The Real Warnings
Rhett Iseman Trull
Anhinga Press
ISBN Number: 9781934495111

Reviewer: JoSelle Vanderhooft


          When reading Rhett Iseman Trull’s award-winning collection The Real Warnings, I was continuously reminded of Sylvia Plath, and at first I could not articulate why. Both poets write with breathless honesty about such difficult subjects as heterosexual romance and the landscape of living with a mental illness, yes, but these seemed like superficial similarities. Ultimately, the matter did not get settled until I consulted my copy of Plath’s collected poems. To my joy, I found that I was neither misguided nor being too generous to Trull (whose collection I devoured as I did Ariel).

          Both Plath and Trull have a love for precise imagery that eddies from line to line with an impeccable ease. There is also an immediacy in their work, a sense of both poets grasping the reader by the collar and saying with hushed intensity, “Listen. I need to tell you a story.” Both can also be slyly, wryly funny when writing about the most painful of topics—Plath’s father, for example, in “Daddy” and an overweight, unpopular, and much-maligned school girl in “Nobody’s Goddess” by Trull.

          Of course, there are also profound differences between the poets’ styles. Trull is often direct where Plath favors indirection, blunt when Plath is subtle. And that is why I do not want to spend the entire review comparing the two poets, as if to say that Trull is merely working and walking in the shadow of her poetic foremother. Her lyrical, honest, and sharply honed work deserves to stand on its own merits.

          The poems in this collection vibrate with an emotional intensity and tight imagery that bring their subjects and situations to life in startling and ultimately unforgettable ways. Consider this excerpt from the book’s title poem, “The Real Warnings Are Always Too Late.”

I want to go back to the winter I was born and warn you
that I will flood through your life like acid
and you will burn yourselves on me.
On my sixteenth birthday, I will use the candles
to set the basement aflame and run out laughing,
wearing smoke like a new dress. With a pocket knife,
I will try to root out that life you so eagerly started.

…

I’ll dominate the prayers you keep sending up
like the last of flares from an island no one visits.
For every greeting card poem, I will write four
to hurt you. Some will be true.

          Of course, this is a warning to the speaker’s parents, and one of a long line of poems that ultimately cautions: Children bring pain with them into the world. Familiar though the theme may be, note the seamless way in which this poem flows and the images that leap out in high relief: “I will flood through your life like acid,” “wearing smoke like a new dress.”

          Where the real fire of The Real Warnings ignites for me, however, are with the poems in which Trull writes about (at least I cautiously presume) her struggles with mental illness, a “warning” of which she gives in the above selection when mentioning “root[ing] out that life you so eagerly started.” In many ways, my interest is personal: I have lived with major depressive disorder for most of my life, and my experiences with the illness—and the times in which it made me want to “root out” my own life—have haunted my own poetry for years. And so, I am always hungry to find work that is generally sensitive to the experience of living with a mental illness, but also work written by other insiders as a result of direct experience. I found such a poem in “Rescuing Princess Zelda” and “The Night Before Depakote,” which is a drug commonly used to treat bipolar disorder.

          In the first of these poems, the poet describes being checked into a psychiatric unit after what appears to be a suicide attempt. Although I have not had this particular experience, I am well-acquainted with the feelings of shame, sleeplessness, and longing to be “normal” that Trull describes in this long poem, and particularly in its second section, “Night One, Adolescent Wing.”

My head sings to itself like a horror
movie score: half
lullaby, half devilhum.

hush little baby don’t say a word

The heat struggles on, dies off. I’m too
hot. But I want the sheets covering
my feet. Suffer. Repeat.
Shouldn’t be here. Really.

My friends must be out
perching on bar stools. My friends
in their tight pants and glittery make-
up, insisting nothing
is mis-webbed about me. But

if everything I did was for the chance
to be caged, lie
still, de-perfect,

if that mockingbird don’t sing

then what about the details
I never told anyone, performances
to an empty house: the curling
iron held out the window
into the rain, me thinking sacrifice; cigarette
lighter opening my skin
in secret circles, red
and itchy as thought; my soccer

trophy—Most Valuable—buried
in the dunes when, nights earlier,
I invited a stranger to slip,
as if lifting a wallet
off an ignorant mark, his tongue
inside me.

          In the following poem, “The Night before Depakote,” Trull writes about a fear that many living with mental illnesses confront when faced with the option—and quite frequently the mandate—to take medication: Will the very pills meant to save us from our murderous brains actually kill us by getting rid of that which has helped us survive? I have never seen the subject treated with more honesty and skill than in this poem, in which the speaker is talking to a friend the night before beginning such a treatment regimen.

But tonight we’re as close as always.
Closer. She’s the same beneath
her sadness she won’t betray
just to please an audience, as if she spent years
drawing her smile up from a well and now
wears it only when she means it. But who am I
on the eve of the whitewash?
Who will I be in the poemless country
to come? I feel the words clot already,
I tell her, like salmon refusing to run.
And my friend whose father is one-year dead,
whose mother was locked up for crazy,
my friend who will always
call me Dagger, takes my hands. I don’t care
about your writing. I’d rather have you,
she says, as if the two were separate, as if
what kills one could save the other.

          I was near tears when I read this stanza, as I and millions of other young women have faced this exact same Catch-22 wherein we have to weigh two different kinds of death, neither of which is the lesser of the two. I don’t know how well or not-well the Depakote worked, of course, but I am grateful for these words and grateful to see them running free as spawning salmon. In our society, as well as the world, mental illness is still misunderstood, belittled, ignored, and mocked, and we need voices like this, voices which tell an important truth eloquently and unflinchingly and with no regard for the endless prescriptions of “shoulds” that clot our words whenever we try to speak for ourselves.

          I don’t want to leave the reader with the impression that Trull writes only about mental illness, as The Real Warnings covers so much ground poetically. Trull addresses the complication of romantic relationships between men and women in “Introducing My Brother in the Role of Clark Kent,” “The Boy in the Full-Length Women’s Fur Coat,” and “To Find Her True Love, the Gardener of the Orchard Turns to Magic,” which is underpinned by the same sense of the mythic and folkloric that girds such Plath poems as “Poem for a Birthday” and “Dialogue Between Ghost and Priest.” A number of poems also address the vicissitudes of raising children (“If We Still Believed the World Was Flat”) and even the beauty and terror of fairy tales (“There Was a Moment on the Way Home When Hansel Left Gretel”). I wish I had the time and space to walk the reader through at least half of these, to further address how Trull’s language sings with vitality, youth, and wonder after wonder. Yet, if I did, the reasons for picking up this book and experiencing such joys oneself might be less compelling.