by Mary Burger

The pages in Sarah Rosenthal’s Estelle Meaning Star are dun-colored, earthen. The text is collaged, like a ransom note; individual words and letters appear cut from a manuscript and reassembled into short, irregular lines, without punctuation. A slender work, compressed to a potent distillate, the book begins with a procession of women who cradle wounded animals, “walking along / pacific rim”—a ritualized enactment of grief, but also of tender care and nurturance.

The Pacific Rim is not a single place but the nearly ten-thousand-mile perimeter of the world’s largest sea—the seismic, volcanic edge of the expanse that divides (and connects) east and west, water and land. The women’s walk along this edge resembles ancient funeral ceremonies, such as the procession across the Nile River to the temple of the female pharaoh Hatshepsut or the ceremonial journey down the Avon to the monumental tomb site at Stonehenge, each enacting the passage from life to death. It also brings to mind a post-apocalyptic scene from N.K. Jemisin’s Broken Earth trilogy, which finds imperiled survivors in a barren, ruined world trying to save their injured kin, or at least to honor their dead, as they flee from further cataclysm.

Rosenthal has written elsewhere that she composed Estelle Meaning Star from cut-ups of dreams she recorded while going through cancer treatment. The traces of her personal experience are sublimated and reconfigured in this work, where ritual and ceremony face down the forces of pain and grief. The origin of those forces isn’t explicitly named here; rather, we’re given hints of a post-industrial urban dystopia laden with passive consumerism, invasive surveillance, callous wealth:

         lethargic
TV-watching

…………………………………..

is a camera
catching me

…………………………………..

bulging leather wallets

Children exist here seemingly just to be disciplined:

order                  stops kids
wandering through hallways

At times, the menace in this world even betrays a resemblance to the spread of a cancer:

incision        squeeze
bitter pellets
from watery pink
tissue

Yet this isn’t a story of the irreversible passage from life to death. There are acts of resistance, pointed and defiant:

a jittery revolutionary
posting messages

More fundamentally, the suffering endured here enacts a transformation. The poem’s speaker—and by extension those she addresses, those who are with her—emerge in a new form, “another self / positioning.” The speaker gives a name to this self, which is not only her own self, but the collective selves of shared experience and survival:

my            name is Estelle I turn
on my center

…………………………………..

                               all names are
different versions of the word star

…………………………………..

try         the word star
provisionally she
who        all of us

This pivoting around the word star recurs throughout the book, an act of affirmation that connects the speaker and those around her to the primal forces of light and energy and regeneration, forces that seemingly withstand even the destruction that mars the poem’s world. This is not to say that suffering and death are erased, for the procession of women with their wounded bundles continues:

they carry mangled
animals to the far
    edge            put
the creatures to rest

But the water’s edge, the “pacific rim,” is also a place of transformation; the water accepts the dead as if reabsorbing them into the cycle of life. And the women’s attention and mourning are essential to this cycle—the dead don’t return themselves to the sea, but must be carried there. This relationship between individual lives and the collective is at the complex core of this work. In the concentrated potency of Estelle Meaning Star, Estelle survives and reconfigures her name and her self through the recognition that she is one in a vast world, not just of shared suffering, but of shared life,

twinkling with