Seedlip and Sweet Apple: Poems

By Arra Lynn Ross
Milkweed Editions

Seedlip and Sweet Apple is a poetry collection that blooms with the voice and life of Mother Ann Lee, the founder of the Christian sect deemed the Shakers for their prayerful and "ecstatic" dance. Her followers eschew marriage and reproduction, living in brotherly and sisterly communities devoted to harmony and God. The author, Arra Lynn Ross, has created a cohesive story that will capture you even if you have the barest knowledge of the real life of the religious leader. (For those of you who do want to do some prep work, you can gain reference from the PBS site American Stories, or even Wikipedia.)

In such a slim volume, there is so much depth. Ross plays with form and function, mixing prose with poetry, shaping Revolution-era newspaper articles into stanzas and weaving together bits of Gospels, Shaker writings, William Blake and even Sappho into the Mother Ann's narrative. The notes at the end of the book are a must-read, as they help the reader engage and decode the poetry even further. She also provides a list of her source material, and by the end of the reading, the reader may be tempted to read more on this incredible historical figure.

The poems themselves shine alone (in fact, "Mother Ann Tells Lucy What Gave Her Joy" was featured by the American Academy of Poets as a Poem-A-Day in March, a well-deserved honor). As a collection, the poems form an intense meditation on intimacy. It examines the relationship between lovers, siblings, and a believer and her faith. There are moments of breathtaking intimacy, where the reader feels almost intrusive in the moments of revelation. In "Abraham Left Me on a Thursday," Ross captures at once the joy and loss of the dissolution of Mother Ann's arranged marriage:

"They'll say he was a bad man, but I know how hard it is to live with God. In the flesh, in the flesh, where are you Ann? You're a spirit banging at your own rib cage. [...] he danced me across the room, laughing, the heat from his grip burning my side. I shook my head, No, Abraham, no, and he stumbled. We fell sideways to the floor, tangled, my cheekbone pressed to the wing of his shoulder, the rough weave of his hemp shirt. I could smell sweat soaking the cloth, strong with fear and sadness."

Ross doesn't canonize Mother Ann. Instead, she reveals the human being she was, rife with complex paradoxes: disgust and love, fervor and patience, the dichotomy of the spiritual and corporeal entities. It's a work powerful in voice and craft.

I also want to take a few words to acknowledge the Milkweed Editions, the non-profit publisher of Seedlip and Sweet Apple. I worked briefly in the world of publishing and am compelled to spread their message: "Milkweed Editions publishes with the intention of making a humane impact on society, in the belief that literature is a transformative art uniquely able to convey the essential experiences of the human heart and spirit. In an increasingly consolidated and bottom-line driven publishing world, [the reader's] support allows [Milkweed Editions] to select and publish books on the basis of their literary quality and message." If you care about the value of our national literature, Seedlip and Sweet Apple is well worth the investment.

Review by Jo Ristow

Competing Kingdoms: Women, Mission, Nation, and the American Protestant Empire, 1812-1960

Edited by Barbara Reeves-Ellington, Kathryn Kish Sklar, and Connie A. Shemo
Duke University Press

A great deal of important criticism has emerged recently in the area of women’s contributions to the history of evangelical Christianity, and this collection brings together some of the scholars largely responsible for this upsurge in interest. Among them is Jane Hunter (The Gospel of Gentility), as well as critics studying the records of nineteenth- and twentieth-century American women working for missionary organizations and religious groups as they imposed and also perhaps transformed American imperialism. The somewhat sunny description of this project, an examination of “the work of American women missionaries in American cultural expansion,” might strike students of post-colonial theory—or even readers of fiction like Barbara Kingsolver’s The Poisonwood Bible—as strangely euphemistic.

It’s hard to read these accounts of women who traveled throughout the world and affected and were affected by the various cultures with which they engaged without remembering the outcome—that is, the devastating consequences of colonialism and the horrific exposure of the arrogant and naïve assumptions that underlay these “missionary” efforts. One of the mainstays of the archival holdings of my own institution is an enormous collection of missionary papers: letters, diaries, and other records kept by the legions of Christian women from the American southeast, sent on global missions to “convert the savages.” On the one hand, it’s extraordinary to follow these women, who had been bound by the conventions of domesticity, at once to view the world through their own apparently inflexible filters—and yet also be themselves changed by the experience.

The argument of this book takes this observation one step further: women’s involvement in missionary work transformed the nature of American colonialism itself. Kingsolver’s missionaries are victimized by their cultural arrogance and ignorance, but they are ultimately transformed by this exercise in “cultural expansion.” And so readers here are asked to view the global efforts of the Women’s Christian Temperance Union (WCTU), or of the Young Women’s Christian Association (YWCA), for example, as complex in their motivations and results. Amy Kaplan’s brilliant phrase “Manifest Domesticity” captures both the connection of these movements to aggressive American expansionism and also to the “sentimentalized domesticity” inherent in much of women’s religious practice which, by virtue of exposure to international travel and cultural difference, was itself altered. Hunter notes that the mission was to convert the “savage to homebody,” and of course the conversion experience operated on those doing the converting, as well.

Ian Terrell’s essay on the WCTU and Hunter’s treatment of the YWCA both suggest the possibility of further scholarship on the complex role organizations like these played in the lives of women and in the cultures they affected. The essays generally represent careful archival scholarship, admirable in scope, covering singular figures and particular cultural instances—in the Philippines, Congo, Egypt, India, Ottoman Empire, Rhodesia, China, Japan—although none representing Central or South America.

In studying African American missionaries in Congo, Sylvia Jacobs concludes that “mission ideology always assumed a negativism about the society in which missionaries worked” and that missionaries “could respect African culture, society, and religion but still want to change them.” The most compelling part of this story is the transformations that occurred within those who sought to transform others. Whether or not these women collectively mitigated the effects of American colonialism remains an open question.

Review by Rick Taylor