REVIEW OF EMILY STODDARD’S “DIVINATION WITH A HUMAN HEART ATTACHED”

Photo by Lenstravelier on Unsplash.

Tell me it is only human—
to wish for someone to believe in the myth of you.

This is the final line from the first offering of Emily Stoddard’s new collection of poetry, Divination with a Human Heart Attached. And it is a fitting epitaph for the conversation she and I had about her collection, in which we touched on the way that these poems reflect Stoddard’s journey of negotiating liminal spaces within and without Christian tradition. As Stoddard, myself, and many other spiritual sojourners work to carve belonging and meaning out of the sculptor’s blocks with which we began our projects of theological construction, shavings of meaning and coherence from the past fall unceremoniously to the floor, and yet at times they accumulate into scrap heaps that tell a beautiful story in their own right. And whether it is the remnants on the floor or the remnants on the block, in both cases what we hope to be doing is myth-making. As we construct our identities and our worldviews, we hope to be quite literally making ourselves, to be locating ourselves in the canon of communal meaning by making compelling narratives of ourselves. We hope to find, to discover, to uncover, to wrest, to consent to, to share the myth of, our selves. And it is a most eminently human thing to wish for someone to come to see and believe that myth.

I couldn’t help but be swept along by the way in which Stoddard pursues this project. She crafts penetrating midrashic explorations of extracanonical lore which bring gender reflection into stories from the first century (Petronilla tries to imagine her father’s prayer).  She acknowledges the delicate interplay between the spiritualities and the frailties of her ancestors, while locating God within our very body (Inheritance Rosarium). She traces the ways our theological questionings and reevaluations inevitably interweave with the spirituality within our closest relationships (Swoon Hypothesis). She names art as a recourse for those who seek the spiritual and yet have been kept from free access to that which is most divine (I Might Have Been a Botanist). And through it all the haunting image of the magpie serves as a throughline for all that is stark, unnerving, and blasphemous-presenting yet in reality deeply honoring to God. 

Along the way there is an exquisite handling of imagery and motifs from nature which bring the reader fully into a vibrant landscape. And there is a collision between Babel and Pentecost and a probing of our longing for fulfillment in self-expression and language (Descendants).

Restless

For the language

An ancestor spoke

Into the sky

Of their god

We sift remnants

Of tongues,

Break the

Breath

…

We are not done yet

Inventing names

For what will save us

Just as we strive to construct the myth of our selves, we also persist in naming our reality. In vesting our hope and in constructing utopias and eschatons. The best art is that which helps us to do just that. Divination with a Human Heart Attached certainly availed itself to me as one of the many tools with which I have been blessed and equipped for such a task.

Emily Stoddard (she/her) is a poet and creative nonfiction writer in Michigan. Her work can be  found in Tupelo Quarterly, Baltimore Review, Ruminate, Radar, Tinderbox Poetry Journal, Whitefish Review,  and elsewhere. In 2021, she received the Developmental Editing Fellowship in creative nonfiction  from the Kenyon Review. Her debut poetry book, Divination with a Human Heart Attached, was released in February 2023 by Game Over Books.