If Some God Shakes Your House

By Jennifer Franklin

Jennifer Franklin reimagines an Antigone for our times in her third collection, If Some God Shakes Your House, where filial devotion and ossified roles of gendered labor become the engine of her defiance. Franklin’s Antigone is ferocious, feeling, and unafraid of the consequences of speaking the truth to power about the political atrocities she has witnessed and personal traumas she has withstood. With a sensitivity that equally elevates the quotidian and the classical, and an attention that moves from the ancient ruins of Pompeii to the right of bodily autonomy and agency stripped away by our own Supreme Court, Franklin reveals the high stakes of our moment where “the one who does the judging judges things all wrong.” Franklin’s Antigone has embraced the sacrifice of self for something greater—a dual devotion to her disabled daughter and to her art. “For twenty years, I have been disappearing,” she writes in the book’s final poem, yet she continues to sing.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Four Way Books
• Release date: Mar 15, 2023
• ISBN: 9781954245495

Book preview

As Antigone—

I’m not greedy. I will go

when I’m led from the city

to the tomb. I don’t want

glory. They have never

understood me. It’s not

a death wish that made me

tend to you, my love,

even though I knew

nothing could save you.

I couldn’t let go—

our legs side by side,

as we slept, the flowers

you lined up in the soil,

after I picked them.

How you wouldn’t accept

they were dead.

That planting them again

would not let them bloom.

As Antigone—

I buried the body at night

but knew I would still be caught.

The sky watched, a harder

shade of blue, as I knelt

above your lifeless body.

After I held dirt in my curved

palms, I couldn’t return home

to the yellow sheets or eyelet

canopy. It didn’t happen how

they described it—doing the deed

that doomed me to death.

It wasn’t fast—over before

I could stop myself. It was deliberate.

I heard music—a deep lament

led me. I felt water but my mouth

remained dry. It held the words

anger and apple. You thought

I was going to say soil and love.

The wall of the city is high. Climbing,

I scrape my knees. When I see blood,

I believe I’m still alive. I know I will die.

Memento Mori: Greek Gold

Nothing organic remains. Wooden graves cradle

pomegranate beads, earrings, combs. You are familiar

with this ritual of adorning flesh with ornaments

that will outlast us. Gold diadems and crowns host two