A Review of Julia C. Alter’s Some Dark Familiar
By Bianca Viñas
Cover design by Green Writers Press
I imagine Sylvia Plath becoming a mother, her pregnant belly pressing against the floor as she hides letters to her previous body and previous life underneath a loose board. It is a moment of self-dilution and sexual silencing that rears its head rapaciously. This is all to say, Plath was anything but a mother. And so too is Julia C. Alter in her poetry collection, Some Dark Familiar. Alter’s collection joins a coffee-stained anthology of Virginia Woolf works and a collection of art by Frida Kahlo on my nightstand—positioning itself within an archive of women straining to break away from the false idea that women without children are failures. Some Dark Familiar is both an honest portrayal of motherhood and a reclamation of feminine identity.
Some Dark Familiar begins with a seemingly simple question: “Who Makes Milk?” And what follows is more than just introspection into lactation. Moving beyond this, Alter reflects on the transformation of the female body after birth, illustrating the changes breasts undergo in an “un-making” and an “un-drinking.” Throughout the collection, Alter is not afraid to depict the reality of what happens when a woman transforms into a mother. Elsewhere, mothers’ past bodies haunt and become apparitions reminiscent of pre-birth. As Alter makes clear, forfeiting one’s body for another is a beautiful and costing gift—“part straitjacket, part hot air balloon.” The relationship between mother and child—body and birth—is undeniably complex, but not pared down in such a way that Alter’s writing would be a foreign or emotionally remote topic for those who are not mothers. Alter explores topics of lost pregnancies, children, and post-partum depression. There are no sparkly metaphors that take away the rawness. There is mourning. There is sadness. There is fear.
“Milk is made / by a wound, or that’s how / I made it for you—the un-making, / the un-drinking. The blue empty, blue / translucent.”
Poem after poem, Alter hollows out memory, paying service to both love and unimaginable loss. Poems such as “Yesenia” make clear that it is possible to be thankful for life in the midst of grief—grieving for one’s past while also reclaiming one’s present. In “Yesenia,” Alter writes of her child’s father as well as that father’s new lover: “Home alone without / my son, my tongue / shapes her name — / over & over & over.” This poem captures the conflict that arises when one experiences jealousy because another woman occupies a space next to your family when you do not—so too does Alter grapple with that fear of being erased.
In “Uvalde,” a response to the Texas school shooting that occurred in 2022, Alter places broken bodies side by side: mothers that have been pinned like butterflies for excavation post C-section, and other bodies after they have been brutalized by violence. This poem also speaks to the violence that compounds when politicians refuse to face their role in such violence. These threads come together near the poem’s end: “When you look up the leaves are so sparkly, my son says / looking up. Beyond the wildest drug trip, / the things our kids might say, what they might do, / and what could happen to them. Trees in Texas, / Texas ash. Nineteen mothers’ children.” Here, the pain of loss is incredibly loud—and yet, in so few words, Alter doesn’t shy away from coupling the heaviness of a tragic moment with the beauty of life as well. Alter sits with both, weaving innocence and nature together. The real tragedy, of course, is that the speaker of the poem has her son beside her, as well as the living trees, while the mothers of Uvalde do not.
As the collection continues into a section titled “Belly the Wolf,” Alter takes the reader back to the tremolo melodies of the late 80’s and early 90’s. In “Sweet Child O’ Mine,” Alter honors the innocence of her son’s childhood, and the way he “smells like roses [and] thunder. . . like a love I know could kill me.” Some Dark Familiar’s poems are chimera, both mother and sexual revenant, neither diluted nor silenced, and most certainly not hidden under floorboards like Plath’s letters. Julia C. Alter’s poetry holds these spaces, dark yet familiar.
Some Dark Familiar is available from Green Writers Press.
Bianca Viñas is an MFA graduate of the Vermont College of Fine Arts Writing and Publishing program. She is the editor of Lifelines: Rewriting Lives from Inside Out, a collection of writings from incarcerated women (out now from Green Writers Press). She is also a managing editor at Soul-O-Travel. Currently, Bianca is finishing up her first book—a hybrid work of poetry, narrative prose, and research into the afterlife—while continuing her study of medicine and all things hauntingly quaint.