Madeline Artenberg
Linda Wulkan
Naming a Hurricane
Madeline Artenberg
Cover Art by Linda Wulkan
From the Author
​
Naming a Hurricane contains thirty years of my poetry. This once silent, bullied, friendless girl thanks you for going on this journey with me! I grew my voice through experience, friendship, and poems, one by one. As a kid, my saviors were Howdy Doody, Mr. Rogers, Lucy, Nancy Drew, the bookmobile, Dick Clark, Soul Train, Perry Mason, Elizabeth Taylor, James Bond, and my grandparents. I didn’t realize it, but my earliest writing was nightly prayers of just desserts for my abusers. Every time I took two steps forward and then fell back, I gave up, but the open road was as enticing as a novel. I would never look at the last page of a story first, so I ventured I had to keep going on the road and learn to trust it. The biggest proof was that I transformed “why me?” into comedy skits, plays, and poetry. I grew up hiding everything. The sweetest irony is that, as a new poet, I was immediately appreciated for my family and sexually-themed poems. The floodgates of honesty were wide open! One of the joys in recent years is that “me, only” turned into “me, too!”
​
In public school, I couldn’t speak in class, except to raise my hand first with the answer. I won the medal for best overall student in the public school 6th-grade graduating class. Only three people clapped in Assembly. Finally, I made my first friend at eleven and a half years old. I thought I was so smart. I didn’t know a damn thing until I threw myself into the world after college graduation: I was wife, failed Spanish teacher, disco queen, cocktail waitress, world traveler, wife again, actress, licensed hypnotist, Media Buyer and Planner, peace activist, and photojournalist. The photo agency told me I should crawl on my belly or shimmy up a pole to get better shots. The minute my first poem shot out, I sold my cameras. I immediately understood that only I could birth my poems.
​
When I was a kid and the doorbell rang, my mother would push me under the kitchen table, clasp her hand over my mouth as I yelled, “We’re here! Don’t go!” Well, readers, I’m here now, so here we go!
Praise for Naming a Hurricane
​
Philip Larkin said that love is the rule of life, but that it's often proven negatively—we are as much shaped by love denied as love received. That double edge—dazzling human possibility, potential disappointment—is at the heart of Madeline Artenberg's powerful new book. A dried-out acorn becomes the token of lives "not fully lived." The unspoken nightmares of the Holocaust lie behind a father's punitive silence. A mother is "all kisses, all fists." Artenberg's feminist vision moves beyond the personal—we visit Greece and Guatemala—but the visceral figures of childhood return, humanized by time, "Now her eggshell hand tugs at my skirt." Monumental in its arc and canvas, Naming a Hurricane is the work of a lifetime.
—D. Nurkse, author of A Country of Strangers.
​
Madeline Artenberg's Naming a Hurricane, a terrific book of poetry, traces not only a life but the social changes impacting the speaker...from the innocence of pink pajamas to "hand-rolled joints," a woman's journey. Artenberg tells how packs of black dogs roam in Brooklyn as opposed to a kid and his dog she sees in the beloved movie theater, her escape. And even through glamorous travel, true escape is limited—as in "A Jew in Texas." This is where poetry comes in. Romance—young and older—and a keen eye for irony make Naming a Hurricane a wonderful debut!
—Denise Duhamel, Guggenheim Fellow and author of Second Story.
​
In Naming a Hurricane, Madeline Artenberg engages in an honest, thoughtful, and, most important, artful exploration of herself and the people around her. A “disturbance” begins early on, as she recounts experiences with parents not far removed from their immigrant roots. This low-pressure system resolves into a storm and then a full-blown hurricane as rough childhood transitions into an open-hearted, sometimes tempest-tossed, adulthood. As the hurricane “dissipates,” parents pass, lovers leave marks, and memories remain. In the clear light of day, a deep self-knowledge is revealed. We can learn much from it.
—Thaddeus Rutkowski, author of Tricks of Light.
Naming a Hurricane is an apt title for Madeline Artenberg’s brilliantly seductive collection, a memoir in verse, that takes us into the turmoil of being a “Jew-girl” in America. Her childhood is textured by a grandfather who wrote “from right to left”, a grandmother whose “breasts hung like worries”, and a father’s love, all powerless to shield her from ever-present storms. With terse lyricism, penetrating lucidity and sensuality, the poet’s barometric shifts leave the reader breathless. Naming a Hurricane is not only a dive into diverse and dark subject matter, a marvelous “soup of misshapen dumplings”, but celebrates a life illuminated by poetry and passion. This is a riveting and daring collection, one that will not leave your hands until you have read it from cover to cover.
—Stephanie Dickinson, author of Blue Swan Black Swan: The Trakl Diaries.
In Madeline Artenberg's poetry collection, Naming A Hurricane, the sections are labeled with scientific terms for the progress of a hurricane: Disturbance, Low Pressure, Storm, Hurricane, and Dissipation. These terms also metaphorically echo the human events evoking the poems. Naming A Hurricane has been a long time in the making. In that time, the poems have transformed both dramatically and subtly. They viscerally embody all manner of storm and calm. "Plain Jane" / they called her. / "I don't need any of you," / she'd say. / Today, she belongs / to a choir. Sunday morning, / her white robe / glistens. Underneath, / Jesus soothes the fresh welts, / darkly rainbowed. In the poems, there is travel to Greece under a military junta; and there is travel from fear and rage, to acceptance. Madeline Artenberg has, indeed, named the hurricane, with language that is a match for its force.
—Estha Weiner, author of This Insubstantial Pageant.
​​​
In the years that I’ve known and worked with Madeline Artenberg, she has grown as both a person and a poet, as is evidenced in Naming a Hurricane. This is the work of a mature poet who is both courageous and wise. It is an honest and heart-felt collection that represents 30 years of Artenberg’s best writing. I urge you to accompany her on this very human, often painful, but beautifully poetic journey. She names her hurricane, struggles through the storm of it and finally triumphs as she metaphorically passes through to the other side “Unfolded, /…still flush…”
—Chocolate Waters, author of Muddying the Holy Waters.