Review: Too Much Nothing by Elisha May Rubacha // Jeremy Luke Hill
When the Toronto Star ran a piece in 1992 on Roberta Bondar, Canada’s first female astronaut, they decided to focus on how much she spent cleaning up the space shuttle. Elisha May Rubacha’s Too Much Nothing from Apt. 9 Press is a chapbook of poems that loosely circulate around her. Using Bondar as a touchstone, the book explores gender discrimination in relation to science, expertise, family, and childhood.The strength of the volume is in how its poems interrelate in order to comment on these concerns. While some of the pieces would feel incomplete apart from the collection, together they form compelling connections in a whole range of registers.Take one sequence of poems. The first relates an incident where a woman is groped at a parent-teacher meeting, followed by a poem in which a “nice older man” assumes it was Bondar’s gender that earned her a trip to space, not her scientific credentials. The third features a group of young boys waiting impatiently for their sisters to get Bondar’s autograph. The sequence as a whole is preceded by the Toronto Star’s ill-chosen headline about the time Bondar spent cleaning. The layering of different kinds of discrimination here—from overt sexual harassment to generational gender assumptions to gender-defined role models, all in the context of a national newspaper that thinks the most compelling detail about a female astronaut is the amount of time she spends tidying up—form a kind of constellation of concerns that work in a far more subtle and nuanced way than they would alone. They are strengthened by their proximity and their interconnectedness. Another such sequence begins with the second poem in the collection, “model rocket,” which introduces the theme of technologically enhanced vision through a description of Bondar’s space photography:
in her large format landscape photography it is possible to zoom in on the black spots in the salt flats until they are buffalo
The quality of Bondar’s perspective, represented by her photography, is represented here as allowing others to see things differently, with greater detail and clarity. On its own this is a strong and meaningful image, but a couple of poems later, “microgravity” deepens it further, describing the physical and psychological effects of being in space, and then ending with another allusion to photography:
back on the ground even large format can’t match the scale
This passage implies that Bondar’s celestial perspective is in fact unrepresentable once back on earth, even through the incredible detail of her photography. Despite being able to zoom in on individual buffalo on the salt flats, she can’t adequately express the scale of her experience in space, the perspective that it has given her.The very next poem has the lengthy title of “seeing the world as one planet like that, I realized no one has a right over any other person.” It reads, in entirety,
while in orbit Roberta could see without glasses
These lines, playing again with ideas of seeing and perspective, imply that the clarity and detail of Roberta’s perspective was never a function of looking through the photographic lens anyway. In fact, it was never a function of seeing through any technological assistance at all, not even in its most basic forms, like eyeglasses. It was a function, rather, of merely being in orbit, of bearing a certain relation to the planet.In any given poem, these themes might only operate in a narrow register, but collectively they form a complex and satisfying intervention into the questions they interrogate. They become layers that Rubacha forms, one atop the other, in order to create a volume that is more complex and nuanced than any of its constituent parts.
Jeremy Luke Hill is the publisher at Gordon Hill Press, a literary publisher based in Guelph, Ontario. He is also the Managing Director of Vocamus Writers Community, a non-profit community organization that supports book culture in Guelph.He has written a collection of poetry, short prose, and photography called Island Pieces; four chapbooks of poetry called Poetry of Thought, CanCon, Trumped, and These My Streets; two poetry broadsheets called Grounded and Indexical; and an ongoing series of poetry broadsheets called Conversations with Viral Media. He also writes a semi-regular column on chapbooks for The Town Crier. His writing has appeared in The Bull Calf, CV2, EVENT Magazine, Filling Station, Free Fall, The Goose, HA&L, The Maynard, paperplates, Queen Mob’s Tea House, The Rusty Toque, The Town Crier, and The Windsor Review.
