What Shapes Us: Forces

Forces. Lisa Stice. Johnston, Iowa: Middle West Press, 2021.

Like Stice’s first two full-length books, Uniform and Permanent Change of Station, Forces illuminates what the military experience means for a specific kind of military family, one in which a female civilian is often wholly at the whims of her male active duty spouse’s career. The everyday realities of being married to an active duty service member can often be thankless and tedious. Frequent deployments and training trips create gaps of separation where nearly all the domestic duties of maintaining a life together fall on the spouse who is left behind. In “Devising the Strategy,” Stice borrows military terminology—which is often a maddening exercise in the use of language to obscure violence—to make parallel observations between planning for war and the ripple effect these plans have on service members’ families. The poem, which begins with the line “to achieve the outcome involves,” is separated into three sections labeled communication, planning, and adaptation. Stice takes this sanitized, almost meaningless military/corporate jargon and fleshes it out into vignettes of anxiety and exhaustion. The section on communication transforms into an exchange between the couple that bridges the gap between the mundane and profound. Embedded among reminders about where engine coolant is kept in the garage and reminders to say goodbye to the family dog are confessions between the couple about fear and love. In the section on planning, the speaker details a litany of everyday responsibilities she’ll have to undertake alone: “visualizing…how I will fit in the tasks you / normally take care of: mowing, / weeding, small maintenance.” The section on adaptation offers a resigned acceptance familiar to anyone seeking hard-won equilibrium in the face of a spouse’s absence. “Somehow it always / happens without me really thinking,” Stice writes. “I just wake up earlier before the alarm / and sweep the floor or fold the laundry / yesterday left on the guest bed / or pull the trash and recycling to the curb.” On and on these mundane chores go until she ends the poem with more military terminology: “tasks completed with a utility of force.”

What Stice does so well in Forces is to take military terms and divorce them from the sanitized intent of their usage by placing them in another context altogether—that of the domestic realm. The irony this creates shows the simultaneous meaninglessness and adaptability of bureaucratic language. The poem “Measures” achieves a similar effect by immersing itself entirely in this kind of rhetoric:

“Measures”

laid out chronologically and refined
to a standard—addressed then
redressed to fit the form already made

there then here in civil augmentation
in contracted support in combatant
logistics—dispatched to frays, edgings.

Stice places words and phrases like “action phase” and “combatant logistics” in an ever-unfurling single sentence that, divorced from context, is absurd yet nonetheless sinister. The ending phrase “dispatched to frays, edgings” is especially ominous, evoking worn nerves created by longtime military service. 

Other poems in Forces are quiet meditations on the loneliness of having a partner who is frequently gone or whose plans change regularly and without warning. The poems “Work Trip” and “Homecomings” act as bookends to this particular solitude. In “Work Trip,” the speaker’s spouse leaves in the early morning while the speaker is still half-asleep. There’s a kind of denial that weaves its way through the poem, as if the speaker believes the spouse might have stayed put after all, but there are too many indications of his absence: a dog who “reminds me that you / aren’t here to feed him…” and a daughter whose first words upon waking are “where’s Daddy.” In “Homecomings,” we see the inverse of this process—the spouse returning in the middle of the night. This is a short and quiet poem, only seven lines long, that details the banality of a partner returning from routine work commitments that keep him constantly traveling. This kind of travel is a reality for most military families. It runs counter to the prevalent narrative of the melodramatic homecoming video that was once so popular on social media during the height of our wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, when returning service members surprised their distraught and crying family members in public venues like school gymnasiums. So much of the narrative repeated in popular media reinforces the drama of service members returning from deployments, a spectacle that makes civilians feel emotional and heartened, but the reality of a military family’s experience is often much more mundane, rendered in muted tones through a repeated cycle of routine departures. In “Homecomings,” the speaker wakes to her spouse quietly saying hello and placing his rucksack by the door, “then it’s off to sleep as if this is any night.” Stice’s poems depict a matter-of-fact reality that belies the complexity of living with someone who exists in a perpetual state of periodic absence.

One of the cleverest aspects of Forces is its arrangement into sections that define force by both its military and scientific connotations. The sections—which are categorized by operational, gravitational, defensive, frictional, tensile, and magnetic forces—give shape to the poems within. In the section “Frictional,” the inherent friction in “Plans Always Change” details the frustrating reality of forced adaptability in the face of a career where the only constant is omnipresent and predictable change. Stice even begins the poem “and I should know this by now, / that I should never expect anything.” Her poems are often a snapshot of domestic moments. When she shows how these moments are often undercut or deferred, she subtly reclaims a measure of power in what is often a powerless situation, even as the speaker of her poems blames herself: “…of course, it’s my / fault, all this disappointment….” The poem “Here We Are,” in the section “Tensile,” illustrates how military families are subjected to the learned emotional experience of being perpetually uprooted at any moment for any reason. Stice compares this reality to weather forecasting. Meteorologists understand weather patterns, but for the rest of us the changing weather can seem capricious and random. Though deceptive in its simplicity, the poem resonates for anyone who longs to put down roots but, for whatever reason, can’t:

“Here We Are”

in the wait
again

this limbo of
here for now

then where
we guess

75% chance
of staying

25% chance
of the west

10% chance
of headquarters

5% chance
of overseas

and the rest
go to anywhere

Forces is often melancholy and contemplative in its depiction of military life. These poems are similar to some of Jehanne Dubrow and Elyse Fenton’s work, which depict the perspective of female civilian spouses who remain mired in the home front, simultaneously responsible for keeping their families together and chafing against the hardship that being a military spouse often entails. Other parts of Forces, however, are lighter in tone and devoid of reference to the military altogether. These poems reflect literature, art, and music. Stice uses art as inspiration to center herself and prioritize her work as a writer, stating that, “When various aspects of life pull me in different directions, spin me around, or attempt to stop me altogether, finding a way to bring calm and beauty to the chaos gives me strength.” This approach to sense-making through art is apparent throughout Forces, and it expands the book’s appeal to anyone, not just readers who have a vested interest in military-themed writing.

Throughout her book, Stice captures the quiet but enduring appeal of committing to something—a spouse, a family, a way of life—even though that commitment invariably subjects a family to outside forces that will shape their lives. The consequence of commitment isn’t necessarily good or bad; it’s merely indicative of the power that love and fidelity have to rewrite individual stories into collective ones, something that brings chaos as well as calm, and joy as well as grief. Through poems of quiet moments and resolute domesticity, Forces demonstrates the power of this balance again and again.

Kate Gaskin is the author of the book of poems Forever War (YesYes Books 2020), winner of the Pamet River Prize. She is a PhD student and writing instructor at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, and she has been a military spouse for 17 years.

This article appeared originally at Strategy Bridge.

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