Literary Reviews
Un-coded
Woman
“Begin
reading with The International Code of Signals, published by the
Defense Mapping Agency Hydrographic/Topographic Center. Start
with symbol titles, “I Have Taken the Line,” “I am Going Ahead,”
“I Do Not See Any Light.” Then imagine the long escape that might
accompany those titles. This author gives readers a woman running
from a violent home. The symbols then become markers for her journey,
and unlike cheesy reality television, Oomen’s speaker truly journeys—physically,
emotionally, intellectually.
Oomen,
an award-winning memoirist, playwright, and poet, is the founding
editor of The Dunes Review and the recipient of a 2005 Michigan
Notable Book for her memoir, Pulling Down the Barn. This volume,
like Kim Addonizio’s Jimmy & Rita, collects poems into a linked
narrative volume with a plot similar to that of a novel. Beanie,
a woman abused and molested by her father, speeds down the highway,
then stops to pick up a hitchhiker, a half-Native American man
named Barn. Together they head north where Beanie slowly acclimates
both to the climate and the man with whom she’s chosen to live.
Underlying every poem is Beanie’s former life as a sexually and
physically abused daughter. The agony surrounding her decision
to marry Barn stems from this terror, and her new life resolves
with a revelation about the old one.
The
greatest gift in this volume is Oomen’s creation of voice. From
the very beginning, Beanie is distinct: “How it all kicked off—I’m
on the run.” The same voice can utter, “I drive like a flood busting
open sluice / gates, like my whole past wants me / drowned but
I’m not going down.” The movement between the factual and the
metaphorical is effortless and sensible for this voice. Beginning
writers can make the mistake of picking characters who do not
have the capacity to reveal themselves, not so Oomen. In “I am
Continuing to Search,” Beanie steals The International Code of
Symbols, and begins to imagine what she might say, what she might
want, in a language separate from her life.
“I’d
like to see across that lake. / Learn how to say I’m sorry. /
Book falls open. // Show me how things might mean. / Forgiveness
is not one of the letters. / But there are others that look like
kin.”
Beanie
figures out a language for herself, through cypher, through metaphor.
Oomen, through the language with which she gifts Beanie, shows
the ways language creates identity just as her character learns
it. The poetry enacts the revelation in really exciting ways.
For readers scared of the lexical gymnastics often at play in
poetry, Oomen’s strong character, iconoclastic language, and suspenseful
plotting will satisfy dual desires for the grace of poetry and
the immersion of the novel. "—Camille-Yvette Welsch, for
Foreward
Magazine
House
of Fields
“Anne-Marie
Oomen brings not only the past, its people and domestic mythologies,
to life in this brilliant book, but she brings life to the landscape,
the seasons,
and the very walls that contained them. Measured, musical, and
wise, these pieces give us a poet’s sense of the mystical, with
a storyteller’s attention to character and place. A kind of travelogue
of the spirit and an ode to the miracle of memory, this is memoir
to the highest power.” —Laura Kasischke, author of The Life Before
Her Eyes and Suspicious River
“In
House of Fields, every moment is considered, consistent, built
in the way that the old Dutch masters built their paintings: layer
by layer, achieving, at last, a luminous warmth found only in
glimpses during the course of our daily lives. And yet, in retrospect,
this is exactly the light cast by what we remember—more complex
than nostalgia, more shadowed, a bittersweet scar.” —A. Manette
Ansay, author of Vinegar Hill and Limbo
Pulling
Down the Barn
Glen Arbor Sun, May 2004
Author Tim Bazzett, May 2006
Foreword Magazine, November 2004
"You
can’t take the farm out of the girl’ is a statement that Anne-Marie
Oomen would not only accede to, but has found ways to celebrate
in this well-written memoir. She, the writer, has gone beyond
her rural roots, but here she pays her loving debts to the people
and the natural world that so inform her attractive sensibility.”
—Stephen Dunn, winner of the 2001 Pulitzer Prize in poetry for
Different Hours
“Pulling
Down the Barn is a vivid and magical work. Oomen’s richly evocative
prose makes palpable not just a sensual childhood on a Michigan
farm—the smell of hay, the sounds of honeybees—but also the landscape
of a young girl’s imagination. Here where the fields reign as
indifferent gods and family can be both blessing and burden, a
young girl learns to negotiate between camaraderie and loneliness.”
—Barbara Hurd, author of Entering the Stone: On Caves and Feeling
Through the Dark
“Anne-Marie
Oomen has written a perfect gem of a book: deceptively quiet,
delicately structured, but with the enduring force, strength,
and brilliance of a diamond.” —A. Manette Ansay, author of Limbo
and Vinegar Hill
“The
wind sings through the pages of this wonderful memoir of coming
of age on an American farm. You can hear the waves on Lake Michigan,
feel snowflakes on your face, watch dust motes spiraling in the
hay loft. This is a book about courage and endurance and the grace
to be found in simple moments. Anne-Marie Oomen is a writer of
extraordinary sensitivity and a master of the literature of engagement.”
—Jerry Dennis, author of A Place on the Water and The Living Great
Lakes
“Pulling
Down the Barn is a wonderfully lyrical and evocative memoir. In
this honest and powerful coming-of-age family story, Anne-Marie
Ooomen utilizes a poet’s eye to lovingly depict the beauty of
the northern Michigan landscape, while at the same time finding
a kind of dark splendor in its sometimes harsh and raw climate.
A must-read for those who love memoirs about settling and place.”
—Michael Steinberg, founding editor of Fourth Genre: Explorations
in Nonfiction and author of Still Pitching: A Memoir
