Border Crossing

Border Crossing (2017) is poet Caitlin Maling’s second volume of poetry. A Western Australian native, she has degrees in criminology from the University of Melbourne in Australia and Cambridge University in the U.K., as well as an MFA in poetry from the University of Houston in Texas. The poetry collection is a diverse survey of forty poems reflecting Maling’s own interests in criminology, science, nature, folklore, mythology, pop culture, and literature. “Conversion” from this collection won the Val Vallis Award for unpublished poems in 2016.

Maling wrote many of the poems during her time studying and traveling in America. “I-610 Inner Loop” describes Houston with familiar imagery—the tacky billboard signs, the homeless man with his sign, the Tex-Mex restaurants, and a forest of shopping options: “Targets & Walmarts & Petcos & Churches & Night Bingo & Day Bingo.” These stores are institutions fundamental to the American experience. They sell food, luxury items, pet items (pet owning is a luxury, signifying enough disposable cash to spend on another creature’s survival for our pleasure), salvation, and vice. For the speaker, Texas is a temporary place, and she rejects the home she could make here: “if I’d wanted to I could’ve found a love / of silt and pimple prairie, wetlands’ slowly sinking suburbs.…/ Is it brave to refuse the home that’s offered?” Even the dialect of English is different, a point she also makes in the following poem, “Closer.”

“February in Oregon,” one of Maling’s longer poems, chronicles her visit there. Separated into twenty-eight numbered sections, the poem is mostly a magpie’s collection of observations about Oregon, and the weather and wildlife there. The style of each section changes. Some sections are only two or three lines long, while others are a dozen or more. Section 6 uses double spacing between lines, while section 10 uses a caesura, section 12 is a series of couplets, and section 25 is entirely italicized. Some of the observations are humorous, including section 19, which is “I must remember that / small things / live in chimneys / when it is cold” (the poem is only two lines, bolded backslash indicates line break). Other observations are random, about her reading material and that bats are dying of fungus.



Other poems are about pop culture. “You Are What This Show is All About” is a composite of reality singing or talent show clichés. The show she is watching could be any of them, but the script is the same: a voted off contestant with a hard-luck backstory sobs about wanting to be a role model for girls, while a montage of her journey plays and her mentors tell her she’s going to go far. The speaker switches the channel to see a commercial about labiaplasty cosmetic surgery, and then switches back to the singing show, just in time to hear the final trite platitudes of a conventional sendoff. “The Bachelor: Bluebeard’s Season” is a folkloric parody of the show. The speaker imagines the female contestants as Bluebeard’s ill-fated wives, each one hacked up and left in the attic until the last contestant wins. The reunion show is the end of the fairy tale, all the women recombobulated and none of them irretrievably lost. The speaker needs to remind herself “that not everything is a tragedy,” referencing Shakespeare’s most famous tragedies, Macbeth and Hamlet, where everyone dies in the end, including the ambitious Lady Macbeth and the mad Ophelia.

“Border Crossing” is a road-trip through the South with her mother and sister. The spacing of the poem is vast, each section allocated to its own page, perhaps mimicking the time spent traveling from one place to another—the hours of drudgery between interesting events. The real-time events of the trip are often paired with reminisces of places back home in Australia. Her mother goes home, disgusted by the bigness and flag-waving patriotic obsessions of Americans, but the speaker continues through Texas, Louisiana, Mississippi, and Tennessee and back to Texas.

“Conversion,” the award-winning poem in this collection, is about body issues and weight, and about embodiment and the soul. The speaker has made peace with her size: “We are kept by the gravitational pull of the sun because it is larger than us. / By being more I can bring things closer to me.” Science and religion come together in this poem, between the allusions to magnetism and gravitational fields pulling things in closer, and the existential body issues of some of her Catholic friends. They draw connections between original sin and physical appearance. The speaker (who acknowledges herself an atheist in “Snow Day”) rejects this line of thought, and muses, “Sometimes I look for the god inside of me.” A shred of her interest in psychology emerges when she talks about delusional neurotics who collect samples of their skin to show their doctors as proof that they are not crazy when they say spiders are crawling on them, even though there is nothing physically wrong with them.



“Islands” is a poem that meditates on what it means to be an island, on directions and the idea that everything is subjective. The poem’s structure mimics the format of a textbook’s table of contents, including Roman numerals in the place of chapter numbers. She argues that everything is an island—Australia is an island continent; our universe is an island among a sea of other universe-islands. She mentions the common idiom of “looking up at the moon” and points out the fallacy: “There are no directions / in space. So really we just look at the moon, / and it happens that we tilt our head.” She seems to make the point that the universe does not change—only our perception of it changes.

The final poem in the collection, “Prayer,” at first glance seems curious because of the speaker’s avowed atheism. Yet, “Prayer” is about believing in things that are; in other words, believing proven facts over the unproven hypotheticals. The poem completely lacks end punctuation (commas and periods). Each new thought begins with “Believe” (capitals in original) but the lack of end punctuation recreates the idea of a hazy beginning without a clear ending that somehow manages to end suddenly all the same. To that end, the page directly following the last poem is blank, giving extra space between the poem and the acknowledgments section.