Shout

Anderson remembers her grandfather teaching her the language of trees and showing her how to listen to them. She narrates an episode in which a Boy Scout troop makes its way through the woods led by an older couple. The woman uses a chainsaw to saw through a tree and “expectations” while her husband looks on with pride. Anderson narrates her own experience in the third person, referring to a girl who is so tall she feels she has to stoop over but is encouraged by her family to stand erect, like her tall mother and sister.

She then switches back to a first-person personal narrative of her mother’s death many years later. Her mother suffered several miscarriages with male children but was able to carry two girls, a fact that Anderson feels is significant. She wishes she could have understood her mother’s many contradictions more but understands it is her mother’s time to die and, “she could cross the river home” (276). Her mother’s death occurs the same month as Anderson’s final menstrual cycle and the beginning of menopause. She dreams that instead of menstruating blood, she menstruates ink. Her father lives five years longer than her mother, but he eventually refuses a lifesaving pacemaker as he feels his mind begin to fade.

Anderson invokes beech trees and the ways in which trees support one another in a forest. She also conjures the image of a spine or trunk and how it holds up not just trees but humans, too, promising the reader, “that after you speak […] your backbone / will unfurl until / you can again dance / to the beat / of your steadfast / heart” (290). In her final poem, she tells the reader that she wrote this book because stories and narratives can cause real change.