You know how fairy tales are full of talking animals and life-altering vegetables and terrible bargains and severed limbs? So you’ll know what I mean when I say that Jennifer LoveGrove’s 2017 poetry collection Beautiful Children with Pet Foxes has a fairy tale quality.
LoveGrove’s lines are short and tight, her poems corralled into regular stanzas. Her phrasing is quirky, charming, and menacing. Illness, madness, accident, abuse—all seethe beneath the text, but come up sideways, transmuted by a strange enchantment.
In the titular poem, an extended piece running fifteen pages, LoveGrove asserts, “I apprentice myself to the beautiful children / with pet foxes. … / I follow them, my childhood / a faint shadow. …”. Later, “I apprentice myself to the earthworms, / lungless …” and further on, “I apprentice myself to the way they sense light, / the menace of a warm touch to damp skin.” The children have mothers, and there is something wrong with the mother in this poem, but it’s not spelled out. “I apprentice myself to the stones / the beautiful children with pet foxes / pluck from the dirt and polish in their mouths / until they shine like the rings / their mothers slid off and left behind.”
This could be interesting to read alongside Christine McNair’s Charm, released the same year from the same publisher, which I covered a few weeks ago in this series. As LoveGrove tells us towards the end of the book, “My grandmother … says life is full of flies / and questions and under the dirt, / more dirt. …” But, mixed into the dirt, shiny rock, shimmer of glass, gems.
Publication Details
Author: Jennifer LoveGrove
Title: Beautiful Children with Pet Foxes
Publisher: Book*hug
Year: 2017