To sum up I Become a Delight to My Enemies, it’s a collection of poems that all center around a small town. The poems are all interconnected, though the voice changes from piece to piece. Additionally, there are occasional commentary notes at the side of the page that are a kind of voice from beyond doing metacommentary on the poems. The poems often focus on traumatic and violence experiences, particularly ones geared towards women. For instance, there is a series of poems called “Factory Meat” which draw parallels in exactly how you might expect through a feminist lens.
The Factory Meat poems contain some of the most vivid imagery and evocative use of language. “Factory Meat I” was one of the first poems in the collection that really gripped me. It involves a character peering into the Chancellor’s leg wound and seeing her “whole world in miniature.” There’s then a blazon of unlikely items: a misplaced hair dryer, fish sticks, split wood. In short, that which “plagued” and “formed” the speaker. It’s a surreal moment that really works for the poem, and the poem then shifts gears into an abrupt and shocking sexual assault—the language for describing which is vulgar and appropriately disgusting. In the second half of the poem, the speaker experiences the aftermath of the assault and it awakens her recognition. There’s a dark knowledge, an “ecstatic recognition” where the ugliness of the world becomes more apparent and the boundary between dreaming and waking disintegrates. The arc of the poem is really compelling, existential, and dark.
“Factory Meat III” explores similar themes about women drinking with men and leaving their ghosts behind. The Chancellor makes another appearance, maintaining a narrative thread. The poem sets the stage for abduction which is “The birth of tragedy” and “the invention of processed meat.” Again, the Sara Peters does a great job of offering some visceral and surreal imagery to address the violence, including a fridge full of placentas in vacuum-sealed bags. The poem also involves a haunting image of the speaker standing in front of crashing waves, but it’s oddly cold and distant—she isn’t in front of real waves, but a projection that loops waves crashing over and over. Something about the fact that it isn’t real makes the piece more haunting.
I’ll comment on “Factory Meat IV” and then I’ll give that series a rest. Again, the Chancellor is at the heart of the poem, this time serving what appear to be literal plates of factory meat. There’s again a strange disconnect within the speaker, who is separate from her experiences. In her words: “I say to my mind, stumble around you filthy mess but don’t you ever / leave me” and then “I hacked my way to the bleeding edge of my brain.” I like that idea of having to make a plan with your own mind and trying to cling onto it even when it’s a mess and the final image of hacking around a brain is again a visceral idea to explore.
In some ways, the “Factory Meat” poems extend into other pieces, as well. “I Am Without Money, Pity, or Time”, a piece which comes towards the end of the collection, revisits the idea of the Chancellor abducting women and treating them like meat, hanging them on hooks, and so on. The poem also deals with aging in an interesting way; the narrator says that she was “too old to heal into a fuckable shell”, but that is paralleled with the Chancellor’s shakiness: “HIs hand would shake so he could barely bring food to his mouth.” The Chancellor’s vampiric effect begins to fall apart. While she hangs like a carcass, he goes about his routine in a way that is perverse and pathetic, barely able to hold himself together.
Now, you’ll notice I’ve referenced The Chancellor several times. There are certain characters in the text that make repeated appearances and some of the poems are portraits of the town’s central figures. The poem “Teacher” is an interesting one for a few reasons: first, the format of the poem is very narrow, like a column in a newspaper, projecting a certain kind of rigidity and constraint. Also, the description of the teacher is just so cruel. The voice is that of teenagers, and they offer such a scathing critique of her appearance and behaviours that it’s hard to stomach. They know she is the most educated person in Town and they make it their goal to tear her down. Even the minutiae of her ankles cracking becomes an object for their derision. Their hyperawareness to her every flaw speaks volumes about the Town; as much as the poem is a portrait of her, it’s a portrait of the Town’s mentality. If a little on-the-nose, the speaker says, “We wish to control our / teacher’s body. We wish to / tell her which expressions / do not suit her face, which / clothes do not suit her figure.” The poem ends on some grisly imagery again, her ribs a “ghastly nest” for “chest filleted open” with its heart still pulsing and intestines follow her “like a bridal train.” Eeesh.
The mayor also makes several appearances and in one notable poem they bury her. It’s an instance of reverse pathetic fallacy because, despite the sadness of the occasion, the day is bright, with “the day [...] driving sun- / light down our throats.” There’s also a portrait of Zenya in the poem “Z.” That one seems like a tense friendship that is driven by envy — the Town really breeds mutual resentment, particularly among its women, seemingly. In “Z,” the speaker projects that Zenya hates her a little and wants her to die a little bit. The poem is similarly rich in imagery that I can’t quote in full. The poem is a slice-of-life that reads very authentically. The kind of musings and introspection of the poem’s central figure does a great job of figuring that awkwardness and tension of youth.
Within the collection, there is a good variety of short and long poems. Some of the longer pieces, like “Clover”, offer similar vignettes but allow you to know characters in the text a bit more intimately. “Clover” is one of those poems that reads like a character sketch and hence makes the poetry collection read a little bit more novelistically. It’s a really well done piece that gives just enough story to grasp onto but remains razor-thin enough to be enigmatic. Again, it would be too lengthy to quote in full, but rest assured the characterization is great. The last lines of the poem I will quote because it’s such a prototypical experience for me: “She had unknowingly spent all of yesterday / thinking a sentence, forgetting it, then thinking it again.” Wonderful.
As you’ve likely noticed from the darkness of some of the poems, there’s an edge to Peters’ writing, often offering a sardonic take. In “Open House”, Peters writes, “I used to believe in the law of proximity” and, before you ask, the following line is: “Oh don’t nod like you understand / It’s a term I made up / It is the belief that if you bear witness to something terrible / You will never directly experience / That terrible thing”. I know she just made it up for the purposes of the poem, but it is something that definitely feels true, however glibly presented.
At the end of the collection, Peters engages in a formal experiment where the poem is presented as a dialogue. The heteroglossic nature of the text comes together at last. The diverse voices that give utterance to the other poems come together in “Slumber Party // Spectral Trace” and recount the narrative. It’s another moment in the text where poetry and prose blend together, forming a complete story, but revising one anothers’ fragmentary accounts and critiquing their phrasing. It’s an interesting mediation of their voices, which all serve to keep each other in check (like they do with the smarter-than-thou teacher). It simultaneously gives voice to the truth of their situation while finding itself within the constraints of multiple perspectives. The epilogue then includes two more short poems (“Factory Meat XIII” and an untitled, haunting, epigraph-like image).
Overall, I quite liked the collection. It is not necessarily the most accessible collection—you might not feel it right in your heart—but there’s enough here to make it a stirring, compelling exploration of a town’s dark secret. If you can stomach it, the imagery of the collection and the characterization of the town’s figures are well worth the time to read it.
I began the review with a caution to myself to not overquote, which I may well have done here. Thus, I’ll conclude with an apology: if I have misquoted, I apologize to Sarah Peters and her publishers. If anyone happens to have the physical, published version of the text and you notice errors in my quoting: please reach out and I’ll make every effort to fix it.
In the meantime, happy reading—even when it’s a grisly, existential horror.
No comments:
Post a Comment