Were-Jag, by Suzette Bishop

Poetry, chapbook, 36 pages, from Bottlecap Features.

Were-Jag by Suzette Bishop intones, “Were-Jaguar/Where-Jaguar/Wear-Jaguar.” This is where we are: what was, what’s gone, the mask fashion creates. What does it mean to make commodities of ourselves? Three voices entwine in this long collage poem, a journaling voice, a vintage women’s magazine voice, and an encyclopedic voice describing the jaguar and its sacred place, “An eater of hearts” who doesn’t care about being pleasing; “They can roar but not purr.” The speaker of the journal sections mulls over the meaning of her memories, dreams, messy relationships, and female family members who can’t maintain the façades expected of them.

Bishop’s jagged edges where these voices unravel into each other sometimes provide answers, warnings, predictions, “Your own civilization will end.” Or a better understanding of our jaguar selves, living by scents, instincts, “A girl runs to catch the ball, her lithe body swinging through the air,” perhaps a memory of jaguar-like litheness. By contrast, the magazine erasures insist we look cool, unruffled at all times, a still ornament in artificial light, while the speaker of journal entries remarks about a party where “all the women are in costumes; I feel out of place.” In the midst of hacks about how to accessorize a black dress, how to hide falling apart, the magazine voice startles with a revelation about how to be an artist, the importance of having the right tools, being an observer.

Suzette Bishop has published three poetry books and four chapbooks, most recently, Eyes of Some Robbers and Unbecoming. She has an MFA from the University of Virginia and a Doctorate of Arts from the State University at Albany. Her poems have appeared in many literary magazines and anthologies and been finalists in the Northwind Writing Award and contests at Black Fox Literary Magazine and So to Speak. One poem earned an Honorable Mention in the Coalition of Texans with Disabilities Contest and, another, First Place in the Spoon River Poetry Review Editors’ Prize. She lives in Laredo, Texas.