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“The opposite of wounded isn’t healed”: Emari DiGiorgio’s Girl Torpedo | Review by Allison Pitinii Davis

August 19, 2018 By Grist Journal

“The opposite of wounded isn’t healed”: Emari DiGiorgio’s Girl Torpedo | Review by Allison Pitinii Davis

Emari DiGiorgio’s Girl Torpedo (Agape, 2018) examines how women creatively intercept trauma and redirect it, torpedo-like, back at the culprits. Pain often instigates these poems, and the speakers manipulate suffering into the energy needed to combat, survive, mourn, and reflect upon other women across time and space. These poems investigate the personal in global, social, and mythological contexts to answer the collection’s burning question: where, in this contemporary moment, “does a girl torpedo strike/an old battleship?”

This collection interrogating power, pain, and control makes the reader consider how we “read” another’s pain. Can we read pain across gender, culture, age, and time? How does our pain connect and isolate us? What roles do language and media play in aestheticizing pain and what others do with pain? In Regarding the Pain of Others, Susan Sontag considers how our framing of another’s pain reveals more about ourselves than the trauma. In response, she advocates approaching the pain of others with difficult reflection rather than pacifying sympathy: “To set aside the sympathy we extend to others beset by war and murderous politics for a reflection on how our privileges are located on the same map as their suffering, and may—in ways we might prefer not to imagine— be linked to their suffering, as the wealth of some may imply the destitution of others, is a task for which the painful, stirring images supply only an initial spark.” Girl Torpedo, through its global and historic scope, situates the personal on this larger map. The collection especially interrogates the gaze of Western media and its role in monetizing suffering: For example, in “Toddler Pulled from Rubble in Aleppo,” it takes, “Two minutes,/twelve seconds to pluck the girl from stone:/a small trophy the men lift to camera.”

The question of how we approach and experience the pain of others is also formally enacted within the collection. Poems including “Un-naming A Thing,” “New Math,” and “More or Less American” can be read in multiple directions, and our ability to read “across” our experience depends on our willingness read and re-read, to accept that our initial understanding is limited, to suspect that our intuition leads us back to the self rather than deeper into the poem. These poems, each written in two-line stanzas organized into three columns, resemble a page of cells. In this collection about pain and power, the cell-like stanzas evoke the cells in Discipline and Punish, and like Foucault, DiGiorgio does not just want to free her subjects from physical pain but from the systems that create oppression.

The four sections of the book examine cultures surrounding personal sexual assault, parenthood, and global sexual inequality. The trauma resulting from intercourse alone shifts like a kaleidoscope of pain—rape, the loss of children, and the burden of children tumble into each other and reshape their shards with increasing horror. The body and mind are presented as the sites of infinite pain and love, and sometimes both at once, as in “The Infant Corpses at the Home For Young Girls,” which describes love as “pain from the beginning—that inexplicable spasm,/the first time you’re kicked from the inside.”

On the cover of the book, a woman’s diving body cuts a sharp diagonal across a cityscape. Like that body, the bodies in the book find ways to throw themselves against the grain of language and social constructs. In the “Little Black Dress,” the power of women’s clothing is not attraction but vengeance. In the poem, the dress’s wearer fantasizes about avenging the man who sexually assaults her not by spearing “a sabre through his ticker” but by making him eat the dress she was wearing:

Every day, he’ll eat
the same dress. Every day, he’ll taste me
and what he did to me. Every day, he’ll gag

on the tag, the small band of elastic. His one
meal because he wanted it so bad.

The assonance of the short “a”—“gag,” “tag,” “band,” “bad”—assaults the ear. The rhyme of “gag” and “tag” reworks the stereotypical “gag” of the blow job into the perpetrator gagging on the object he objectified. The poem takes the language of the assaulter and has him shove it back into his own mouth until he chokes on it.

Another poem that interrogates the culture and language of sexual assault is “Where Does the Rabbit Go When the Hounds are Loosed?” The poem, composed of questions, situates the speaker’s personal experiences with assault in the context of Monica Lewinsky-trial era America, and in doing so, engages in contemporary discussions about consent:

And Monica?

Where’s the scandal with his last name? Where did she go
down on him because she didn’t want to have sex?

Where am I not guilty of that, so guilty, I got good at it?

The poems in this collection depict a reality where “power” is taking assault in the mouth to discourage assault in the vagina. A reality where we’ve become desensitized to the pain that fills our news and our bodies. Girl Torpedo argues that when women cannot steer the ship then, as in “Beware, Beware,” they can recite “psalms that draw sailors to rocks” so that sirens can devour the “men gripping oarlocks.”

Girl Torpedo

by Emari DiGiorgio

Agape Editions, 2018

pp_. $16.00

 

***

Allison Pitinii Davis is the author of Line Study of a Motel Clerk (Baobab Press, 2017), a finalist for the Ohioana Book Award and the National Jewish Book Award’s Berru Award, and Poppy Seeds (Kent State University Press, 2013), winner of the Wick Poetry Chapbook Prize. She holds fellowships from Stanford University’s Wallace Stegner program, the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, and the Severinghaus Beck Fund for Study at Vilnius Yiddish Institute. She is a PhD student at The University of Tennessee.

Filed Under: Community Tagged With: Agape Editions, Allegra Hyde, Emari DiGiorgio, Girl Torpedo, Poetry Review

A Conversation Between Samantha Duncan and Katie Manning

November 28, 2016 By Grist Journal

A Conversation Between Samantha Duncan and Katie Manning

Samantha Duncan’s chapbook The Birth Creatures and Katie Manning’s chapbook A Door with a Voice were published by Agape Editions in 2016. The two poets interviewed each other via email.

 

Manning: Hi, Samantha! I read The Birth Creatures upon its release and again today, and I love the way your chapbook captures the strangeness of pregnancy and motherhood. That strangeness is something I also explored at length in my forthcoming full-length, Tasty Other, and it crept up unintentionally in my Bible word-banking chapbook, A Door with a Voice.

I was afraid when I began writing “mother” poems that no one but mothers—and maybe not even mothers!—would want to read them. I’ve been glad to be proven wrong. Will you tell me about how you began your project? Did you have a purpose and a plan from the beginning? Did you have any fears about writing this?

Duncan: Hi Katie! I’m glad you brought up the strangeness of pregnancy and motherhood, because I think it’s important to dismantle the notion that every part of these experiences is universal or joyful. Part of the motivation for The Birth Creatures came from my desire to share the aspects of childbirth and motherhood that aren’t glowing and perfect, that are messy and bleak. My other purpose for the book was to gain some footing over my own narrative, as my first postpartum experience was not a positive one that I felt in control of.

I do wonder how much truth there is to the idea that “mother poems” aren’t very popular or are only read by mothers. It’s certainly a thought that was in the back of my head while writing The Birth Creatures and trying to get it published. Another reservation or fear I had was that it’s the most personal project I’ve published. Luckily, readers’ reactions so far have been generous and positive!

This question also came to my mind while reading A Door with a Voice, as the Bible is an ambitious text and subject to take on. I love the idea to create art from language in the Bible, instead of, as you say, using the language as a weapon. Did you have any fears or reservations when you began the project? How did you decide on a found poetry approach? Did you have clear themes about the book beforehand, or did they emerge as you wrote the poems?

katie-25Manning: Oh, yes, I definitely worried that some people would be offended that I was using the Bible as a word bank, even though I was doing this in part as a protest against misusing the Bible by taking the language out of context. I was so relieved when my writing group members (who are also committed Christians and writing professors) responded to my project poems by saying that they were important and necessary, and I was pleasantly surprised when they found some of them humorous.

I chose the found poetry approach because I’d just had my first baby and I’d just finished my dissertation, and I worried that I’d just let go of writing unless I set myself an intentional assignment. I was exhausted, so it was a relief to use a limited word bank instead of choosing from all of the words I know. This project made me view found poetry in a way that I never had before. It’s not so different from “un-found” poetry really—we’re always working from a limited set of words. Found poetry simply sets tighter strictures.

I did not have any clear themes in mind when I began writing these poems; I just picked out words and phrases and started arranging to see where I could go with them. It was interesting to see what emerged and recurred—for A Door with a Voice, I pulled out the poems from the larger project that especially focus on women and mothers.

The poems in both of our chapbooks tend to have short lines, and your poems often include white space within lines. For A Door with a Voice, I usually broke lines to keep words and phrases separate that I found separately in the original text. How did you come to the short lines and white space for your poems? Did this form arise organically as you wrote and revised, or did you set out to work with that lineation from the start?

author-photo-1Duncan: I don’t know that the lineation fell into place from the start, but it definitely felt necessary as the book came together. Most of it is based on my first postpartum experience, which, as I mentioned, was not a positive one. For me, a large part of the aftermath of giving birth was a loss of control that left me feeling dissociated from myself. My mind felt different, my body felt different (especially during a rough recovery), and this inability to recognize myself was very new and unsettling.

In this way, the poems shaped themselves as I wrote them. The lines having different indents appeared to me as them being strangers to each other, much in the way I felt like a stranger to myself. The white space spoke to an uncertainty I felt, a sort of unfilled space that I, as a new parent, saw being filled with more of a new normal than the old normal I was used to. And it all happens quietly, these changes you have little control of. Overall, I ended up trying to visually represent that unfamiliarity and uncertainty in the shape of the poems, and this was the result that spoke most clearly to that.

It’s great that your writing group partners were supportive of your book. I’m curious about the humor they saw in the poems. My book adopted a sort of darkly comic tone, as I didn’t want it to be too serious. Is humor a tone you sought out for A Door with a Voice, or did it emerge less intentionally?

Manning: Humor was completely unintentional in my first string of first drafts! At that point, I was writing from a place of protest, so I was really caught off guard when I first read these poems and my workshop friends laughed along with them. Their response shifted the way I viewed my project, and I embraced my playfulness.

Speaking of playfulness, you have a recurring rhino in your chapbook that might be disorienting or disturbing to some readers, but I’m completely charmed by it. (Note: When I first saw a rhinoceros at the zoo at age 2, I told my mom, “I want to be one of those when I grow up!” I have a special place in my heart for rhinos.) Would you tell me about your choice to use a rhino? Why that animal? What’s its significance for you?

Duncan: I like that you’re charmed by the rhino! It came partly from a children’s alphabet book called Alphabeasts by Wallace Edwards, which features some oddly pensive creatures taking over a house with their theatrical musings. In other ways, the rhino symbolized the absolute takeover of a family and household a new baby can bring about. Rhinos are large in their presence, hard to ignore, and, in a more surreal moment in my book, swallow you whole. They’re the hulking physical opposite of a tiny, fragile newborn baby, but somehow, this one showed up in my poems and embodied many of the overwhelming, burdensome feelings I had about the new human I’d brought home and was expected to raise.

I’m glad we got to chat about our chapbooks, Katie! What’s next on your plate – any new projects in progress or publications to share?

Manning: My new full-length poetry book, Tasty Other, is being published by Main Street Rag (as the winner of their book award!) in November 2016. It explores my transition to motherhood with poems inspired by anxiety dreams, fairy tales, biblical narratives, parenting handbooks, weekly pregnancy calendars… it’s all there, and it’s all weird. I’ve got readings set up in San Diego, LA, and Kansas City already, and I’m excited to set up more readings and school visits to share this work in the coming year.

I’ve loved chatting chapbooks with you too! Thanks for taking the time. Will you close us out by telling me what’s new and next for you?

Duncan: My poetry chapbook, Playing One on TV, is being published by Hyacinth Girl Press in 2017. The poems are about memorable female TV characters, mostly from the nineties, explored through a feminist lens. It was a fun book to work on and closely study how these characters represent girlhood and womanhood and social norms, as well as how I sometimes struggled to relate to so many white female icons as a woman of color. I also have a flash fiction chapbook, Chaos Theory, that I’m excited about and would love to find a good publishing home for.

—–

Samantha Duncan’s fourth chapbook, Playing One on TV, will be out from Hyacinth Girl Press in 2017, and her recent fiction has appeared or is forthcoming in Meridian, The Pinch, The Conium Review, and Flapperhouse. She serves as Executive Editor for ELJ Publications and reads for Gigantic Sequins. She lives in Houston and can be found at planesflyinglowoverhead.blogspot.com and @SamSpitsHotFire.

Katie Manning is the founding Editor-in-Chief of Whale Road Review and an Associate Professor of Writing at Point Loma Nazarene University in San Diego. She is the author of four poetry chapbooks, and her first full-length poetry collection, Tasty Other, is the 2016 winner of the Main Street Rag Poetry Book Award. She has received The Nassau Review Author Award for Poetry, and her writing has been published in Fairy Tale Review, New Letters, Poet Lore, So to Speak, Verse Daily, and many other journals and anthologies. Find her online at www.katiemanningpoet.com.

 

Filed Under: Essays Tagged With: Agape Editions, interview, Katie Manning, Samantha Duncan

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