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Review: Bear Stories by J'Lyn Chapman

It is fitting that J’Lyn Chapman’s Bear Stories, a sequence of thirty short prose poems, starts where most wilderness tales can’t help but tread—a small, nondescript cabin in the middle of human abandon. Add nostalgic feeling. The hope for basic survival, too. And this is where such compulsory tales end. What emerges afterward becomes the first “stubborn boundary” of many searched, tested, and ripped apart within Chapman’s anticipation of bringing the proof of her passions. Exploring another framework inside animalism, she invites those seemingly random tendencies of the bear and other wildlife, their frightening needs, engaging a different forest mapped with sign and exchange of identities for pleasure, for language which can manipulate her environment, right down to a fervent wish “to show the world a vernacular of mulberry” and to get this modest berry “swinging and rubbing.” Lives, naturally, are taken and consumed so, impelling a struggle with the tongue’s strange incompleteness to convey its violence (“My mouth is full of rabbits…. The sensation is moths”). As a result, these self-revelations reflect few tranquil moments, instead projecting the changed body toward various escapes. Constellation, prophecy, attack. Wayward trajectories of birds. Living augury. Yet the reckoning of these withstands delivery since this “grid and viscera,” Chapman declares, refuses to shape its own comprehension for her: “If by stories I could cheat dichotomies, then this would be the Story of Here and no mere romance. But all stories are romantic and worn thin by friction.” Not for the woodland creatures whose figurative skins she steps in and out of, however; and by shunning the friction of entrance and exit, there imparts her agonized succumbing to desire that is effortless.

—forrest roth

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