), delivers a truly ethereally enlightening experience for the reader. Immediately upon entering the book, I was enveloped by the beautiful line and stanza breaks, like tumbling down a script or scroll. To be caught off-guard yet flowed forward is a masterful skill that will resonate with any reader or writer who identifies with the despair to triumph. Additionally, be prepared to be deliciously lost in the underworld of time while reading as this collection spans over 100 pages sailing between predominantly prose poems and free verse pieces.

The themes of family (particularly motherhood), relationships (particularly marital), and health (particularly disability, cancer, and abortion) and lyrical style are reminiscent of writings such as The Autobiography of Red by Anne Carson, In Still Rooms by Cea (Constantine Jones), and Time is a Mother by Ocean Vuong. By this I mean the reader is on a modern-day mythological tragic heroine’s journey, and that heroine is related to Sophocles’ character, Antigone. Antigone, daughter of Oedipus, was forbidden to bury her brother against royal orders from King Creon, as her brother was viewed as committing treason, which ultimately cost her her life.

I buried the body at night
but knew I would still be caught.
The sky watched, a harder

shade of blue, as I knelt
above your lifeless body.
After I held dirt in my curved

palms, I couldn’t return home
to the yellow sheets or eyelet
canopy. It didn’t happen how

they described it—doing the deed
that doomed me to death…

“As Antigone—” (page 5)

Ultimately, Franklin relates this Greek classic to the pain of being a woman talked into birthing an ill child into a world she will ultimately need to care for, potentially the rest of both of their lives, alone with no spousal or familial support; a kind of doomed state that appears chosen but perhaps is not—and one that is reinforced by the governing bodies at play.

There’s an effortless sense of chaos, sacrifice, and a sort of heavenly self-condemnation throughout that stays true to the Greek mythology arcs and examination of some Christian ideals, too, when it comes to motherhood and sacrifice:

When you said you know
you are not a narcissist
because you are a masochist,
your first psychiatrist reminded you
about Jesus and how you
made your way through Italy
collecting small souvenirs
of wooden angels and gilded
reproductions of Madonna
and Child to hang on your walls
to punish you.

“As Antigone—” (page 82)

It’s the continuation of the ancient conversation of what is right versus wrong for each individual in any given situation – especially one that involves family and futility. The nuances of this conversation are highlighted and modernized with discussion of the laws of the land, particularly ones related to women’s and those with disabilities rights, while still dealing with the ever-old and ever-present issues of family pressure, guilt, and abandonment.

My recommendation for consuming this book is to find a body of water on the night of a full moon and lay out your most comfy picnic blanket; also bring tissues and your heart.

Memento Mori: Wind Phone

You don’t yet know
that I take care
of every weak thing.
You wait to tell me
your bad news until
you’re leaving as if
you can bear only
so much consolation.

If you speak your grief
as the gray-haired farmers
and fisherman do
on the phone connected
to nothing, you may

never stop calling the wind.

“Memento Mori (page 13)

Jennifer Franklin holds degrees from Brown University and Columbia University School of the Arts. She is the author of three full-length poetry collections including If Some God Shakes Your House (Four Way Books, 2023). Franklin received a 2021 NYFA/City Artist Corps grant and a 2021 Café Royal Cultural Foundation Literature Award. Her work has been published widely including in American Poetry Review, Bennington Review, The Nation, The Paris Review, and Poetry Society’s “Poetry in Motion.” Most recently, Diane Seuss chose one of Franklin’s poems for The Academy of American Poets “poem-a-day.” She teaches workshops in Manhattanville’s MFA program and manuscript revision at the Hudson Valley Writers Center, where she serves as Program Director.

KRISTINE ESSER SLENTZ is the author of woman, depose (FlowerSong Press 2021). She is originally from northwest Indiana and the Chicagoland area. She earned her MFA in Creative Writing (poetry) in May 2020 from City College of New York (CCNY) where she is currently an Adjunct Assistant Professor. KRISTINE is a Pushcart Prize nominee, finalist in the Glass Poetry Chapbook and F(r)iction’s Flash Fiction Contests, recipient of a CCNY English Department Teacher-Writer Award, and former Rifkind Fellow and Poets Afloat resident. Currently, she is the co-founder and organizer/host of the monthly artist series, Adverse Abstraction, in NYC’s East Village.