Reviewed by Laurel Benjamin
Split Daughter of Eve
Visions of a Sister
by Catherine Gonick
Sheila-Na-Gig Editions
114 pages, $us16.00, June 2025, Paperback, ISBN: 978-1-962406-16-4
Breaking open a double heritage, Christian and Jewish, Catherine Gonick creates a paradise where three sisters—the speaker, the younger sister, and the little sister—are all portrayed as daughters of Eve. Her full-length collection, Split Daughter of Eve, takes us on a deep dive where we find the speaker changing shape, changing perception, and even trying to reverse loss.
In “Sister Mary Joseph Serves Lunch in Ávila,” we encounter a potent reference to sight. Through the point of view of Saint Teresa, who had a vision of the Virgin Mary, we learn, “We sisters all have visions here.” The “all” includes the speaker and her sisters, but quite literally it means the nuns of the religious order. In contrast to Saint Teresa, the three sisters are not a mystic or religious reformers, yet it’s Gonick who has a power of vision, as do her sisters. We are to wonder then, if they could also levitate like Teresa and Juan, “like thousand-layer cakes / raised by inner fires.” What would this power or seeing give the sisters? Would it stop one sister from not talking to the speaker for 30 years? Would it keep the little sister from dying in a car accident? Gonick leaves us with a sense of yearning to suspend ourselves from the ground, because if we could assume that power, we too wonder, what is it to become visionary? We have such hopes for her in this story.
As for the “inner fires,” this is not just baking a cake, but a kind of passion, which need not be be entirely religious as much as feminist. Can we say Saint Teresa has agency? Gonick’s hybrid interpretation is at work here, raised both Christian and Jewish, enabling her to move beyond the bounds of the Virgin Mary and stories rooted in the New Testament rather than the Jewish part of the Bible. (79)
The little sister appears in the playful “Jesus and I Go to the Beach.” The scene is spelled out as a vision in which Jesus never died, where the speaker walks with him to the Sea of Galilee. “Jesus picks up a pebble, makes it skip on the lake’s calm surface,” like anyone would do, playful and calm. Then, she recognizes him more clearly: “[He] looks at me and I see he is now much younger, and a girl.” While the change of identity, change of sex, this magical transformation, is incredible, is it any less important that Jesus recognizes her, like a friend, a compatriot? She welcomes the change of identity. “You look like your little sister, if you had one, I say.” Now we understand that Jesus has a little sister (mirroring the speaker’s experience.) We must suspend belief here, as the speaker converses with Jesus, and appreciate the intimacy, the commonality of gender and having a sister.
Then another turn, when Jesus speaks as a female: “She says, Yes, the future is female.” Here we encouter the power of vision once more, where the loss of the little sister is so deep that the speaker is able to imagine something that will make her whole. Perhaps we are more familiar with the newer readings of the Jewish bible, where in stories women have agency, so in Gonick’s care, for the Christian story to be transformed to the feminine, may come from the Jewish tradition. Regardless, she has brought to the table fulfilment amid loss. (97)
Then, Gonick turns her hand to a story of cows. These animals are unusual. As in a short story form, we get concise backstory, where she builds in the little sister’s weakness, the psych wards, how she was a violist in an orchestra, as well as describing a mother who was unreliable, and how the little sister’s husband was in the car crash, but survived. Thus, in the author’s capable hands we are given a framework for understand other sister stories in her book. Here, the sister “found music in [the cows] lowing, / tenderness in their gaze,” extended vocalizations appealing to the musician, but also a love gaze.
We hear little sister’s voice, “If you really cared, / last night you would have picked me up, / given me your bed. I’d do it for you, / if your mind was scrambled eggs.” Little sister aims to make the speaker feel badly for not helping her more. Further, there is a connection between the call for help and a cow god found in Indian mysticism, Kamedehnu “who gives all she has,” a symbol of prosperity, abundance, and fertility. Then we reach the point where the speaker says, “I thought about being a cow so hard I slipped inside one.” She does not become a cow exactly, but magically goes inside the cow, so she can stand “solid as a truck.” Here we have the truth of the poem: becoming that solid, she could stop the car accident, stop death.
Further, though the speaker (and the other two sisters) did not have children, the sister-cow says, “I’ve never nursed, / but I could feel the tug of milk.” The power in the feminine, whether human or cow, is resonant. After all, the little sister worshipped cows. In this way we end up engaging in a kind of magical thinking ourselves, where stretching the possibilities can save another. For the speaker, maybe she has special powers to save the little sister. I find the lowing of the cows and the longing of the speaker to reverse time and heal others, particularly moving. (69)
The gift of the collection is finding the ways in which women can be empowered. The novelty of pairing Christian-Jewish traditions with visions, along with depth of tone, and the willingness to venture beyond boundaries, lures us in. What strikes me most is the warmth in the collection despite the plurality of the sisters, the disparity and distance in the relationships, so we too, yearn for loving and tenderness. We have no choice but to see the possibilities along with Gonick.
About the reviewer: Laurel Benjamin’s book, Flowers on a Train (Sheila-Na-Gig Editions, 2025), was a finalist for the Cider Press Book Award and received an Honorable Mention for the Small Harbor Publishing Laureate Prize. Forthcoming is Written into the Curve of the Sea’s Open Throat (Shanti Arts, 2026). A San Francisco Bay Area poet, she is active with the Women’s Poetry Salon and is a reader for Common Ground Review. She founded and leads Ekphrastic Writers, a group dedicated to writing and community. Publications: Pirene’s Fountain, Lily Poetry Review, Cider Press Review, Calyx, Taos Journal of Poetry, Mom Egg Review, Gone Lawn, Nixes Mate. Her work has also been anthologized in Women in a Golden State (Gunpowder Press, 2025), The Nature of Our Times: Poems on America’s Land, Waters, Wildlife, and Other Natural Wonders (Paloma Press, 2025), among others. Laurel holds an MFA from Mills College. She invented a secret language with her brother. Read her work at: laurelbenjamin.com