Like the engine room language, there are other small betrayals. Sometimes it is the husband himself who deploys the distancing language of deployment, as in “My Husband Calls Me Shipmate”: “that language / of the engine / room has no / shut-off.” There are absences that unexpectedly assert themselves even when the speaker’s husband is present: “Come home, // he would no matter what be strange.” In “Homeport,” a clever and cruel reworking of Hayden’s “Those Winter Sundays” and their lonely offices, Dubrow’s speaker recounts a middle-of-the-night summons of her husband by his captain:īefore slipping into the chill of coveralls, There’s bitter incense paired with something sweet. Morse code also is a coded language that stands in for absence, much as the poems Dubrow writes to represent these deployments: “And what are words? /-prosthetics made // to bear the weight / of what is lost” “when I say vessels // I mean boats and bodies, / that there’s no more imperfect union / than marriage / or the marrying of words” or “Reading Sappho in Pensacola,” “his absence like the space / a translator leaves / when only parts of the poem remain.”Ībsence is everywhere present in this collection, in the still-life composition of “A Catalogue of the Contents of His Nightstand,” and in the scent of him left behind in “The Long Deployment”:įor weeks, I breathe his body in the sheet It’s in a letter mailed early in their relationship: “I’ve always been skilled in the strike // that language makes on sentiment”…“how you loved that dispatch for the precision // of its cruelty, my words and their marching / orders to leave me the fuck alone” (“Officer Candidate School”) as well as in the news of war in “Casualty Notification,” a riff on Auden’s elegy for Yeats: The title, a form of military communication sent over distances, transmits itself throughout this collection: in the couple’s correspondence, in what’s left unsaid between them, and in the whitespace in such formal elements as Sapphic fragments and medial caesuras.

Fraught with empty beds, and describing a long marriage characterized by constant military deployments, Dots & Dashes is a book of absences.

I’m reading Dots & Dashes, Jehanne Dubrow’s sixth poetry collection and a thematic successor to 2010’s Stateside. I’m irritated-I want quiet and solitude-so I escape to the empty bed in the guestroom. I’m trying to concentrate on this book, but my husband is snoring loudly beside me in bed.

Dots & Dashes by Jehanne Dubrow