THE RED CANOE: LOVE IN ITS MAKING

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A verse memoir
Available where books are sold
ISBN #978-1-933880-0-08-2

Cavankerry Press
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The Red Canoe: Love in Its Making is a memoir in poems that explores the anatomy of a marriage – underbelly and crown. A practicing psychologist and former marriage therapist herself, Handler unveils the multileveled role of parents, religion, children, illness and the emotional/psychological development of the two spouses on the frail and treacherous terrain that is marriage. Her gift and that of this book is that she manages a balance of perspectives; one identifies with the empathizes with both spouses. Paramount for them, as for all married couples, and their primitive, conflicting wishes to merge and to remain separate. Though poetry, Red Canoe reads like a novel. Handler manages the emotional highs and lows by manipulating words and groups of words – the page becomes canvas and letters and words are art objects that mute or intensify the feelings expressed. A must read for couples, Red Canoe is also a valuable clinical tool. A graceful blend of her experience and wisdom in two professions – poet and psychologist – Handler offers her readers the gift of her honesty, her unflinching commitment to tell the whole story and her trust in the power of hard work in the making of a love-filled and trusting marriage.

COMMENTS:

The Red Canoe is a work of tremendous metaphoric complexity and richness, in which a woman’s pain – braided into a troubled marriage, branded upon an injured body – ultimately find relief in the transformative power of language. Joan Cusack Handler’s dual guises as therapist and poet merge as one in this healing book which, in the end, is an articulation of a keen intellect animated by heart and hope.
--Raphael Campo, M.D.

When I began to read The Red Canoe, the poems’ spatiality perplexed me. I wondered about the bizarre shapes and halts of the words and even the letters on the page. Slowly, the meaning of the spaces visited me. These poems invite their reader into private, hidden, unutterable spaces—the cul-de-sac behind the cervix, the gaps between adjoining vertebral bodies, the marriage bed. What courage it must take to see with this dramatic, piercing gaze. In acts not of anatomy but of vivisection, the blade of sight cuts through skin, fat, fascia, down to bone. Handler finds the very most fundamental elements of that which is caught in her net—the cruelty of Catholics and Freudians in their superior and unforgiving sneers at their deepest selves, the remote but tender silence of the grey-eyed husband who can only steal looks at his wife, the possession so intense of the son that it can only be rendered in prose.

Love here exceeds its bounds. Spilling over into body, food, sex, childhood, appetites, ideas, and pain, the poems achieve a brilliant fusion of the particular and the universal, the seen and the undergone, the body and the self. We are lustier, brawnier, better-fed beings for the prospects of Handler’s gifts.

-- Rita Charon, M.D., Ph.D
Professor of Clinical Medicine
Director, Program in Narrative Medicine
College of Physicians and Surgeons of Columbia University

In The Red Canoe: Love in Its Making Joan Handler brings both honesty and balance to the intricate world that is a marriage. Her means are consistently inventive as her lines enact feelings and thoughts. Her focus is unremitting as she makes the reader feel how much pain and glory can go into two people trying to accept one another. This book is unmistakably poetry but has the feel of a novel – one wants to know what will happen to these people.
-- Baron Wormser

The Red Canoe: Love in Its Making
A Verse Memoir by Joan Cusack Handler

The Red Canoe: Love in Its Making is a verse memoir that explores the anatomy of a marriage—underbelly and crown. A practicing psychologist and former marriage therapist herself, Handler unveils the complicated multileveled role of parents, religion, children, illness and the emotional/psychological development of the two individuals on the frail and treacherous terrain that is marriage.

Unlike many who approach the topic with bias --either highly romanticized or with a critical ax to grind, Handler’s commitment is to honesty as she sets out to uncover the true mystery of marriage. Thus, though The Red Canoe is written from the point of view of the wife, Handler is not interested in a one-sided story; her gift and that of this book is that she manages a balance of perspectives ; one identifies with and empathizes with both spouses--her husband as well as the speaker. As her father-in-law states about his own wife early on in the book, Handler ‘understands what goes on between man and woman’—the fusions and fissures. And contrary to public opinion, Handler concludes that love is not enough to sustain and repair the fragile relationship that ensues when two people commit to make a life together.

Though poetry, Red Canoe, reads like a novel. Handler sections the book in 5 parts: Legacy, Mothers and Their Sons, Fusion, Love Making, and Homes. As marriage and family therapy theorists have long understood, in every marriage, there are at least 6 people—the couple themselves and each set of parents. In Handler’s case, that number jumps to 9 or 10: for the wife, God is always insistent; for husband and wife, their son is a central character; and for the whole family--husband, wife and son, the wife’s relentless physical pain and multiple surgeries become an ever present 4th member of the family. Often the most powerful and resistant to influence, pain shoulders out more sustaining emotional states such as joy, peace, sexual pleasure and lightheartedness.

The relationships that predate the marriage are explored --who these two people were as children, who their parents were and how they imprinted their values and opinions on the vulnerable young boy and girl provides the bedrock for the adults these two become and for the hurdles they encounter in their attempt to live in the world and create a lasting marriage. Paramount for them as for all married couples are their primitive conflicting wishes to merge and to remain separate. These are also the primary elements in the most powerful and slippery challenge in the majority of relationships—the draw toward and away from intimacy. And the ways that their individual neuroses make the battle to have a trusting and generous marriage a high wire act. These people struggle. They want to find a way to be together happily and peacefully, but their own needs are constantly derailing them.

Essentially, it is this couples’ tenacity and commitment to both their marriage on the one hand and their own personal growth on the other that eventually wins them peace and happiness together. Both psychologists, they share a language and understand the profound impact that their earlier more primitive relationships and feelings play on who they are today separately and together. Her wish to merge and her profound need to be loved and be seen as good enough first by God and her parents and later by her husband is at constant odds with his wish to be alone and silent and his need for but mistrust of closeness that is founded in his relationship with his mother. Both spouses have overbearing, critical mothers and passive, silent fathers. Each expects the spouse to treat them as their parents did. And so they arm themselves. Trust is hard one.

In her quest to bring to life subtleties of nuance and gesture and to tell stories that branch out and whisper or resound from many disparate places/voices, Handler abandons the left margin in her creation of poems. She manages the emotional highs and lows by manipulating words and groups of words –the page becomes canvas and letters and words are art objects that mute or intensify the feelings expressed. Letters, words and lines move across and down the page according to the thrust, reticence or urgency of the voice.

A must read for couples, Red Canoe is also a valuable clinical tool for health care practitioners—psychiatrists and psychologists, marriage and family therapists and social workers. A graceful blend of her experience and wisdom in two professions—poet and psychologist—Handler offers her readers the gift of her honesty, her unflinching commitment to tell the whole story and her trust in the power of struggle and hard work in the making of a love-filled and trusting marriage. As renowned poet and memoirist, Baron Wormser, says,” We care about these people. We want to know what happens to them.”