(Vice) Viscera, Willow Loveday
Little
Cactus Press, 2022
Out of Montréal’s Cactus Press comes Willow Loveday Little’s poetry collection (Vice) Viscera, the full-length debut for both author and publisher. In the opening piece “An Anatomical Drawing of Viscera,” Little sets the stage for a poetic operating theatre in which the boundaries between the lingual and the corporeal are blurred and at times ferociously broken. We are to understand that (Vice) Viscera is not simply a book or text – it is a living body of its own. Through the benevolent concept of Xenia, hospitality based on reciprocity, we enter an allegory that permeates the entire volume: “Denotation is viscera itself. Connotation is scalpel in skin.” This book wants to be read, the opening work dares us to move forward. Yet it also leaves us with the notion that every step deeper into its substance of language and poetry is an act of violence, of interpretive brutality almost. We are reminded that “The body only relinquishes its secrets at gunpoint,” though we are promised to find truth if we keep going since “The body doesn’t lie.” Thus enticed, the simple act of turning a page loses its banal, unassuming character, and we are asked to consider not only what we read but how. Little challenges her audience to a balancing act, to accept at once the disruptive and forceful nature engrained in our readerly aspirations to understand poetry, but also our welcome desire to engage this poetic work, this textual body, mobilizing all our sensibility and passion for the written word, because the book wants us to. (Vice) Viscera does not hold back and asks its readers to do the same.
The initial chapter “Collation [Spine]” begins with the guiding premise: “my language is my body.” In the following, the first part almost constitutes a series of lessons, their didacticism often signalled by alliterative titles such as “On Phlebotomy,” “On Consumption,” and so on. These pieces work minutely through different organs and body parts and their manifestation in language. “On &” allegorizes conjunctions as the “connective tissue” of grammar and hypothesizes the catastrophic illness of its absence, its damage to our ability to make meaning if we are unable to compartmentalize, enumerate, and link. “On Extispicy” alerts us to the dangers of misreading. In a surprising turn near the end of the poem, the narrator reveals that “Normally, I hate being dissected, but with a scalpel of my own/I’ve been invited to return the favour.” Reverberating with the motif of Xenia, these lines remind us that our individual use of the interpretive “scalpel” reflects on our ability to inhabit a truly respectful stance towards the literary and literal body of the book. This remarkable demand relates to dimensions of gender and sex defining the body that is explored in these pages. “On Vertices” stipulates that “Female posturing is all about the right angle,” and calls for a sensitivity to geometrical breakages in its final two lines: “Listen for a tangent. That vanishing point’s lips—/tearing through the graph to speak.” Invoking some of the book’s prefatory lines which state that “Poems are angular” and “Women are for evisceration,” this couplet becomes a powerful signpost of the gendered conventions along which normative reading practices often operate and declares that the works of (Vice) Viscera are pushing back. The poetry of this collection asserts its femininity alongside a rightful claim for mutual regard implied by the continuity of Xenia. Giving ever greater detail and nuance to her key metaphor of the book-as-body, Little sustains the conflation of linguistic with anatomical tropes while simultaneously exploring experiences of sensuality, sexuality, illness, as well as emotional connection and disconnection. Her lines are sometimes playful and funny, sometimes challenging or deliberately shocking, yet always poignant and deeply evocative. These poems are constantly striving for greater metaphorical depth by means of Little’s immense lexical prowess paired with surgical precision.
As the collection progresses the body emerges more and more in context with that which lies outside of it. We are reminded that “The body gives up what it cannot hold.” Imagery of flora, fauna, and emotional narrative often blend with observations on the temporal, showing that the body is a site of fusion and subject to perpetual transition. “Half-Life Love, Hyphen,” for example, closes with “I will have loved him./Severed and sutured and seen and sawn.” The striking sibilance in this final line becomes the audible seeping of time through our fingers, while the diction of physical separation and restoration reinscribes the concept of time into the physical. In “MRI Cerebrum Suite,” the last of three monumental twelve-poem sequences at the centre of the second chapter, the relationship between the body, its outside, and time returns to the stream of poetic anatomy flowing throughout (Vice) Viscera. No matter how much we engage the materiality and histories outside of ourselves, neither the body nor the book-as-body can ever be escaped. Dedicating each part of the suite to a different part of our brain, we recognize that anything we experience through our senses, our memories, our thought is ultimately processed and felt inside ourselves, physically and mentally. Likewise, no matter how far a book takes us away from our present, we are still reading words and lines off the page, and as long as we keep reading, we keep eviscerating.
“Poetry does not connote. Poetry is detonation” announces the introductory poem to the final chapter, returning yet again to the opening observations of the collection. Metaphor tears down the limits and constraints of our ability to explore and comprehend through language. This point, however, is not a manifesto for unlimited interpretive freedom. “Xenia’s Oath,” a rewriting of the Hippocratic Oath in the spirit of (Vice) Viscera’s central allegory, reinforces that our use of language and of our bodies is always predicated on mutuality: “As a guest myself, I will visit homes for the benefit of the sick—meaning myself—for treating you is treating me.” This line reveals what the convergence of Xenia with bodily imagery is pointing towards – as we discover one another through our material frames, histories, our language and art, we inevitably also discover our own selves. Little braids a myriad of metaphors and allegories into her generous debut collection, offering us a compelling avenue to rethink our relationship with the visceral materiality and ephemerality of the world we inhabit, our own bodies, the books we read, and the people we connect with.
Martin Breul currently lives and writes in Montréal (Tiohtiá:ke). His poetry and flash fiction has appeared in print and online in Acta Victoriana, The Honest Ulsterman, From Glasgow to Saturn, Wet Grain, Speculative Books, and others. In 2021, he was awarded the Mona Elaine Adilman Prize for his eco-poetry at McGill University, and he was nominated for BOTN 2023 by Variety Pack. Twitter: @BreulMartin