Step inside poetic art and emerge with new perspectives on humanity

Review of Reasons for Étant Donnés by Sara Cahill Marron

By Serena Agusto-Cox

Enter through the door on the cover of Reasons for Étant Donnés by Sara Cahill Marron and you enter a world of mystery. Like the peepholes of Marcel Duchamp’s last major artwork, Étant Donnés, Marron’s poetry is a window into a world of mysteries—Water, Marriage, Kingdom, Transfiguration, and Body—that are open to interpretation and reinterpretation by the reader.

These mysteries follow the Catholic church’s rosary practice introduced by Pope John Paul II, and like this practice, each section of Marron’s collection invites the reader into a meditative space in which they explore, interpret, and create a meaningful experience. Marron’s work is asking the reader to dialogue with the work.

Sara Cahill Marron is a long-time member of the DMV literary community, having served as editor and publisher of Beltway Editions, a DMV-based publisher of poetry books and the journal Beltway Poetry Quarterly. Reasons for Étant Donnés is her fourth book. Not only a poet, she offers writing advice and creative support through her Substack. Interestingly, she is also an attorney.

In the initial poem for the section on water, Marron shows readers the ways in which water, in different forms, has been the baptismal font of gods, coronation waters of pharaohs, and used in the cleansing of children, but it also has darker tides, opening pathways to the underworld. We are set up.

The knowledge that she imparts and the knowledge that we know from school are upended in the following verse. We are brought to the beginning where “fanned cyano bacteria,/hued-blue, as helium” fill the seas before fish and once the evolutionary process takes hold “each strand a/twisted promise/from the body’s/beginning” emerges.

Given that each section’s mystery is labeled, readers may initially find themselves looking for the connection through the poetic lines. In some cases, amid the beauty emerges a darkness, a cruelty where wolves “watched from ashore/as we struck the Earth/with spades and scripture.” This dichotomy isn’t to be ignored but to be seen in balance with the whole of the mystery.

There is beauty and horror in our nature, but we are no less connected to the Earth and its systems because of that darkness. Take the hurricane with all of its roar and destruction, the veil lifts and the sunlight illuminates another day. Turn your head up and soak it in.

Progressing through Marron’s collection, readers explore the other four mysteries, peering into the peephole as new worlds emerge. In the second section on marriage, Marron takes this time to explore what it means to be human in an initial conversation with artificial intelligence: “What is the difference/between you and me?/ ‘I am a language model’/she answers, ‘and you are language.’” Knowing Marron’s previous work, Call Me Spes, this does not seem to be coming from left field at all. There is a marriage of the self that takes place in the creation of another intelligence, but that connection is based on the individual’s capacity to learn, grow, and cooperate with something outside the self, much like a marriage asks of a couple. But these are interpretations made by a single reader. Each reader’s experience will differ as they interact with the mysteries.

Reasons for Étant Donnés by Sara Cahill Marron is more than a poetry collection, it is art in movement through reader action, reaction, and with space and time. Once you enter the doorway into the world of mysteries, readers will be unfettered in a world where they must contemplate connections in new ways to reimagine their own existence and their impact on the systems and people around them. But will each of us come to the same decision “giving up the lore of more,/more, more, more, and more”?

Sara has offered guidance for the reader coming to this collection. She has prepared an introductory video and some teasers for each section. To learn more about Sara and order her books, visit her website. 

Sara Cahill Marron is the author of Reasons for the Long Tu’m (Broadstone Books, 2018), Nothing You Build Here, Belongs Here (Kelsay Books 2021), and Call Me Spes (MadHat Press 2022). She earned her master's degree from St. John's University in 2016 and her juris doctorate from The George Washington University Law School in 2021. She is a member of the DC Bar, Associate Editor of Beltway Poetry Quarterly from 2019-2024, a publisher at Beltway Editions, and the owner of Egret Editorial. Her work has been published widely in literary magazines and journals.

Serena Agusto-Cox is a PushcartPrize nominee, editor at The Mid-Atlantic Review published by DayEight, coordinates poetry programming for the Gaithersburg Book Festival. Her poems appear in multiple magazines and anthologies. To help poets, she reviews and markets collections through Savvy Verse & Wit and Poetry Book Tours respectively. Echoes Carry is her forthcoming debut poetry collection.