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The Journal for Writers

Against the Death Drive: Queer Joy in Chen Chen’s When I Grow Up I Want to Be a List of Further Possibilities | Craft Essay by Dana Alsamsam

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In Jericho Brown’s introduction to Chen Chen’s When I Grow Up I Want to Be a List of Further Possibilities, he aptly describes the collection and the speaker as “obsessive and curious,” filled with “humor,” “comic delight” and “a sense of wonder.” For poetry, these terms of praise don’t seem out of the ordinary but for poetry by a queer author that consistently and openly takes on queerness as a subject of inquiry, this description is not what we would expect. In the introduction to Michael Snediker’s Queer Optimism he says, “Melancholy, self-shattering, shame, the death drive…this queer pessimistic constellation—nonetheless have dominated and organized much of queer-theoretical discourse…Queer theory’s analyses of negative affect and ontological instability have been and continue to be both generous and generative” (Snediker, 4). He goes on to outline his project as clearing a similar space for inquiry into queer optimism. In this passage Snediker essentially says that queer theorists and critics of queer poetry have long concentrated on suffering. I will add that often the poetry about the queer experience itself, not just critique of it, has remained boxed into this category of suffering due to its conception as a culturally acceptable queer narrative. Chen Chen’s work pushes back against this in many ways. Brown goes on to say about Chen, “he won’t be satisfied with any answer until he has thoroughly reviewed every possibility, every option for becoming a more whole self…” In this lies a deep sense of optimism. The queer author who has struggled with family and society throughout his life still has the capacity for hope, and for becoming. Melancholy in this collection is not a permanent staple of queer experience, nor is it a staple of the poet’s identity. Though his struggle with strict homophobic parents shapes a good amount of subject matter, it is often presented with humor, wonder, or a vulnerable sense of reflection which leads to growth and becoming. This extends beyond a brief moment of joy or pleasure among misery and melancholy. Chen Chen’s work supports Snediker’s project of queer optimism in that the sense of humor, wonder, and curiosity are patient and sustained in the voice of the entire collection.

In speaking about this gap in critical work, Snediker says, “Hope is promissory; hope is a horizon. Shame, on the other hand, occurs in a lavish present tense. What if the field of queer optimism were situated as firmly in the present tense as shame? Even as scholarship on shame may arise out of generosity and hopefulness, this work, within queer theory and affect theory, provides shame all the more eloquent and vibrant a vocabulary, while leaving positive affect (itself lexically impoverished) to fend for itself” (Snediker, 16). Essentially, Snediker focuses on studying optimism in the present tense, not as a possibility, but as an actual occurrence in the moment that is as intelligible and as apt for analysis as shame or pessimism. He finds essential to his argument the “separability from the promissory” of queer optimism. In other words, he works against the idea that all queer optimism is not worth studying because it is only and always in the future and therefor fleeting and unintelligible. I will agree with Snediker to the extent that it is important to study optimism and its persistence with as much critical rigor as is used to study pessimism and its seeming permanence in the queer experience. I will disagree slightly or go further to show how Chen Chen’s collection shows promissory queer optimism as a rich sight for critical investigation as well. As is signified by the very title of the collection, the speaker of these poems is filled with hope and a desire for fulfillment despite struggle and sadness. Even though Chen’s optimism often relies on a future, or a promise of a future—this drives the sense of humor, wonder, curiosity, and what I will call the “life drive” of the poems on the level of content and language. Essentially, suffering is very present in this collection but it never leads to pessimism, it instead leads to motivation to live better, more fully, and with more love. The very idea that a future is possible is what makes the poetry and the speaker consistently and patiently optimistic. I will propose that Chen Chen’s collection is subversive in that it posits queer optimism as a consistent force and not the outlier, even though it is attached to a future and always intrinsically connected to suffering.

When discussing Emily Dickinson’s poetry through the lens of his queer optimistic project, Snediker says, “Dickinson’s understanding of happiness is inseparable from happiness’s encroachment on pain. Dickinsonian happiness and pain, however, are not simply antonymous. That is, they do not replicate the unproductive yin-yang of happy/sad, whereby one can’t have the former without the latter, or vice versa” (Snediker, 95-96). Essentially, Snediker’s queer optimistic reading of Dickinson relies on the idea that happiness doesn’t have to exist as solely the opposite of pain. In his reading, Dickinson often uses pains temporal qualities such as patience and persistence to describe happiness in unexpected ways. Chen Chen’s poetry is similarly illuminated when we accept that an understanding of the joy and wonder in the work is not separable from the speaker’s experiences of suffering. To place these things on a binary is to overly simplify them, and to, as Snediker mentions many critics have done, ignore the happiness in the equation because it seems obvious.

In the beginning of When I Grow Up…, before even the first section, there is a poem called “Self-Portrait as So Much Potential” that immediately invokes these ideas in simple lines with lots of white space. It begins, “Dreaming of one day being as fearless as a mango” (13). This line at once mourns the speaker’s lack of fearlessness and invokes hope and a drive towards the future where this is possibility. Later in the piece the speaker says, “I am not the heterosexual neat freak my mother raised me to be. / I am a gay sipper, & my mother has placed what’s left of her hope on my brothers” (13). On first read, this is heartbreaking. The speaker feels that he has let down his mother and has been rejected from a family of “beautiful sons.” Why, then, does this line invoke laughter and lightness? The term “heterosexual neat freak” makes fun of heterosexuality, showing that the speaker is comfortable with his own identity to a certain extent. Additionally, the internal rhyme of “neat freak,” me,” and “be” is sonically delightful making this line roll easily off the tongue and feel almost bouncy. The second line makes a similar move with the internal rhyme of “sipper,” “mother,” and “brother.” Though the content of the lines is one of suffering, the comedic tone and sonic pleasure invoke a feeling of hope and uplifting.

Even in pieces that are filled with solemn and mourning, the poet is sure to pick us up. In “How I Became Sagacious,” a poem that details leaving home because of the lack of acceptance, he says “I wished for a place big enough for grief, / & all I got was more grief, plus People magazine” (28). This poem holds a deep hopelessness in content but we never forget the humanity of the speaker—even in the darkest moments, he finds the smallest things to live for, and offers readers a bit of light. This comedic tone comes in and out of the collection but is almost always used to relay moments of struggle, or to show a reflective speaker who has lived through and can now add humor to experiences of struggle. The short poem “Summer Was Forever” uses this same move in the lines “My parents said: Doctor, / married to lawyer. The faucet said: Drip, drop, / your life sucks” (19). The pressure from the parents is exemplary of the child of immigrant’s experience. The speaker, however, doesn’t quite fit the image of who his parents want him to be. Even in this piece which is clearly from the perspective of the speaker’s younger self, he already knows that he won’t fulfill this ideal set out for him. This line is immediately followed by the faucet telling the speaker “your life sucks.” This follows the above-mentioned comedic lightness of struggle but it also shows a mature speaker in the present reflecting and even making fun of this past self that was so steeped in tragedy. Because of this “I now” verses “I then” duality, we understand as readers that the speaker has made it through this struggle and come out not just unscathed but with a sense of humor and reflection.

This poem goes beyond the pairing of comedy with suffering to exemplify the kind of queer joy that is so powerfully optimistic. Retuning to Michael Snediker, he argues that in queer theory about poetry typically dismiss optimistic emotions like happiness and merriment because of their nature as evanescent. In his reading of Dickinson, he shows that the happiness should be attended to critically because the emotion can be formalized and prolonged just like pain: “So patient—like a pain, Patience is what renders the smile anomalous, by granting it (less an afterlife than) a life that exceeds the sudden break by which smiles ordinarily are known” (Snediker, 107). In other words, he finds Dickinsonian joy worth attending to critically through queer optimism because of its unusual quality of temporal longitude which works against usual ideas of optimism as passionate and not worthy of study. This is not the only premise on which Snediker argues for the critical study of optimism in queer poetry, but the temporal argument is prevalent. One of his primary arguments as mentioned previously is for studying an optimism which is not futurally oriented or promissory in nature. I will show in contrast that Chen Chen’s collection uses a joy that is passionate and fleeting, and often futurally oriented, but which is still a valid site for critical inquiry. For these poems that contain the wonder and curiosity of a child even when they are inhabited by an adult speaker, the future and its possibilities for queer love and joy are what allow the speaker to be optimistic of a better future and fuller self. The fleeting, passionate, and sometimes waxing violent moments of the collection are what lead to the speaker’s sustained and consistent life drive.

To continue with “Summer Was Forever, the poem turns when the speaker speaks about seeing the “local paper boy on his route” and begins showing what we understand to be his regular fantasies about this boy from afar. As the imagery spirals into the imagination it becomes a whirlwind of passion:

…I knew: we would be so terribly
happy. Our work would be simple. Our kissing would rhyme
with cardiac arrest. Birds would overthrow the cathedral towers.
I would have a magician’s hair, full of sleeves & saws,
unashamed to tell the whole town our first date was
in a leaky faucet factory. How we fell in love during jumps
on his tragic uncle’s trampoline. We fell in love in midair.

To begin, this whole section is in the future conditional, using “would” before the verbs. This construction shows that the speaker has a strong desire and hope for passion and love. He imagines a future in which this kind of love is possible. As the poem goes on, the “would” construction is dropped in “How we fell in love during jumps…” and finally the absolute of “We fell in love in midair.” This shows the imaginary as it comes true for the speaker and the love becomes a reality. The poem ends here on this light and optimistic note. The speaker and his lover are literally in midair, so light from love they fly off the page at the end of the poem. We hardly recall the beginning of the short poem where the speaker was feeling pressured and inadequate. The imagery that surrounds the pleasure in this piece also takes on an interesting pairing of pleasure with violence, almost as if the passion tips over into violence at its most intense. This dichotomy is set up with “terribly / happy.” Especially because it extends over a line break, the terrible nature of this happiness is emphasized. Then, the kissing rhymes with a lethal attack; the passion is so intense that it can kill. Birds a small, pleasant animal associated with song and spring, destroys cathedrals. Then we have the image of “saws” and a “tragic…trampoline.” This imagery of violence so closely associated with passion shows that this joy is fleeting and would usually be deemed not worthy of study. As previously shown, this joy is clearly related to a future-oriented promise because the experience here is an imagined one. In other words, the joy in this poem goes against all the traits that Snediker uses to deem Dickinsonian joy worthy of study. This joy is worthy of study for queer optimism, though, because the hope and drive for love and passion are what bring the speaker out of struggle. He no longer hears the faucet saying “your life sucks,” in favor of his fantasized love. Though the joy is not temporally sound, it is worthy of investigation as queer optimism because it moves the speaker through sadness and into hope.

Some of the poems do show joy in a specific present moment, and though these moments are not dependent on a future, they still act the same way. These moments of joy are what bring the speaker out of suffering and lead him to a maintain optimism. He addresses this idea himself in a poem titled “Poem” when he says, “Racked by doubt, but not yet / wrecked by it…” and later, “…doubled over / by dour, but not yet / doomed to it, I mope with / some hope, desperately open” (52). Even in doubt and dour the speaker self acknowledges that he is “desperately open” to any possibility of hope and happiness. In this poem, his desire to live fully is so strong that he becomes uninterested in death as a concept. Towards the end he says, “I / don’t want to know / how the book ends, / that the book ends…” This lack of desire to see the end of something shows a grounded voice of the present moment and its joys as well as a drive to live a full and joyful life. The poem ends with the speaker thinking that he should call his mother and ask her about her garden. The suffering and death that is ever present push the speaker to moments of joy and ensuring that he takes all possibilities to live fully.

It’s particularly impressive how the collection accomplishes this in poems that are overtly about sadness or tragedy and are yet, somehow, still optimistic. The poem “Elegy for My Sadness,” appears somber from the title itself. The elegiac nature of the piece implies a death and the poem is about the speaker’s sadness. When we look a bit closer, however, we see that if the poem is an elegy for sadness, sadness must be what has died. Chen writes, “I want to be a sweetheart in every moment, / full of goats & xylophones, as charming / as a hill with a small village on it. / I want to be a village full of sweethearts…” The construction of “I want,” though implying a quality that the speaker does not currently have, shows a drive towards a fuller self and a better future. Even in the deep throes of sadness, the speaker is capable of imagining a future where this is not the case. There is also the element of humor and sonic pleasure in these lines with “goats & xylophones.” The selection is strange and delightful and the internal rhyme emphasizes a bouncy quality. The poem goes on to show how the speaker’s lover comforts and supports the speaker in these moments of sadness. The love he is given makes him examine his own sadness: “You are just / in the same room with me & my unsweet, / uncharming, completely / uninteresting sadness” (37). These lines are particularly interesting because critical work on queer poetry, and queer poetry itself has often focused on and created robust arguments around sadness. As Snediker explains in his introduction, queer suffering already has a wide vocabulary and theory around it; it is joy and optimism that are deprived of this same critical thought. This moment, through this lens, reads as subversive. Chen essentially says that sadness is boring and chooses instead to focus on the intricacy and fullness of love.

This melancholy is not a permanent fixture of the speaker’s experience, nor of his identity, and he certainly doesn’t want it to be. The poem ends:

I wish I could write an elegy for my sadness
because it has suddenly died. I wish I could mourn it
by kissing you again & again while neither of us
can stop laughing, a kind of kiss where we sometimes
miss the mouth altogether, a kind of kiss
I think every single dead person
in every part of the world must crave
with violent impossibility.

Although in the moment this is said, the speaker is still very much inside of their sadness, the piece does not focus on that. Instead it takes on a vocabulary of desire with “I wish” structuring the beginning of the sentences. This sense of desire shows that the speaker is more interested in love and pleasure than in his own sadness. He craves a future where sadness can be pushed aside in favor of kissing and laughing. The choice to make “every single dead person” the subject towards the end is interesting. The poem itself is an elegy, but not for a person. Here we see a similar move that was made in “Poem,” where contemplating death turns the speaker to a distinct desire for life, a strong resistance to death without having lived fully. The speaker here doesn’t want to waste time on sadness when there is love being given to him. He imagines that the dead crave the kind of love he has right in front of him and this leads him to crave living more fully in the moment. The way this poem ends also enacts the hope for the future that the speaker has. Though the speaker is still experiencing sadness, the poem is structured so that it ends on love and happiness, even if it’s only a possibility. The reader is left with the lightness of a kiss where the speaker and his lover “miss the mouth altogether.” This structure privileges joy as the poem effectively “kills” the speaker’s sadness with an outburst of love. In another poem concerning death, “If I Should Die Tomorrow,” the speaker does not enact the archetypical motions of regret. Instead he speaks about what he will miss. The poems speaks about the pleasure of language and the pleasure of the body. Merely thinking about the possibility of no longer experiencing these pleasures, drives the speaker towards life and full living.

            It’s clear through these pieces that suffering and sadness are not removed from the picture in order to convey a consistent feeling of optimism. In fact, suffering and sadness are often starting points for these pieces, grounding them in the queer experience of being cast out by family or society. This suffering and sadness, however, never translates into pessimism. The speaker of these poems himself finds sadness and loneliness unproductive and trades them in for love, joy, and pleasure whenever possible. He says, “I am making my loneliness small. So small it fits on a postcard / a baby rabbit could eat” (24). He never avoids talking about negative emotions. He instead acknowledges them as true and uses wonder, curiosity, and desire for love to create a consistent optimism, to reach for an answer or many answers to his questions of being and becoming. In attending to the joy of this collection, even if it’s difficult because it is fleeting and passionate, I’ve found a fuller reading of what is possible in both the queer experience and in poetry. The capacity to study joy as fully as we’ve studied suffering can make way for more joy, for more queer poets and critics of queer poetry to engage with joy seriously, for it not to be written off as easy or obvious. When so much of the queer experience and queer poetry has been based off of melancholy and suffering, and when the path towards joy is rocky and uncertain, how can we call joy obvious or easy?

Chen Chen writes for his younger self, as well other young queer people who might never have seen any representations of queer happiness, who might need to see the possibility of joy to keep going. In this way, the work of looking at queer joy closely and rigorously is one of activism, of clearing a valid space for this kind of work and the positive impact it has. I’ll conclude with a quote from Chen Chen when asked what advice he has for young queer people who are struggling: “It’s important to say: your heartbreak is real. There is nothing wrong with you if you continue to feel heartbroken. Your emotions, including your sorrows, are real. Always. In my book, there is no “happy ending” to the conflicts between unaccepting, homophobic parents and a queer son. The lack of reconciliation is my reality. Maybe that’s your reality, too. You are still amazing and if you’ve had to make the choice—for your own safety and health—to cut off communication with family members, I see you, too. I love you, too.”

Works Cited

Chen, Chen. When I Grow Up I Want to Be a List of Further Possibilities. BOA Editions, 2017.
Snediker, Michael D. Queer Optimism: Lyric Personhood and Other Felicitous Persuasions. University of Minnesota Press, 2009.

Dana Alsamsam is the author of a chapbook, (in)habit (tenderness lit, 2018), and her poems are published or forthcoming in The Massachusetts Review, North American Review, The Shallow Ends, Gigantic Sequins, Tinderbox Poetry, Salamander, BOOTH, The Common and others. Critical prose appears in The Rumpus. Her work has been supported by a fellowship from Lambda Literary’s Writers Retreat for Emerging LGBTQ Voices.

The Many Names for Mother by Julia Kolchinsky Dasbach | Reviewed by Emily Bradley

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Julia Kolchinsky Dasbach’s The Many Names for Mother is a collection of bravery.  By this, I do not mean merely that the poet herself is brave in sharing her art – though she is – or that her poetry looks the hardships of motherhood square in the eye – though it does.  Dasbach approaches her subject in a movingly matter-of-fact way, with neither flippancy nor self-indulgence.  I mean that this book is a record of small and large acts of bravery across landscapes and generations.  I mean that Dasbach probes the idea and experience of motherhood through all means – social, linguistic, physical, historical, formal – with a determination to accept what she uncovers. 

While the collection’s theme is expansive, the speakers of Dasbach’s poems do not roam blindly.  Each truth or tension she offers is grounded in viscerality, most often of the human body.  In the first of the “Other Women Don’t Tell You” series that binds the collection, the speaker – after mourning the corporeal destruction that is the price of motherhood – muses “…my body was an ark once.”  Juxtaposing images of her still dilated cervix and clumps of lost hair with the body of her newborn child, she distills into a mere thirty one lines a reality perhaps too frightening or freeing for others to tell: “How your hands / would never keep up.” 

In another iteration of the “Other Women Don’t Tell You” series, this in the book’s third movement, the speaker links the imperfections of her child’s physical existence – a runny nose, a bruised elbow – to the blame for such imperfections that mothers are so often burdened with.  This equation of corporeal and moral failings highlights the harsh absurdity of the judgement mothers both bear and exact on one another, while at the same time establishing an intellectual space in which the body becomes a projection of past realities.  Noting a birthmark on her son’s body, she concludes, addressing herself, “that one’s especially your fault,” imagining the pressure of her anxious fingertips reaching through the womb and “marking him afraid, / the history he comes from / in perpetual, dark bloom.”  Thus, a birthmark becomes the embodiment of her child’s violence-ridden heritage. 

Central to Dasbach’s exploration of maternity is the idea of intergenerational trauma, and she again utilizes language of corporeality to access truths across time and landscape.  Her Jewish and Ukrainian heritage and identity as a first generation American announces itself as a source of poetic tension from the first page.  “Against Naming,” the book’s opening poem, features a speaker confiding in her yet unborn child that she has made a pilgrimage to Auschwitz, “Against / my family’s urges, against even your future / ones, maybe,” in order to confront a history that, while she is privileged with the opportunity to leave in the past, across the Atlantic, she chooses to remember.  Ending on the idea that the speaker will give her child a name “unmarked / by ancestry or first generation or Slavic…” the poem enters into dialogue with a dissonance central to the rest of the book:  the distance between remembrance and memorial. 

The Many Names for Mother is a record of a mother’s measuring the space between her history and her child’s future.  “Remember,” she instructs in “Letter To My Son,” “here you are a white man…. Know, across the water you are dark.”  While repeating orders for her son to recognize the violence that brought him into a relatively privileged existence, the speaker also emphasizes his separation from past persecution.  This tension also is grounded in the body.  Through literal and figurative description of her son’s newborn body, the poet questions what inherited trauma looks, feels, and even sounds like:

the dead under
your skin your feet inside your mouth
They crack your white bones
milk teeth raw gum line still sealing soft spot.

Her passion for linguistics – clear through the whole of the collection – here opens up additional layers of understanding and embodiment of this history.  Into this same, very serious poem, Dasbach manages to weave light through wordplay, reaching toward a gestalt more beautiful than its historical and physical fragments and allowing her child to exist on the page as a sovereign being, recognizing even his mute, infant form as more than a convenient poetic image:

But remember, little sun, you are more
… than body or metaphor can make you
or color name you or land and water divide you
more than ma or man or mine.

While the book roams across time and space to access diverse portraits of motherhood, it is also self-aware as a work of art.  Part of Dasbach’s bravery as a poet is her willingness to admit the limitations of her own voice in addressing narratives that exceed her own experiences.  An anxiety of appropriation burdens but does not restrain her work – rather, in the face of this fear the poet challenges herself to address the stakes of writing in the liminal space between known and unknown, using this tension as yet another point of access to the question of what it means to be a mother.  This is best exemplified in “The Question,” arguably the only persona poem in the whole collection, written in the voice of the poet’s mother.  Here, Dasbach measures the pain and privilege within her choice to speak intergenerational stories and the degree of truth she can and cannot achieve in doing so as the American-born daughter of a Ukrainian immigrant mother.  “Is the only difference in our accounts,” the mother’s voice asks,

accent and accent-less?  Is hers more vivid?
Its gaps filled in by years of stories.
So young, she never could have seen
the places cast now in a worded half-light.
Still, she captures them and calls it
art, calls it poetry, calls, without
hearing me say: I lived that thing you like to reimagine –

Dasbach’s questioning the potential of her poetry to distance herself from its subject is paradoxically among the many things that makes her a great poet.  Hers is a voice worth listening to and learning from.  The Many Names for Mother is haunted and haunting, and like all worthwhile poetry, unafraid to confess, simultaneously, “I don’t know,” and “I know all too well.” 

The Many Names for Mother by Julia Kolchinsky Dasbach
The Kent State University Press, 2019
Paperback, 98 pages

Infinity Standing Up by Drew Pisarra | Reviewed by Michael Sutherlin

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Drew Pisarra takes on the topic of the modern on-again off-again relationship in his raw and clever collection of poems entitled Infinity Standing Up. The work is comprised of 40 Shakespearean sonnets divided into 5 sections. Despite the formal structure inherited from the classic love themed sonnet, the work is very experimental and conversational. I especially enjoyed the thematic rather than sequential numbering of the sonnets. For instance, Sonnet 69, the fourth poem in the collection, depicts the Yin-Yang qualities of a sexual relationship: “a visual symbol for / such sensual play!” Sonnet 32° is about the coldness of an empty relationship. Sonnet 917-589-9XXX is a long run-on sentence text message to an ex, Sonnet Seventeen magazine describes the ex’s maturity, and Sonnet Gazillion is a poem about Cupid’s “countless arrows.”

Each numbered title encapsulates the theme of the individual poem while also bolstering the idea of Infinity Standing Up. Pisarra’s unconventional numbering system evokes the infinite valuations, deviations, and combinations of experiences within different types of love relationships, be it infatuation, breakup, affair, or polyamorous relationship. Pisarra suggests that love, like poetry, cannot be confined by traditional formulas of the past, since the modern digitized world adapts and enumerates the experience of love in new ways.  As a result, the collection sheds light on both the nature of modern relationships and the way modern poetry discusses such experiences.

The first section, Act 1, consists of 10 poems detailing the early period of a love affair, the first turmoil between a couple, and finally the sorrow felt from the breakup. These poems are very visceral. The first poem describes the moment of enraptured infatuation as akin to crawling inside a person and living amongst their organs: “I’d like to climb inside your mouth feet first.” It perfectly captures the sense of discovery and intimacy in a relationship while also pointing to the retrospective gross aspects of an overly enthused infatuation. The topics transition from heightened lust in Sonnet 666, to a failure of information in Sonnet 411, and finally to the sorrow of being dumped by a younger person in Sonnet -1: “I’m not wailing, more like sighing. Isn’t / that a softer grief.” The changing tones narrate both the intense moments and the emotional distance that flurry and dissipate until the relationship dissolves.

The next two sections, Act 2 and Act 2A, deal with the post-breakup sorrows and the rekindled sexual affair. Act 2 includes many contemporary themes related to seeking companionship. For instance, Sonnet 1-800 reminiscences about how the 1-800 sex lines has evolved into the hook-up culture of social media:

Yet where are we now? With our lovelorn apps
(Grindr, Tinder, Tingle, Scruff, and Diskreet)
that spell out longing via finger taps,
 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Hey, emoticon heart… r u nearby?”

Act 2A transitions to a new, guilt laden relationship with the ex. Sonnet $18.99 expresses the speaker feeling cheap because he could not purchase dinner for fear of the relationship being taken too seriously: “I wanted to blame you for making me feel cheap / but I knew you weren’t single, so who’s the creep?” The section ends in Sonnet <2 which cleverly hides deep-seated regret and hatred in the sub-text of an inane conversation between the couple while among their friends.

The final section sees the speaker processing his grief and trying to move on. This section plays heavily upon the mathematic themes throughout the collection. The first poem, “Sonnet Infinity,” begins with the speaker seeing the ex’s body parts everywhere: “your lips, your nose, your ears / landed magically on face after face,” Sonnet Pi denies the idea that a polyamorous relationship works because love can be divided infinitely, and “Sonnet Ø” plays off the sign Ø as symbolic of an empty set (along with other meanings): “It will soon be / over. It will be over. It’s over.” Finally, Sonnet # discusses a therapy session that ends abruptly, indicating that the speaker’s feelings are still present and have not yet been fully worked through.

Pisarra’s combination of traditional and experimental writing offers readers a fresh look into the everchanging topic of finding love. The poems give deep insight into raw emotions, contemporary references, and visceral elations that will appeal to many readers. Balancing this lyricism, brutally distasteful imagery likewise underlines the nauseating aspects of modern relationships. The title, Infinity Standing Up, seems to highlight the embodied abstraction of what it means to write a love poem. I recommend Pisarra’s book as a conscious exploration of the hope and despair of pursuing and failing to find love today.

Infinity Standing Up

By Drew Pisarra

Capturing Fire Press, 2019

Paperback, 68 pp. $10

Michael Sutherlin is a PhD student in English at the University of Tennessee Knoxville where he specializes in Modernism and Literary Theory. His current focus of study is the relationship between religion and secularity as it plays out in twentieth century debates about didacticism.

The Wild Feminine: Five poems by Ada Limón | Craft Essay by Dion O’Reilly

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In the Christian myth, Adam names the animals. In “A Name,” the first poem of Ada Limón’s most recent collection, The Carrying, she remakes Eden. In Limón’s version, Eve names the creatures, making one wonder if in this Genesis, Eve is the first-born human, the maker of Adam.

When Eve walked among
the animals and named them—
nightingale, red-shouldered hawk,
fiddler crab, fallow deer—
I wonder if she ever wanted
them to speak back, looked into
their wide wonderful eyes and
whispered, Name me, Name me.

“A Name,” sets a high bar for the The Carrying by rewriting the Judeo-Christian narrative, claiming the woman as Namer. Moreover, the speaker wonders if the original woman “looked into/their wide wonderful eyes/ and whispered, Name me Name me.” This re-imagining not only transfers the power to Eve, but also shows how differently a woman might claim the world: not as an object on which to impose meaning, but rather as a source of meaning and identity. This poem, which turns Christian ideology on its head, is not heavy-handed in its feminist slant. It is not resolute, does not chant a received wisdom. It is important to note that the speaker “wonders” if Eve “wanted” the animals to “speak back.” Limón poses a question. Indeed, her question is rather magical and not a little plaintive. We sense the desire for this female bond with the wild. We allow that her need might be enough to inspire such a bond, while the repetition — Name me, Name me— implies an unfulfilled longing. 

This feminine ability to derive power from animals is unabashedly clear in the opening poem of Bright Dead Things. The Pushcart winner, “How to Triumph Like a Girl,” is a playful celebration of womanhood. The first line is disarming, initially characterizing the mares un-feministically as “lady horses”—  ladylike and prancy, not at all your stereotypical leaders.

I like the lady horses best,
how they make it all look easy,
like running 40 miles per hour
is as fun as taking a nap, or grass.
I like their lady horse swagger,
after winning. ears up, girls. ears up!
but mainly, let’s be honest, I like
that they’re ladies. As if this big
dangerous animal is also a part of me,
Summer inside the delicate
skin of my body, there pumps
an 8-pound female horse heart,
giant with power, heavy with blood.
Don’t you want to believe it?
Don’t you want to lift my shirt and see
the huge beating genius machine
that thinks, no, it knows,
it’s going to come in first.

As the poem moves along, we begin to discern the power of these “lady horses.” They have “swagger, after winning.” Then the weird and fascinating turn; the speaker feels an identification with the beasts because of their shared gender. Once again, the poem’s second volta asks a question: “Don’t you want to believe it?/Don’t you want to lift my shirt and see/the huge beating genius machine/that thinks, no, it knows,/it’s going to come in first.” This poem is a fun “Imagine” song, a kind of “I have a dream” manifesto, but with a subtle stratum. Limón’s speaker doesn’t ask the reader to believe a woman can be as powerful as a racehorse; she asks the reader if she might “want to believe it”—  a nudge, a baby step. Furthermore the question is framed in a transgressive manner, asking if the narrator could reveal her breasts (the source of human nurturance and nutrition) and instead of an offense or party prank, it might be proof of power and “genius.” Moreover, consider how she imparts “genius” to the heart, the organ conventionally associated with feelings— as if to imply feelings are possessed of their own intuitive knowledge.

In the April 2019 Writer’s Chronicle interview, Limón remarks that “there are two snakes in a poem, and in the end, one snake has to win…on some level one of the many underlying forces of the poem has to prevail…People are scared to make a choice or they feel like they want to embrace the mess and craziness of it, which is awesome, but in doing so sometimes they dilute [the ending of the poem].”  In much of Limón’s work, it is the feminine wild that prevails. Many of her poems deal with loss— death of the planet, death of family members, death of the conventional dream of being a mother. That “snake” of loss is often entwined with the competing snake of wild femaleness or with the pure beauty of the natural world. Inevitably the feral feminine wins. The choice is made. Sometimes, it is purely nature that prevails, but there are enough poems like the ones cited above to establish a strong connection between the feminine and the wild as a balm.

Take “Service,” from Bright Dead Things, in which the speaker is “fed up” with her traveling companion whom we take to be her boyfriend or husband: the speaker is not enjoying his objectification of his ex-girlfriend’s beauty. The speaker re-establishes her resonance with the physicality of a racehorse and then sets out to find her satisfaction in yet another animalistic bond:

Somewhere outside of Albuquerque, I was all
fed up with the stories about your ex girlfriend’s
Guess billboard in New York City, and to make
matters worse, I had to pee like a racehorse, or
like a girl who’d had too much to drink way
too far away from home. You stopped at a friend’s
body shop to talk about a buddy who was stuck
some place in Mexico. You were talking, pulling
strings and taking pulls off a brown bottle, and no
one told me where the restroom was, so I walked
back to where the hot rods were displayed like dogs
ready for a fight, baring their grills like teeth.
I was hungry, the air smelled like hot gasoline
and that sweet carnation smell of oil and coolant.
A girl pitbull came and circled me as I circled
the cars; she sniffed my ankles like I was her kin
or on some kind of rescue mission. You were still
talking, not a glance in the direction of me
and the bitch working our ways around
the souped-up Corvettes and the power tools.
The pet was glossy, well cared for, a queen
of the car shop, and when she widened
her hind legs and squatted to pee all over
one of the cars’ dropped canvases. I took it
as a challenge. That strong yellow stream seemed
to be saying, Girl, no one’s going to tell me
when to take a leak, when to bow down,
when not to bite. So, right then, in the dim lights
of the strange garage, I  lifted my skirt and pissed
like the hard bitch I was.

Again, Limón is asking a question: Why are females dismissed and ignored— relegated to the junk heap. Why is the term bitch derogatory when female dogs are loyal, protective, smart, and strong— like “a queen?” The speaker feels marginalized and ignored until she identifies with the powerful pitbull bitch and transgressively defines her territory by pissing in the junk. The speaker is far from home in an environment that is not helpful or friendly. The snake of oppression and alienation is conquered by the snake of animalistic female empowerment. Limón makes a clear (and humorous) choice, claiming to be a “hard bitch,’ and that’s why the resolution is so strong.

In The Carrying, Limón grapples with her fruitless attempts to conceive and what that means for a woman. In the final analysis, nature reconciles the speaker’s ambivalence and mediates the loss. In the last poem “Sparrow, What Did You Say?,” the narrator— who has spent a quiet day gardening— contemplates what her life would be like if she were capable of giving birth. She decides “I’m good at this, this being alone/in the world, the watching of things/growing, this older me…who spent an hour trying to figure out that the bird/with a three-note descending call/is just a sparrow.” She goes on to question what her life would be like if she had a child, would she “selfishly demand this day/back, a full untethered day trying/to figure out what bird was calling me/and why.” As usual, Limón asks the question without imposing an answer. It is clear the path for this speaker is to listen to the wild and pursue what she hears. This poem is not only a tribute to the redemptive power of nature, but also an ars poetica. The speaker, in the final analysis, re-dedicates herself to listening to the natural world and figuring out what to say about it. That process becomes her generative act.

Sometimes, without reference to distinctly feminist issues, the untouched landscape releases the living from pain or bondage. In “The Long Ride,” a doomed horse is a stand-in for the universal anguish of misdeeds and regret. The horse is identified with civilization, the city, and its discontents. The open pastures of Montana become the balm for human sin.

Ma’s in the wind-pummeled double-wide
waiting for the retired policeman
to bring the retired police horses
to the ranch. She’s at the window now
describing the rain, the two-horse trailer,
and also, how sometimes she and my stepdad
talk about death for a long time.
How imagining death can make it easier
to live and I agree and say, It’s called die
before you die. What is being delivered
here is a horse who’s had a hard life.
A large quarter horse named Seattle—
a horse with a city-name who protected a city,
who was spooked outside the baseball stadium
what a shopping bag wrapped around his leg,
a plastic thing versus a muscle-bound animal
in a busy crowd and a flash accident killed
a man. But then, I wonder, what for the horse?
Never to be ridden, stuck numb in a stall,
lightning bugs torturing the poor blood?
I bet that horse might have wanted to
died before he died. But not yet.
What is  what is being delivered here is release.
Today, his officer writer is finally retired too,
with an old badge on the dashboard
and a fine plan to drive all the way to Montana,
where the writer has bought a ranch for his horse,
Seattle. The rider and his horse, with his city name,
and his forgiven city mistakes, are charting
a clear new territory of absolution, and it makes
Ma and me happy. How good it is to love
live things, even when what they’ve done
is terrible, how much we each want to be
the pure exonerated creature, to be turned loose
into our own wide open without a single
harness of sin to stop us.

The wild and the love of the wild prevail in this poem as they do in most of Limón’s work. Characteristically, there is no minimizing of earthly pain and suffering; pain is a strong, vivid, writhing snake throughout, but ultimately, healing imagery of the “wide open” end the poems with satisfaction. Limón chooses the snake of love, redemption, and the natural order.

On her Blogspot, Limón states “I think it might be harder for men to talk about their feelings, but when they do, we think they are being brave.” She goes on to discuss what it was like for her to be frank about her feelings:

I wasn’t just anxious. I was white-knuckling-for-the-take-off scared. For me, [Bright Dead Things] is the most personal book of poems yet. It’s raw in a way that I’m not used to; I don’t mean unfinished, I mean, “open.” Though the previous books of poems are certainly me, and expose all parts of me within them, this one doesn’t hide under anything. For starters, the poems never (or very rarely) change tense [sic]—the “I” in these poems is “ME.” I remember, while I was writing some of these poems, saying to myself, “Okay, what’s the poem you are scared to write?” and then trying to write it. I did this over and over again.

I would contend that Limón’s resolute commitment to choosing her snakes— revealing her feelings about loss, pain, womanhood, and nature— is a courageous choice, a revealing and vulnerable choice. Maybe, ultimately that’s what makes her poems both strongly female and also strong: she evinces the courage to open up, to deliver wildly-honest poems— to take a tough stand with finesse and craft, to be the “hard bitch” that she is and own it.

Works Cited

Buckton, Lisa. “Naming the Animal: Am Interview with Ada Limon.” The Writer’s Chronicle, vol. 51, no. 5, Apr. 2019, pp. 16-24.

Limon, Ada. The Carrying: Poems. Milkweed Editions, 2020.

Limón, Ada “Starting with A: On Art & Anxiety” Ada Limón. www. Adalimon.blogspot.com. Accessed 11 March 2019

Limón Ada. Bright Dead Things. Milkweed Editions, 2015.

The Holy Bible: King James Version. Dallas, TX: Brown Books Publishing, 2004.

Dion O’Reilly has spent much of her life on a farm in the Santa Cruz Mountains. Her poetry appears or is forthcoming in New Ohio Review, Sugar House Review, Rattle, The Sun, Massachusetts Review, New Letters, Bellingham Review, Atlanta Review, Catamaran, and a variety of other literary journals and anthologies, including an upcoming Lambda Literary Anthology. Her work has been nominated for Pushcarts, the Intro Journals Project, and was sent to the judges for the Folio Literary Journal Poetry Contest and her first manuscript, Ghost Dog, was a finalist for the Catamaran Book Prize.