The Sealey Challenge: A Juror Must Fold In On Herself

Kathleen McClung’s tightly-woven, expertly-written, startlingly lovely A Juror Must Fold In On Herself is fascinating as a work of art, standing alone; as a work of memoir, exploring the foibles of the American legal system; and, finally, as a masterclass in the poetic form. It is stunning in so many ways, perhaps most of all that McClung has taken her time on a sequestered jury—vehicular manslaughter, I think, although we are not told—and made of it high art and deep cultural commentary.

McClung moves between the awful, deeply boring isolation of the sequestered jury and the awful, usually unspoken images the jurors must see every day. She humanizes the defendant from the very first poem, where, in “Field Notes, Hall of Justice Parking Lot,” she writes:

And, yes, every morning I / glimpse the defendant in his tie arriving on / his bike across the street, locking / it with a gigantic U to the Hall of / Justice rack. The only bike.

She wants to say something to him, but cannot: contempt of court “sounded ominous,” and she’d rather not play with fire. But those few words, even as we come to learn that the unnamed, wordless defendant hit and killed a child, likely in a crosswalk, manage to remind us again and again of the humanity of that killer.

Parts of A Juror Must Fold In On Herself were pretty funny, which I guess I didn’t expect. In “Superior Court Ghazal,” for instance, she wonders if the prosecutor researches everyone he goes up against: “he probably Googles us, assigns his staff to pore over // our profiles, tailors his closing argument by quoting / novelists we love.” It’s funny, maybe mostly just because it’s definitely a little bit true.

I never really expected to stumble across something in which the boredom and worry and loneliness of a sequestered jury turns into something almost magical, and it makes McClung’s work here with A Juror Must Turn In On Herself even more remarkable. This is truly an exquisite chapbook, on so many different levels.