Book Review: “Dressing the Bear” by Susan L. Leary

Dressing the Bear by Susan L. Leary
Trio House Press, 2024
Review by Elizabeth Sylvia

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I live in a place hit hard by the opioid epidemic. In the past ten years, I’ve attended funerals and read death notices for too many people who, like Susan L. Leary’s brother Brian, lived with addictions and died leaving behind stunned and loving families whose grief is tangled with anger and guilt. In her heartbreaking new collection Dressing the Bear, winner of the 2023 Louise Bogan Award from Trio House Press, Leary considers how one navigates such loss, when both the person and the hope for a better future have been taken.  

Brian died in 2020, and Leary’s book follows her grief in almost real time, not as a neat process towards acceptance but as a cycle — or a cyclone whose winds offer up memories and hopes, bad dreams and emptiness. Throughout, Leary speaks directly to Brian, begging him to “let” her “tell” him who he is so that he “might finally leave” her, offers
                           to write the tiniest,
                           most unambitious poem 
                           to keep [him] alive,
                           even if [he] must be
                           alive elsewhere.
The collection’s most elemental paradox is that Leary can only let go of Brian by holding him tight within her poems, and every attempt reminds her that he is already, unrelentingly, gone. “I call to you,” Leary writes in the opening poem, “but you have forgotten / your own name.”  

Grief’s whirling, nonlinear nature is a structural, as well as thematic, concern in Leary’s poems. In the title poem, “Dressing the Bear,” the speaker describes taking Brian to Build-a-Bear Workshop so he can stuff a present for the girl he loves, including with delicate care “only the good parts of himself” for a young woman whom the speaker later sees at his funeral. A fragment of this poem re-emerges in the later poem “Blessings,” when the speaker reiterates that making the bear was “the first time / my brother cared for a thing / without having to call it / his own.” Now the bear’s heartbeat is reconfigured as her brother’s, the speaker declaring, “In the dead of my hands / I still carry my brother’s heartbeat // through the light.” The sister who marked his rite of passage towards adulthood, his generosity born of young love, now won’t—can’t—give her brother away. His death has untaught her this ability. With such intense imagery threading the collection, the final poem’s assertion that “[t]here is no more burning, / […] just light” reads more as a wish than a resolution. 

Leary navigates the complicated balance of loving Brian with language that shifts between beauty and horror, invoking dreams and dream imagery to capture the impossible contradiction. In one poem, there are “spiders, / asleep in the eye sockets.” Elsewhere, her “grown brother’s casket [is] a kiddie pool / filled with boiling water,” and there are “deer antlers in [his] chest.” In places, the desperately vivid language reminds of Natalie Diaz’s collection When My Brother was an Aztec, another book that examines how addiction transforms the sibling bond. The hallucinogenic imagery reaches an apex in Leary’s “Ice,” as the speaker writes
                           Soon, the deer will escape 
                           the body’s thickets for a life more spacious than a single 
                           room, for thick velvet curtains, tiny scraps of meat dangling
                           from the meandering crown, while you remain coatless,
                           only the satisfaction of knowing what’s graced you,
                           hurt you. 

Awake, Leary’s speaker is unraveled by loss but knows she can’t rewrite her brother’s death or his life, that “[w]e’d all be better off if we stopped trying to invent what’s / possible.”  Still, she sometimes fights her desire to make a different story, to “patch the holes in [her brother’s] body with dryer sheets” so that everything feels whole and clean. Brian was a boy who “walked through the world with a knife / strapped to his hip,” a boy whose “future avoid[ed] examination,” whose death the speaker long imagined: “worried when [she] got the call, [she]’d be unprepared.” This turns out to be another of the book’s paradoxes— the speaker is, physically, prepared for the event she has felt coming. And yet, the depth of loss is no less surreal for having been foretold. To counter it, she offers other images: the eleven-year-old “learning to whisper all the cuss words & dirty jokes” becomes the adult who called from a jailhouse viewing of Property Brothers to say “he can build a better house” where the speaker can live by the sea with “sheets of sun stacked to the ceiling like paper.” The house is “built in the company of tv static / […] feces on the wall & pillows soaked in piss,” a grotesque, dehumanizing environment through which Brian’s real self still shows. “[Y]es, even there,” affirms the speaker, “my brother thought beauty.” 

With Dressing the Bear, Leary has built such a house herself, a house of dreams that holds Brian in all his beauty and pain. Reading, I feel grateful to have been invited inside to witness Leary’s grief and love for Brian. Dressing the Bear is an intensely personal record, but it is also the record of thousands of beloved brothers who have “clothed [themselves] in sky & paper,” and whose families, like Leary’s, ask questions that can never be answered. “We are all obsessed with what happened,” she writes. “Where were we when it was happening?”  Dressing the Bear shows us that she was always deeply present. 

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Susan L. Leary is a poet, writer, and editor living in Indianapolis, IN. She is the author of four poetry collections: Dressing the Bear (Trio House Press, July 2024), selected by Kimberly Blaeser to win the Louise Bogan Award; A Buffet Table Fit for Queens (Small Harbor Publishing, 2023), winner of the Washburn Prize; Contraband Paradise (Main Street Rag, 2021); and This Girl, Your Disciple (Finishing Line Press, 2019), finalist for The Heartland Review Press Chapbook Prize and semi-finalist for The Elyse Wolf Prize with Slate Roof Press.

Elizabeth Sylvia is the author of None But Witches: Poems on Shakespeare’s Women (2022), winner of the 2021 Three Mile Harbor Press Book Award and My Little Book of Domestic Anxieties, forthcoming from Ballerini Book Press.  She has been a semi- or finalist in competitions sponsored by The Burnside Review, C&R Press, DIAGRAM, 30 West, Rare Swan, and Wolfson Press, and is a reader for SWWIM Every Day.

ID: Cover of Dressing the Bear by Susan L. Leary.