Purge, Luke Wortley
Workhorse, 2022
CW: Graphic depictions of an eating disorder
Purge is the debut chapbook by poet and writer Luke Wortley, whose first full-length is due out later this year—but this says nothing about the singularity of Purge’s nightmare.
Purge is a brutal collection. Let me start there. Through a series of delirious images, at turns surreal and hyperreal, each of these brief prose poems detail their speaker’s struggle with a debilitating eating disorder. The effect is literally, physically dizzying. The poems are better approached as one suffocating atmosphere to endure rather than separate rooms to walk through. But let me combine these metaphors: if a poetry collection is a house and each of its poems are rooms, then the house of Purge is flooding—or on fire.
The poems in Purge are viciously cyclical: unstoppable restraint buckles under helpless addiction as it slowly gives way back to restraint. The collection’s opening poem, Cervine, sketches the tightening spiral of addiction with unflinching clarity: the speaker tosses in bed, distracting themself from their “insanely full stomach” with all the routines they perform throughout their day: they “sluice bourbon” between their teeth, they “clamp down on handshakes,” they go for a jog, listen to music, fill the “dispenser” of their mouth with thanks and laughter. But even a successful day ends in bed with that “slumping hulk creeping into my finger, something like a giant in a cornfield rising up.” Here the speaker’s imagination leaps into what later poems call “the ghost realm”, falling from the world of friends, laughter, and neighborhood jogs into the powerful visual simile of a giant rising from a cornfield. “Then I’m hammering on my stomach, feeling for the ghost of touch, of contour, of pictures I’ve seen on the internet.” By the end of this poem, the contents of the speaker’s stomach transform into “hooves booming” in their heart, a “tiny deer” galloping out of their mouth and into the toilet. The speaker wipes beads of sweat off their chin, “knowing the rut has only just begun.”
Each of the subsequent poems in Purge explore every step of this descent into the “rut” of purging. I swear these poems are slightly tilted towards the spine of the book, pulling the reader into the rut with the speaker again and again. I feel every excruciating detail of the fall. I feel “the lifting sense, the pop on the tastebud as a piece of fried chicken is gnashed,” and I feel the gathering dread “as it all comes down to the stomach to settle and breed weight.” I feel the “thousands of weight checks a year” as the pounds “sliver off in tenths.” I feel the “profound dizziness” of “my son’s breath catching in my own throat.” I feel the “rivulets of bile” in the backs of the speaker’s teeth, “smooth and uneven as creek stone.” I feel the weight of every painted nail, every ounce trapped in spit, every bead of milk in the speaker’s beard. That “hammering on my stomach” in Cervine still gives me shivers every time I read it. I feel the speaker’s fisted palm thudding against the base of their ribcage. I feel my own stomach go hollow as the verb drops in me like a stone down a well. I close my book and listen for the sound of stone hitting water, but no sound ever comes.
The depth (or height) of this purging is the “ghost realm” itself, a place or state where “there are a million million bits of stardust redefining the backs of my front teeth worn away by the bile.” The ghost realm is a euphoric paradise where the speaker is finally freed from their eating disorder, where there are “there are women and men who love my body and don’t comment on it as though it were wasting away; instead, they mention the beauty of indentation, the luminous swirl of light and shadow on my face as I stand up.” The ghost realm—freedom from purging—is only accessed through the act of purging, before the visions of “endless fountains” dissolve into “two IV solutions waiting in a hospital bed when the time is right.” A visitation from the ghost realm always sends the speaker back to their reflection trembling in toilet water.
Purge’s lyric underworld is a landscape of trauma, a dimension where the past and present coexist as fragments of a lost whole. Down, the collection’s second poem, reconstructs the speaker’s blackout from a high school wrestling match. The poem is framed as a memory, but its present-tense pulls the moment to the front of the speaker’s consciousness: “Here’s the way it goes down. It begins with a single sweep attack, a pile-driving execution and then a concussion as we both hit the mat.” The speaker reemerges in a hospital bed, unable to remember their father’s name, and the spit on their cracked lips sends them to “the throes of the ghost realm” yet again—or is this the first time? “I’m deep in the nexus of loss, of fingers scratching the back of the throat, the improbable god abandoning my touch, answering my prayers as it all comes up in my throat and in conversations with the doctor who says I’ll never wrestle again.” The sentence time travels from the present to faded memories of doctor’s consultations, and we have no clue how much space yawns and closes between these moments. In Wrestling, the second-to-last poem in the collection, the “thousands of weight checks a year'' become their own wrestling match the speaker perpetually loses, stepping onto the scale as their younger self steps onto the mat: “Protrusion to subduction, elocution in shots. Slam, ride, and vomit. Gliding light on single leg takedown. Spit to top and drop weight in garbage bags slathering my slinking arms—all sinew and bile. Burning all the way up.” The vicious repetition of these purges and checks spiral around the nucleus of the speaker’s blackout, “the outcome of my last match I ever fought.” The past shatters the present as the present fragments the past. The waves break the rocks they break against.
This is a short collection for a chapbook—20 poems, and none more than a page. Anything longer would be too intense, too relentless to read. It’s hard to breathe in Purge’s atmosphere. Try to read it all in one rush, if you can. Otherwise, take it one or two poems at a time, absorbing their stories. The poems brighten the more you read them. Even in Down, as the speaker spits bits of gristle into the trash, they “try not to let hope become a memory.” Hope, when it succeeds, is destined to become a memory of trouble, then of triumph. The many strengths of this chapbook—its visceral descriptions, its relentless brutality, its fearless confessions—are testaments to its speaker’s endurance through the nightmares they’ve brought up from the rut.
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