SD Poets You Should Know: Christine Stewart-Nuñez

Christine Stewart-Nuñez, an associate professor of English at South Dakota State, writes poems that are often narrative and often about her family, including the death of her sister (in Keeping Them Alive) and her own experience as a mother of a child with special needs (in the forthcoming Bluewords Greening). Her poems always pay close attention to sound and often to structure, and for me are an experience of the unity of lyric and narrative, which are sometimes taught as separate kinds of poem-making. Her poem “Boy at Rest” in Rogue Agent is an excellent example:Christine Stewart-NuñezBOY AT REST, AFTER JULIE ZICK'S LITHOGRAPH GIRL AT RESTWhile sleeping, the child vanishes from his life.—Carolyn Forché, The Angel of HistoryIn Girl at Rest, I saw only a hazysilhouette of a child’s body—the navyblue frame of her arms, head,and a bit of torso, and I readthe artist’s choice of ochre, taupe, and lightgray (shades shifting only slightly)to imply background, table and skinwith wonder—the colors nearly vanishthe child. When I study my sonasleep, it’s in full dimension:eyelids threaded with a blue vein,a freckle emerging on the outlineof his lip. There’s no facial stress,but I don’t need to guess:rest is an illusion, not a featureof a brain beset with seizures.By day, they complicate the spellingof C-A-T, how each sound, rollinginto the next, infuses meaning.When sound does fall through the screenof seizures, a word often fails to find its placeon his tongue. The spells also erasememories of lunchtime pizza, gym-classtag, the answer to What’s your lastname? the need to look both ways beforecrossing the parking lot outside the store.On the monitor, I hear him speak,a midnight phrase thrown from deep sleep,and I wonder what words emerge(despite the seizure’s surge)from the visual play of his dreams.What world does he vanish to? It seemsimpossible to draw in ink or wordsmore than a sleeping child’s curvesand angles. When I tiptoe into his roomto re-tuck his blanket, I will only assumethat wherever he’s at, he’ll come back. Though the poem is one stanza, it proceeds with rhyming sets of two lines, as if they were rhyming couplets that just lack stanza breaks. That’s not to say that all of these couplets are perfect rhymes, or even that the poem has an even number of lines (I’ll return to that). “Head” and “read” rhyme, and “outline” and “vein” might be a slant rhyme, but some of these pairs proceed only by assonance, a repeated vowel sound, such as “light” and “slightly” or “vanish” and “skin,” or consonance, a repeated consonant sound, such as “words” and “curves.” Those sounds do unify the poem, though, and give it a texture, and also call into question resemblances—if the poem rhymed too perfectly, it wouldn’t represent the way the speaker encounters the lithograph, which is “hazy” and made of “implication[s],” as opposed to her son, whom she sees in “full dimension” as he “sleeps,” even though his seizure disorder won’t permit him to fully rest.By the end of the poem, though, after the rhyme of “room” and “assume,” we’re left with the line “…wherever he’s at, he’ll come back” on its own. That choice underscores that it’s just an assumption—she’s putting an end word out there that won’t have a rhyme, that won’t hear its sound “come back,” just as she doesn’t know whether he will wake, or in what condition, whether he’ll be “back” to himself. And yet the line itself contains the assonance of “at” and “back,” so it feels like the sound might be coming back already, that it might be an OK assumption, he might actually come back from “wherever he’s at.” I admire how well the form of this poem enacts both its content and the speaker’s struggle with it.Featured image by Amanda Tipton under the creative commons license on Flickr. Post by Barbara Duffy.Read about more South Dakota Poets.