PMS: A Journal in Verse, Dot
Devota
Rescue Press, 2021
I’m
struck by the rush of continuous text in the immersive, reactive, thoughtful
and expansive contemplations and reactions of American poet Dot Devota’s latest,
PMS: A Journal in Verse (Chicago IL/Cleveland OH/Iowa City IA: Rescue
Press, 2021). The author of And The Girls Worried Terribly (Noemi Press,
2013), The External Wall (BookThug, 2013) and The Division of Labor
(Rescue Press, 2015), Devota’s PMS: A Journal in Verse is composed as an
ongoing journal blending lyric and prose, and her narrative is propelled by a
collage of rough text and rage, deliberate typos, short, halting lines and
almost a kind of breathlessness to the endless rush. She speaks of poets, museums
and sleep, and doesn’t have time for any of your nonsense. “How do you prepare,”
she asks, to open the poem “TOMAŽ ŠALAMUN
IS MY HUSBAND,” for the poet’s death? // The book I loved most made me / hate
you. Made me feel / prudish. Midwestern. why / cause your wife suffering?” As
Vi Khi Nao offers as part of their back cover blurb: “Her bold—brightly captivating
poetry is an act of oppression against insomnia, suicide, abuser, victim
blaming, writing, murder, rape, Alice Notley. Here her casual acute language
finds the foreign country in the familiar.” This is a book of untetherings, from
rage to flailing and falling to striking out with incredible, pinpoint accuracy.
As she writes near the end of the collection:
you make poetry
happen
it wouldn’t just
happen on its own
I know it’s hard
work
but in that same
way
we can’t assume
because we are feminists
that women are
automatically safe in our spaces
they are assaulted
in the very spaces we create
I failed for years
not coming out
blaiming my “hermeticism”
when people asked
why I didn’t warn others
I said I can’t
talk because I haven’t been raped
but J said since I
haven’t been raped
then I must speak
on behalf of others who have it worse
perhaps they’ve
been wronged too much to have any trust
The
foundation of the collection is an ongoing “journal in verse,” something worked
by multiple poets for decades, including Robert Creeley’s own A Day Book
(1972), but Devota works a whole series of other layers through her collage, stretches
of seemingly-unfiltered but highly crafted rush and energized gesture. As she
writes, mid-way through the collection: “Public / humiliation by the man / you
loved. / should have / stayed on the farm. / History dies in its / sleep. Why
tell me about / catching the bullfrogs now? / Hpw she’d wade / through the pond
to the middle / after her brothers shot them / with a sling [.]”
My zombie
actions scar me
trying to please
her far scarier so can there be
a healthy continuum
where I’m not robot or
mean-feeling
diarist? yes,
Stop me playing misunderstood
I need to be real
before I can deal
with reality out there (“IN THE BASEMENT”)
