The Lantern Room by Chloe Honum: Review by Rebecca Smith
/Chloe Honum’s 2022 poetry collection, The Lantern Room, is a meditation on how reckoning with loss metamorphoses the language of self-expression. As the speaker’s search for identity and direction evolves, the forms and themes of the poems shift accordingly. Still, nature remains a constant presence throughout the collection with the speaker searching for kinship in wildlife and tracking time through the shifting seasons. Recurring figures and images link pieces together and present the collection as one continuous journey that quietly but steadily develops across the book’s three sections: “Luna Moth at Night,” “The Common Room,” and “Self-Portrait with Praying Mantis.” Insects, rain, and a hooded woman are a few of the details that reappear in various poems, drawing on and continuing a history of meaning with each occurrence. The poems constantly push imagery into unexpected territory, asking the reader to reconcile pre-existing associations with the connections the speaker makes in the moment. In the poem “Teaching Poetry at the Juvenile Detention Center in Fayetteville, Arkansas,” for example, Honum features a flea as an emblem of optimism, writing “In a concrete / tomb, hope is anything / that travels in big leaps.”
In Honum’s collection, the speaker becomes inextricably linked with language as the latter reflects the mental and emotional state of the former. In the first section, “Luna Moth at Night,” language is presented in pieces and threatened with further erasure. Overtly, in the section’s eponymous poem, the speaker admits to an unstable relationship with language produced by a predisposition to silence:
I wonder if writing
and erasing is one of my
creaturely instincts—
fingers darting,
sentences there, then gone,
the alphabet swept flat
by silence.
Burnt pieces of newspaper, an unconvincing pantomime, and unreadable reminders written in a field are more examples of lost language in the book’s first section. These moments, among others, familiarize us with a voice quieted by loss and in need of recovery and rediscovery.
Such a journey takes time, as the book’s second and longest section, “The Common Room,” testifies. The poems here respond to the silence of the previous section by channeling the diverse voices and experiences of patients in a psychiatric hospital’s day-ward. An absence of language is replaced with an abundance of language as each moment, no matter how simple or mundane, is recorded. In “New England Lyric,” a counselor asks patients to write “an inspiring quote or lyric.” The speaker states:
I go with All you need is love,
which I think of as
a question, a true or false.
Don’t worry, be happy,
writes the smiley young teacher
whose meds are dangerously off.
The initial positivity of the lyrics doesn’t last. The speaker’s confident quote devolves into a question while the teacher’s “don’t worry” hides a serious concern. The enjambment and stanza breaks give the inspiring lyrics a second to hang in isolated optimism before qualifying them with the patients’ trauma and anxieties. By also detailing the lives of other patients, the poems extend the importance of language as testimony to everyone.
Prose poems are also prevalent in the second section, their large chunks of text visually representing the shift to abundant language. In contrast to the carefully curated lines of other pieces, the prose poems embrace the fluidity of natural line breaks and capture the energy of unrestrained confessions. As if responding to the counselors’ requests for openness, the pieces read as a chronicle of the speaker’s past and present, reflecting the need “to go on naming, even if all I said to you / this winter was snow, snow, snow” (“Note Home”).
The third and final section, “Self-Portrait with Praying Mantis,” follows the speaker’s attempt to make sense of the language around them and rediscover their voice. Throughout the section, the poems continue to embody the struggle to move on after a loss—to “sign at the end of an old, unreadable year” (“Document”). However, the speaker also begins voicing their feelings and fears more transparently than in previous moments. In the poem “At Skull Creek in Fayetteville,” they bluntly speak of their sorrows and concerns and openly admit their difficulty expressing those feelings: “I miss you, / and worse, I want to say it the way another poet would.” The poems slowly regain the language of understanding and identity that was silenced in the first section, ending with two self-portraits and the repeated image of a praying mantis. The same voice that called the “green text” body of the mantis “indecipherable” in the first section (“Nightfall in Spring”), now reads it as “a model of dignity” (“Self-Portrait with Praying Mantis and Endurance”).
Despite the speaker’s unsteady relationship with language, Chloe Honum’s The Lantern Room contains concise poems with thought-provoking lines begging for deep examination. The collection tells a story through both the said and unsaid, placing extra importance on the diction and syntax throughout. Poems unfold, straying from their initial thoughts to explore interconnected but distinct ideas before closing on a powerful, encapsulating line or phrase. It is fitting then that the final poem ends with the word “honesty,” a quality embodied in a speaker and collection that openly explores the shifting language of pain and recovery.
Note: At the end of the book, Honum notes that the speaker of the collection is "not identical” to herself and that the details in the poems are “not inherently nonfiction or autobiographical.”
“The Lantern Room” by Chloe Honum; published by Tupelo Press.
Rebecca Smith is a 2023 graduate from Roanoke College who majored in Literature Studies and Creative Writing. She worked as an intern and Reviews editor for Roanoke Review.
