Theology of the Body

By Donora Hillard
Gold Wake Press

In Theology of the Body, Donora Hillard employs a variety of styles and structures to present a complicated picture of the body, desire, and heterosexual relationships. She makes use of the language of theology and an unrelenting physicality in order to create a sense of faith not beyond the body, but through it of a human divinity that is also at once diabolic. It is no accident that the opening epigraph comes from William Blake.

Within this sequence, Hillard manages to portray women with threatening sexualities as well as women who have been made victims. In portraying women’s surprising and, to some, disturbing strength, she does not erase the brutality. With the lines "You can see muscles/ in my legs from running/ after men like you," “Pursuit” is followed by “Remedy,” which concludes with a literal punch that the tight lines and simple imagery of the first two stanzas allow to have a particularly strong impact on the reader. Reading the last verse for the first time, I jerked back a little as if I had been punched. (This isn’t the only place where I reacted so strongly: take that as a trigger warning.)

The only thing that separates these two poems is a line from Pope John Paul II’s Theology of the Body, taken out of context in order to be made into an opportunity for poetic production and imagination. “Remedy” and the other poems interspersed with lines from this same source do more than dramatize or respond to the line which precedes each: poems and statements interact, forming machines that produce new possibilities for the spirituality of the body. The possibilities, no doubt, would have been heinous to the Pope from whom Hillard so skillfully appropriates. The spirituality of the body, after all, is really just the body and living in it. No need for robes, psalms, or Churches: "Every woman, by virtue of the nuptial meaning of her body, is called in some way to be both a wife and a mother."

This quote from the old Pope is followed by a poem that changes the meaning of the final two terms beyond anything he would have recognized. “Wife” opens, "My husband was a shotgun made of candy./ I wanted to kill his former lovers, especially/ the Strawberry Shortcake-looking one." The only allusion to motherhood made comes a few lines later, "On our anniversary,/ we made love in a kiddie pool full of sugar/ and afterbirth."

This strange and joyful sweetness, interrupted by scars and knives with uncertain intents goes beyond the bounds of traditional and restrictive theologies. In doing so, it represents (particularly since it blends sweetness and at least potential pain) the peculiar strength of Hillard’s theology, whether you take it as a theology or not.

Review by Elizabeth Switaj

Cross-posted with Gender Across Borders

Erotic Poems

By E.E. Cummings
Edited by George James Firmage
W.W. Norton

Love, sex, and springtime are fundamental themes in E.E. Cummings’ lifetime body of work, and in Erotic Poems, editor George James Firmage brings together pieces by Cummings’ that are especially sexual, exalting of fertility, and written in a voice that is at once fresh and wise, evocative of the dumb yet utterly precise instinct to procreate.

These poems, and the line drawings (also by Cummings), were selected from the poet’s original manuscripts and are diverse in their eroticism, tone, and form. Representing a spectrum of sexual desire, thought, and impulse, the poems range from humorous to romantic, graphic to tender. Some are raw, even violent, while others are philosophical, and still others are playful but intelligent. My favorites led me to laugh, delighted by both the humor and the poetic genius in the verse, or else moved me to a deep sentimental ache at the beauty and tragedy of love and the existential anguish in its inevitable loss.

A particularly evocative poem entitled "ix." has a dark shadowy edge evoking the violence of both desire and of life itself, as well as a melancholy awareness of eventual extinguishment of life. It begins:

nearer:breath of my breath:take not thy tingling
limbs from me:make my pain their crazy meal

Then climaxes with:

flower of madness on gritted lips
and on sprawled eyes squirming with light insane
chisel the killing flame that dizzily grips.

And finally concludes:

thirstily. Dead stars stink. dawn. inane,
the poetic carcass of a girl.

This is not your run-of-the-mill erotica! From the sound of the words themselves to the use of unconventional syntax and spacing, the poems in this collection wind up to a climax after following a cadence that varies in texture, from rocky to sinuous.

Perhaps my favorite poem, because it hit me so squarely in the heart, is "vii." After the lovers have made love and:

all the houses terribly tighten
upon your coming:
and they are glad
as you fill the streets of my city with children.

Resting now, the lovers embrace, and it is Cummings' description of the melding of their bodies and hearts that, for me, so poignantly captures the sense of oneness between them:

you are a keen mountain and an eager island whose
lively slopes are based always in the me which is shrugging,which is
under you and around you and forever: i am the hugging sea.

The line drawings are themselves poetic, expressive, and emotional. Their style is reminiscent of Egon Schiele, Chagall, Picasso, and the deco illustrative style of the 1920s. (Interestingly, Cummings worked as a portrait artist for Vanity Fair magazine from 1924 to 1927.) The drawings are a great complement to the poems, as each holds large and complex movement, lovers' limbs and torsos twisting and twining around one another, floating in passion.

The book itself has been beautifully and simply executed; when I took Erotic Poems out of its mailing envelope, I had the sense of receiving a valentine. Its white cover is sparely punctuated by rose and black text and a shadowy crease evocative of the furrow at the center of an open book, or the entry point in clean white sheets ready to be mussed. The fashion in which the poems are headed—with non-sequential Roman and Arabic numerals—didn’t make much sense to me, but that wasn’t really a problem. There were poems that seemed to continue into one another and a few that could work as a triptych. While this may not necessarily be intentional on the part of the poet or the editor, it is indicative of the streaming and deeply subliminal nature of Cummings’ poetry and this collection in particular, which reveals the interior erotic landscape of both body and mind.

Review by Matsya Siosal

Jesus Boy

By Preston L. Allen
Akashic Books

Star-crossed intergenerational love between a Christian matriarch and a young church pianist sounds like an unlikely fictional masterpiece, but in Jesus Boy, Preston L. Allen’s empathic, intricate storytelling skillfully unfolds this improbable tale of religious conviction, sexual desire, and social pressure to conform.

While striving to maintain a virtuous private life—and wholly failing to do so—Elwyn Parker struggles with his public image as a young preacher. At the tender age of sixteen, his childhood crush becomes pregnant by another boy, confusing his chaste heart. At the same time, his aged mentor dies, leaving a grieving widow with whom Elwyn takes up, despite their twenty-two year age difference and to the great surprise of them both. Suddenly, sexual vices overwhelm a story of deeply religious believers, who struggle to make sense of the contradictions between spiritual dogma and physical and emotional desires. Most of the story’s characters live hypocritically at best; yet, their humanity is striking and a clear reminder of what it means to live with wholly unrealistic expectations of oneself and one another.

Between the evangelical language and the geography, the novel had additional resonance for me personally. Set in South Florida towns like Lakeland and Plant City, I could easily imagine not only the Church of Our Blessed Redeemer Who Walked Upon the Waters congregations and their church buildings but also the two-lane highways that connect some of the small cities mentioned. My maternal grandparents, retired ministers, have lived in that area for the last decade and attend two church services every Sunday: one in their trailer park, where grandpa leads the worship service, and one at a Church of God in Lakeland.

The book takes many turns, and sometimes I would be reading for several pages about a newly introduced character before all the pieces fell into place. Allen layers themes of familial obligation and incest with religious judgment and piety, all the while undoing any assumption you might make about essential underlying elements of a functional intimate relationship blossoming in the shadow of slavery and racialized poverty. Feminist in the sense that the author exposes the humanity of each character equally, Jesus Boy will encourage the most progressive thinker to reevaluate their moral judgments about love, parenting, pregnancy, and May-December romances.

Akashic Books consistently publishes quality fiction, and Jesus Boy is just one more must have title in their catalog. If you only read five novels this year, this should be one of them.

Review by Brittany Shoot

Whip Smart: A Memoir

By Melissa Febos
St. Martin's Press

Here's a confession: I've never actually read a memoir before, so I went into Melissa Febos' cleverly titled Whip Smart with complete ignorance. As a result, I'm not sure if the book's half-plot, half-retroactive dime-store psychological self-exploration formula is typical of the genre or not. Either way, I found the real-life narrative of a twenty-year-old college student turned self-destructive sex worker simultaneously engaging, sickening, unflinchingly honest, and enormously annoying.

Febos' story is certainly uncommon. As a straight-A student at New York City's The New School in the early 2000s, she decided to become a dominatrix, not because she was particularly strapped for cash or because she became seduced by the BDSM scene or even because she was bored. She makes the case at the beginning of the memoir that it was either that or stripping. "The vulnerability of stripping had always disturbed me; it seemed too easy to be condescended to, to be humiliated," Febos writes. "My need to be in control had always trumped the allure of being so desired." A couple of calls, a short interview, and a few training sessions later, the author is plunging headfirst into the world of dominant-on-demand women and the wealthy men they serve.

As the story advances, it's hard to believe that anyone performing the kinds of acts she did (for the small salary of seventy-five dollars an hour, given the extreme things she was asked to do) would exalt themselves above a stripper, who is never required to urinate, defecate, or spit on their clients, as Febos frequently did. She manages to do it, repeatedly, while separating her dominatrix sessions from other types of sex work because she didn't get nude or allow her clients to have sex with her (although she did frequently have sex with the men, with the help of a strap-on). It's this frequent, repetitive holier-than-thou diatribe about her position within the sex trade that makes the book annoying.

Hand in hand with her top-of-the-sex-industry lines were hollow words about female empowerment and her mother's feminism, which apparently was seriously misconstrued in it's transference to the next generation. Take this scene where she decides to fess up about the new job:

Instinctively, I tried to appeal to my mother's feminist, therapist values...The women I work with, they're amazing, strong, educated, creative women. It's not like I'm a prostitute or something. I'm in control of everything that happens. It's empowering.

Empowerment and feminism are obviously not the same thing, while being paid to serve as a sex object (nude or not) is a form of prostitution. Febos' lines aren't from any feminist playbook; they're just ways the author—always used to feeling like the smartest person in the room—justifies her profession, which she admits was, at times, demoralizing and plain disgusting. Because of the exchange of currency that occurred in "the dungeon," she and her co-workers were objects fulfilling a dominant sexual fantasy for the men without actually being dominant. Dominance, also, isn't synonymous with feminism or empowerment, as is often insinuated in this memoir.

While the story revolves around life in the dungeon and it's crazy cast of characters, Febos also weaves a parallel story of her heavy drug use, which occurred concurrently with her dungeon ascent and descent. There are also the other bad habits that she reveals—like randomly stealing books from Barnes & Noble and lying at Alcoholics Anonymous meetings—all of which are eventually resolved as Febos becomes stronger in her power over her addictions.

Despite our differing opinions on women, society, and sex work, I admired Febos' willingness to tell the whole truth in the least preachy way possible. Although it was evident that she thought (and maybe still thinks) many of her actions were commendable because of their shock value and adversarial relationship to social and sexual norms, it takes some serious guts and huge (ahem) balls to pull off publishing this type of story. For that reason alone, Whip Smart is an absolute must-read.

Review by Whitney Teal

Cross-posted from Uptown Literati