Finding Calm in the Rage: A Review of Laurie Rachkus Uttich’s Somewhere, a Woman Lowers the Hem of Her Skirt
Reviewed by Danielle Sarta
In her debut poetry collection, Somewhere, a Woman Lowers the Hem of Her Skirt, Laurie Rachkus Uttich skips right past wearing her heart on her sleeve and instead lays it out bare on the kitchen table, paired with words like a warm embrace and a cup of coffee for her readers to enjoy. These unfiltered poems full of raw emotion make reading the collection feel like having a conversation in the late hours of the night with a friend you haven’t had the chance to catch up with in a long time.
Published through Riot in Your Throat, a budding feminist press, this collection does not hold back on diving deep into the role of women in our society, and the kind of weight that’s placed on their shoulders from a very young age. The poems in this collection are split into five sections: n. girl, n. townie, n. daughter, n. mother, and she, her, hers. Within these sections, and through her own experiences as a daughter and a granddaughter, Uttich muses over the past lives of the women in her family, and how they suffered in similar ways to her. Through her experiences as a mother, she compares her own childhood to that of her three sons, and how their challenges in life are sometimes wildly different than hers were and continue to be. As a wife, she explores her role in marriage, and her connection with her children in juxtaposition with her husband’s connection to them. And as a woman, she yearns for a kinship with others around her in her feelings of displacement and anger.
Outside of womanhood, this collection also discusses topics such as mental health—like how Uttich’s cousin suffers from PTSD and how it’s handled by the family in the piece “I Guess PSTD Isn’t Some Cold You Can Just Catch”—grief—like how she deals with the passing of her own mother in the piece “Put Me to Rest Anywhere but Here: A Love Poem”—abuse—like the signs she recognizes on a student of hers in “To My Student with the Dime-Sized Bruises on the Back of Her Arms Who’s Still on Her Cell Phone”—and relationships—like the one explored between Uttich and the state of Florida itself in “I Think I’m Trying to Tell You I Sort of Love Orlando.”
But something that’s at the heart of most of these pieces is the feeling of anger, a sense of injustice. That anger could be for or at herself, or for or at someone else, but it is a constant undercurrent throughout the collection. From early on, Uttich writes “I wish we could talk about those fucking / fucks, those men always ahead of us in line, those laws only / they can change, those protests that make us feel better / until they don’t. Maybe we’re the same kind of mad?” She goes on to express her displeasure with herself and how compliant she’s become, and how she wishes she was more like that younger woman in front of her. Later, in “God Never Gives You More Than You Can Handle,” she lists a number of hardships that she and her family have had to endure, and while the language isn’t as blunt as in the previous piece, there is still that strong feeling of anger, or at least of indignation, at being made to suffer in this way to prove love.
That anger bleeds into grief, into the cold hours of being awake just before dawn, and it’s in this space that Uttich shares some of her most vulnerable pieces. “The Mother Packs Up Her Youngest Son for College While the Father Tells Her He Can’t Wait to Have Sex on the Kitchen Table” is one such piece. In it, she deals with a sense of grief that comes with recognizing an era of her life is over. She is also mourning the idea of herself as a mother and comes to terms with the fact that the weight she attached to being a mother has made it harder to remember how to be herself. She says, “Her sons may be leaving, but she is the one unmoored, oxygen-less, a childless / mother.” This piece poses a striking question: what becomes of a mother after her mothering years are over? Its answer is, for the moment, nothing. Nothing but grief, not quite ready to embark on all the journeys and adventures her husband suggests.
In another vulnerable piece, “It’s Been a Couple of Crappy Years,” Uttich shares a number of experiences she’s gone through in the past few years, from losing both of her parents within a short time, to the family dog dying, to her husband losing his job. But here, at the end of the piece, she manages to wrap up all of those events into a sweet final stanza that gives her reader the knowledge that even in the midst of those painful events, there are moments that help make it easier. This sense of hope, even if explored sarcastically or through pointed language, carries her reader to the collection’s closing, where the end of her final poem before the Postfix, “I’m Just Another White Woman Practicing Yoga,” focuses on the small moments of calm. Like the exhale at the end of a shavasana—the “corpse pose” in yoga—she creates a sense of perseverance in the face of anger and indignation: “a deer wandered into a cathedral / in France and stood in front / of the altar like he’s the gift / he is and it’s Friday / morning and my dog / smells like rain and / my youngest son / just texted Luv u / and / the God in me recognizes / the God in you.”
Perhaps this parting calm is the most striking thing about the collection. As the shavasana pose is one of the hardest to master because it is hard for us to naturally relax, in a world as vibrant and oftentimes chaotic as today, it is hard for us to master the calm. Yet, Uttich accomplishes this at the end of an emotionally rough and exposed collection that leaves her reader feeling laid just as bare along with her, as if they have each exchanged a part of themselves by the last page.
Find out more about Somewhere, a Woman Lowers the Hem of Her Skirt (and read some of the poems) here: Author - Read (laurieuttich.com)
Danielle “Dani” Sarta is a queer, trans-racial adoptee, who grew up in a white religious household in central Florida, who writes poetry and creative nonfiction equally about their life and experiences, often creating hybrid pieces between the two genres. She is a first year MFA student at the University of Central Florida, and an active member of Orlando’s literary community, as well as an assistant poetry editor and reader for The Florida Review, and a reader for the 2023 Firecracker Awards in creative nonfiction. Find her on Twitter @daniellesarta and online at daniellesarta.com.
Laurie Rachkus Uttich is the author of the poetry collection, Somewhere, a Woman Lowers the Hem of Her Skirt (Riot in Your Throat, 2022). To order a copy, please visit the publisher here. Laurie’s prose and poetry have been published in Autofocus; Burrow Press; Brevity; Creative Nonfiction; Fourth Genre; Iron Horse Literary Review; JuxtaProse; The Missouri Review: Poem of the Week; Poets and Writers; Rattle; River Teeth; Ruminate; Split Lip Magazine; The Sun; Superstition Review; Sweet: A Literary Confection; Terrain.org; and others. Laurie teaches at the University of Central Florida and leads creative writing workshops at a maximum-security correctional center for men in Orlando.
