I Am Not Trying To Hide My Hungers From The World, Kendra DeColo
BOA Editions, 2021
I am charmed and startled by the strength of Nashville, Tennessee poet Kendra DeColo’s third full-length poetry title, I Am Not Trying To Hide My Hungers From The World (Rochester NY: BOA Editions, 2021), following her prior collections Thieves in the Afterlife (Ardmore PA: Saturnalia Books, 2014) and My Dinner with Ron Jeremy (Nashville TN: Third Man Books, 2016). Her titles alone are stunning, offering a glimpse into the myriad possibilities that lay within—“I Pump Milk like a Boss,” “I Would Like to Tell the President to Eat a Dick in a Non-Homophobic Way,” “On the Cusp of 36 I Remember the Only Republican at My College Gave Me Head and I Didn’t Come,” “I was 35 and Driving Route 40 When I Understood Why My Mother Escaped,” and “I Hope Hillary Is Having Good Sex.” Her poems exude a fearlessness, around sex and the body, as well as around the birthing process, as she writes as part of “I Write Poems About Motherhood,” one of the crowning jewels of the collection, “My husband’s hands disappeared into mine / and for a moment I left this world, a hem of blood // between us. I broke onto the shore of a fixed / note. I helixed and drank the urine of starved // apparitions to keep me afloat, slapped the shit / out of my reflection, squared and squeezed // a rocky planet out from the blue horizon / like a ship bifurcating a labial sky. But my asshole, // to whom I must now give credit where credit is due, / taught me how to anchor to the earth, locate the hot center // which I always knew was there but never saw / shining in my sacrum like Orion’s belt // when they stitched me shut in a ragged, / casual way, even though I wished // to stay open a little longer, / unhinged and full of silences.” DeColo’s lyrics are incredibly powerful, blending a kind of conversational monologue through a densely-packed lyric, providing punch after punch. Her first-person narratives are gloriously confident, witty and insightful, unafraid of what might be seen as messy, brutal or heroic. “A poem should be heavy metal // worn as armor when the world hurts.” she writes, to open “Poem That Gives No Fucks,” later offering:
Because if a poem isn’t god’s tooth
tonguing you for gold then it’s only a half moonwalk,
only a date with the toilet and last night’s chardonnay.
A poem should feel like an encyclopedia
chewed up by stray dogs behind a Tiger Mart.
Seductive as a saint with truck driver hands.
Should glint like a prayer made of bodily fluids,
make you want to burn all your clothes,
eat yourself alive, smother your heart
and say: I’ve been searching
for the blues my whole damn life.
And
then, of course, there’s the ending of “Why in Some Hospitals They Don’t Let
You Hold Hands During Labour,” that reads: “Yes, I would have / pulled my
husband into the abyss with me, // tearing open in every direction / like a
star. I would have cracked // his carpals like a piano’s brittle keys / like
snapping the neck of a dove. // I would have burned the whole place down / to
get where I needed to go.” As someone who has witnessed the birth of all three
of my children, I wonder why it took someone this long to write this part of
the experience, and so well. In an interview around her previous collection, posted at the Saturnalia Books website, October 15, 2014, DeColo speaks to some of those experiences:
In addition to gender, you also write poems about female sexuality. Where many people might gloss over the “messier” or “more graphic” parts of this–like orgasms and clitorises and even pleasure, depending on who you ask–you don’t ever seem to shy away from these topics. Did you find it difficult to write about subjects that some people consider to be inappropriate or even taboo? Was censorship ever a problem, whether from yourself or others?
I feel lucky to have grown up in an open and accepting environment. Despite being from Massachusetts, I never had any real shame or Puritanical baggage. I spent a lot of my childhood in Provincetown, Massachusetts where the expression of sexuality is out in the open and celebrated. When I was young, it was clear to me that there were so many ways to exhibit/perform/embody one’s sexuality, and it was a beautiful and liberating thing. So writing about sexuality never felt like a transgression or subversive act, but a natural expression of who I am and the way I am in the world. I want to say that at times, in my poems, the body/sexuality is just a medium, a context for writing about other themes. Why should writing about a clitoris be inappropriate or taboo? But then again, I know that the female body is also a battleground, and it would be naïve to think that writing about it—no matter what my intentions are—isn’t going to trigger or engage with other people’s hang-ups. And the truth is, I want to be provocative in the sense that if someone is uncomfortable with (or threatened by) vaginas or bodily fluids or female sexuality, I would like my poems to challenge them. I’m thinking about the Lars Von Trier movies, Nymphomaniac Vol. 1 and 2, which were criticized pretty heavily for trying to be “provocative.” The scenes are graphic and sometimes hard to watch, but ultimately it’s about a person owning and reckoning with her desires—completely on her own terms and excluding the male gaze… I guess that’s what I hope to do, to push against whatever tries to keep us feeling powerless, no matter what ideas or images I’m exploring.
Born
in Ottawa, Canada’s glorious capital city, rob mclennan currently lives
in Ottawa, where he is home full-time with the two wee girls he shares with
Christine McNair. His most recent poetry titles include A halt, which is empty (Mansfield Press, 2019) and Life sentence, (Spuyten Duyvil, 2019), with
a further poetry title, the book of smaller, forthcoming from University
of Calgary Press. In spring 2020, he won ‘best pandemic beard’ from Coach House
Books via Twitter, of which he is extremely proud (and mentions constantly). He
spent the 2007-8 academic year in Edmonton as writer-in-residence at the
University of Alberta, and regularly posts reviews, essays, interviews and
other notices at robmclennan.blogspot.com