Once, during my MFA, I had poetry workshop with Dean Young. A classmate brought in a poem about Alan Turing. The poem didn’t name Turing. Dean said, “What is this poem about?” I said, “Alan Turing.” Dean made a face, “How do you know that?” “I Googled it,” I said. Dean said, “We shouldn’t need to Google what a poem is about.”

I mention this incident in relation to the book-length poem Bullet Points by Jennifer A Sutherland (River River Books, 2023) because Bullet Points is very much about readerly experience. I mean the experience of a literal reader, sitting with a book, or a reader and interpreter of the world and the events in it. Reading is about resonance. Certain lines resonate, and we remember them, underline them, and maybe Google them.

While reading Bullet Points, I Googled Tin Drum (d. Volker Schlöndorff, 1979) because it is listed in the acknowledgements. I also Googled the court case and the shooting that weave through the pages. The court case Jennifer A Sutherland, lawyer, became a part of because of the shooting, not the case she was on her way to argue in court. Realities mix together, as do speaker and author, shooting victim and witness.

The facts of the case are that I attended a Zoom reading featuring Jennifer A Sutherland, poet, and when I heard the first few pages of the book, I had to read the rest. The first moments of Bullet Points hooked me with the transition between the twenty-first-century American hotel room where a woman gets ready to go to work and the early twentieth-century scene from Tin Drum where a criminal goes into hiding under a woman’s skirt in what is now Poland:

The world outside is bustling, moving like a market square, importing, exporting. I carry what happens next inside me like a balance sheet.

A man is filmed beneath a woman’s skirts while she prepares to eat. Her skirts are wide, wide. She seats a country or an idea.

What do these two things (woman in hotel, woman in Tin Drum) have in common? The connectivity between seemingly unrelated things, like the connection between the language of the law and the way humans are treated outside the law, is one of this book’s projects. The speaker recounts a drive through Wilmington, Delaware with the line, “History and all its contexts woven into the seams of what we experience,” a description that applies equally to someone standing before the law and to a city shaped by colonialism.

Here, Jennifer A Sutherland, lawyer, works with Jennifer A Sutherland, poet, to create a complex narrative about reading and experiencing the world from two of its realities. The law judges and penalizes someone who opens fire on a group of people; a poet tries to make sense of the experience of being present during an act of violence. They are two different types of readers.

The lines central to the project appear just before the speaker begins to recount the act of violence that threads through the book:

A lawyer’s job is to draw connections between one fact and another proposition. A lawyer looks to precedent.

A poet’s job is to speak connections between things not recognizable as facts but which are true.

As a sidenote, I am not a lawyer, but stories from the law often resonate with me. For example, the young, white Stanford student accused of sexual assault, and the white male judge who heard the case. The judge was lenient because he said he saw himself in the young man. Which is to say that the law is completely subjective when you get down to it, or, as Jennifer A Sutherland, lawyer, puts it:

The law is such a mess of fictions.

Is reality filtered through a multitude of private lenses.

And in fact, the case of the Stanford student is relevant here because the pages of Bullet Points document case after case of the ways power and point of view operate in the law, not just in the courtroom, but in the profession, one of the professions to which Jennifer A Sutherland belongs.

I think about the law a lot. Who it favors, who it does not. Bullet Points considers the ground in-between. The poem makes the case that the individuals present at shootings, even if not physically injured, are pierced with a different kind of bullet, and those wounds never heal. The law has nothing to say about these injuries despite the fact that so many of us sustain them.

And now we come to the poet’s work, which is to identify things that are true, even if not fact. The truth is that the speaker of this poem shares some basic life experiences with one of the victims of the shooting. While Bullet Points is most prominently and ostensibly about a lawyer being incidentally present at a shooting, the details of the shooting and those involved in it are also relevant to the lawyer’s personal life. The victims of the shooting were Christine Belford and a friend who accompanied her to court so that Christine would be safe from her ex-husband, David M.

Christine Belford and David M. had three children. J. and I also have three children.

Thus begin the parallels between the victim of the shooting and the speaker of the poem. Two central traumas come crashing together in the event of one morning: the violence and fear of the actual shooting and the violence and fear that women often experience in relation to their (often male) partners. The poem relays details of the persecution, harassment, and probable abuse Christine Belford endured before she died. The speaker of the poem, often restrained, circuitous, elliptical, but also sometimes direct, identifies with Christine Belford—that the speaker and Christine Belford are much the same is a truth, even if there are no exhibits in court to prove it. The parts of this poem connect in myriad ways. Sometimes, in fiction, an author creates these connections to serve the plot. Sometimes these connections are already present in real life, and it only takes looking in order to find and reveal them.

The law looks to precedent, and precedent fills these pages: the long history of the law and property rights, which included—and continue to include—women. A man (for example, David M., Christine Belford’s ex-husband) would sooner kill his wife than give up his property rights, which were conferred by a few words spoken in the eye of the law. Bullet Points is explicitly lyric—proclaims itself so—not confessional. The brain in a situation of tragedy or trauma deals often in intense and not always logical associations. You might call them visions, almost dreams. Dislocated memories. The speaker’s biographical details don’t have the feel of raw confession but rather of connective tissue between historical, legal facts and precedent.

When I read Sutherland’s line “Some language is, in fact, a verbal act,” it took me a moment to understand what she meant: language creates circumstance and reality. It creates a legal circumstance, such as marriage, in which power is conferred. It also creates fear and injury, as in cyberstalking, textual harassment, and threats. This book is threaded through with references to repeated and multifaceted oppression of women: through fashion, through literature, through the legal system, through marriage, through texts, on Twitter, and at work, and how those verbal acts have physical effects on the body.

Metaphor is a kind of fiction. It propels a narrative by projecting it in or on another body. And the body carries on the business. It’s a simple calculation.

Bullet Points examines the ways in which we can be or not be in our bodies, and the way trauma manifests physically. The central character of Tin Drum controls his growth so that, as he ages, his body remains a boy’s. He appears to be a boy, but there is a man inside his body. The woman in Tin Drum who hides a criminal under her skirt appears to be a woman, but there is a man inside her (impregnating her) and inside the space she inhabits (her skirt). Likewise, the speaker of this poem seems to inhabit Christine Belford’s body—is harassed, is shot—and in some way can’t leave. This is certainly not a fact, but it is a truth. It is not something for the law, but rather for the poet.

Tin Drum, based on the 1959 novel by German writer Günter Grass, takes place in Danzig (now Gdańsk, Poland) in the years before and during World War II, when one family member might be a Nazi, and another might be killed by them. The Jewish shop owner who supplies tin drums might be harassed and have his shop vandalized. The film highlights the ways in which terrible tragedies can occur when enough people are complicit in acts of compliance and violence, such as the abuse of women, racism, genocide, the abuses of law, and the abuse of the right to bear arms.

Bullet Points reminds me of Penelope, weaving and unraveling in order to keep at bay what society has decided to accept, but which she has not. The poem contains a structure, created by a poet whose mind ranges over a vast array of subjects which thread together to tell a coherent story with coherent criticisms, while also leaving space for the reader’s own connections, imaginings, and outrages.

In the end, Bullet Points is not only a testimonial about the gun and gender violence that has become quotidian, but also about the ways in which interpretation and reading create those events and shape how we respond to them. Describing the online harassment that took place before Christine Belford’s murder, Sutherland writes:

[REDACTED], one of the women referenced in the indictment for assisting the M. family in cyberspace, still maintains a website about Christine. The accusations garish against a yellow background.

Sutherland uses this seemingly minor detail from the Belford case to make a case about reading. Reading, after all, is about what we notice and what we make of the facts or truths provided to us. And that is also, in effect, what the justice system is about. We can choose to examine context and nuance. We can ask questions. Or we can accept words at face value.  The website, created with an agenda, “is not a place for context or nuanced thought or for critique. […] It is easier to swallow fiction when the mouth and teeth believe the meat is sweet.” In contrast, Bullet Points presents its own evidence, but it asks the reader to connect, to interpret, to imagine, and to empathize, rather than to be complicit without question.