Growing up as a Mormon, I was taught nothing is more sacred than creation, that our ability to create, as women in particular, is the reason for our existence. My rebellions: poetry, creation on my terms, delaying motherhood for an MFA and writing my first book before having my first child (at 27, the horror!).
Like many “second great awakening” faiths, Mormonism has a violent, colonial, and patriarchal history with which members like me continue to grapple. My ancestors fled religious persecution in Denmark, first, and then Illinois, only to drive Utes, Goshutes, Paiutes, Shoshone, and Navajo peoples from their lands to “claim” their promised Zion in Utah. “This is place” Brigham Young said. He did not care who was already living in that place if his people could find peace.
Bone Valley Hymnal is a reaching toward the women who created me, a rejection of the men who used faith as an excuse for their violence, and a promise to my future children that I will not continue those violent legacies. Instead I will allow poetry to lead me and my children toward a future where their options for creation extend beyond parenting. Where they can choose a different path than one of forced faith. Bone Valley Hymnal is an acknowledgment of my faiths, doubts, and frustrations because when church didn’t feel safe, poetry was always the place where I could safely return.
The first poem of the collection is an ancestral sonnet. Each of the 14 lines represents a different woman from my matriarchal lineage relying on ancestral data from Family Search (an app I have the huge privilege of accessing freely through my LDS membership record). In many of my family lines, when you go back 14 generations, there is a surprising amount of information on the men, and almost no information of the women. These gaps in my history are a kind of grief I work through in the poem as I honor the women of “whom we know nothing.” The lack of early archival research allows for a kind of volta when information about my ancestors begins to appear. These pieces of history we do have for some of my ancestors hint at some potential rebellions of my matriarchs, and honor some of the hardships they faced. The poem concludes with my mother. While writing the poem I texted her and asked what she wanted to be remembered for. She replied, “For how much I love you.”
Another poem, “Extermination Order” alludes to the Hawn’s Mill massacre of 1838 where 17 Mormons were killed by Missouri militia men, and to the Mountain Meadows Massacre of 1857 where Mormon settlers killed at least 120 members of the Baker–Fancher wagon train. I bring both up, not to condone in any way the atrocities committed by members of my faith, but to condemn their willingness to enact such violence on others after experiencing it themselves. The poem is structured into 12 parts drawing on religious symbolism of the 12 apostolic leaders of Christ’s biblical church and uses language unique to LDS scripture, specifically Doctrine and Covenants 121. I cannot make up for the loss of life, for the way the LDS church lied and hid the truth about their actions for years after, but I can refuse to ignore our mistakes. I can look them in the face and call them what they are.
Other poems are more personal to my lived experience, referencing abuse suffered at the hands of “righteous” men. In many of those poems, I tend toward the surreal, like in “PoppyTongue” where I write “my poppyblood tongue / straddles the gun of his abyss / no longer.” The surreal acts then, as a hyper-reality perhaps to protect myself from the truth of what happened, or perhaps to create a new truth.
Many of these poems were written from a pew staring at the page instead of the pulpit. Many of them rely on conversations with my mother and grandmothers. It was an sacred and humbling privilege to step into archival research of the stories of my ancestors, and to be able to honor Utah’s ecosystems, which have come under threat in recent years. I love Utah, and so must recognize what violences allowed me to be raised there.
The final poem in Bone Valley Hymnal “Those Who Can’t” is a promise to my progeny that I won’t ignore where we come from, that I will never shy from condemning abuse and violence enacted in the name of faith, and that they can create their own path forward. In the poem, my daughter buries me. Her lineage extends in a “line of graves, / a long ribcage.” Our legacies can be heavy. We can choose to set them down.
