Rhian Elizabeth’s maybe i’ll call gillian anderson speaks to the liminal spaces we experience as we transition from one role to another in our relationships.
The book begins with the titular piece where a lonely mom says goodbye to a daughter moving away to college. Next, the same narrator has an elaborate dream of befriending an elderly stranger who comforts her after the loss of her own grandmother and father (drowning on a stranger’s couch). Other pieces depict a mom who feels needed again while caring for a drunken teenager (a new and precarious thing) and a still-grieving queer woman who remembers how in an ill-fated relationship, her lover’s snoring sounded too much like her deceased grandmother’s tea kettle (to the girl who said i’ll never be happy because i’m too picky).
Grief becomes a motif in this collection, which includes pieces referencing the losses of the narrator’s father, grandmother, and past lovers. Sometimes the losses are the focus of the poems, other times they’re mentioned as asides adding depth to a piece on another topic. The daughter’s move towards adulthood becomes a catalyst for the narrator to take stock of her life and consider how she will navigate 40 years of grief and self-discovery.
The prose is all lower case with contractions and some punctuation shorthands (the & sign) giving the book a familiar feeling, like reading the narrator’s Instagram posts. In keeping with this, she includes tidbits of unglamorous daily life: killing spiders, vomiting, drinking soda for breakfast.
She also speaks openly of trauma from verbal abuse at work (glasgow) and sexual abuse from a creepy older man (the photograph & the man who took it). And, of her own awkward past, complete with mornings hung over with strange women in her bed (i drank too much and woke up in sweden next to a blonde) and a relationship that made her feel like a trapped lobster in a cage (lobster).
Dreams and dream-states serve as another motif in this collection. Characters have actual dreams, sleepwalk, get lost and knock on the wrong doors, have lengthy waking reveries, and drive through fog. Being halfway between waking and sleeping echoes the liminal spaces in which the narrator finds herself and also the dislocation of grief and of major life transitions.
In the end, the book comes full circle, checking in with the lonely mother whose daughter left home (i didn’t call gillian anderson). Remembering that she “learned a long time ago that beautiful women aren’t the solution to [her] problems and because, you know, [she doesn’t] have her fucking phone number,” she decides against calling actress Gillian Anderson. Instead, she finds her confidence and her center, meditating, going back to school, reconnecting with friends, and nervously wishing her daughter all the best.
Rhian Elizabeth’s maybe i’ll call gillian anderson is available here from Broken Sleep Press.