“…I’ve got an iron hair stuck deep up my ass
                             and I’m always in search of just the right set
                             of pliers to pluck it out.”

-      From “Needle-nose or Lockjaw?”
       Cynthia Ruth Lewis

Babel editor Victor Thorn has brought us what he calls “the five female representatives” he would choose if he “stood before the Pulitzer Prize committee.”  Some of us out here might not completely agree with Victor’s five choices (fair disclosure: your reviewer has unsolicited blurbs in the book) but credit Thorn for realizing the need for an anthology of modern, underground female poets and with choosing five who can all easily lay claim: the raw, primal and truly confessional Lewis, the dirty, guilty-and-don’t-really care prose writer Jude Lynn, punk performance legend Iris Berry, trash goddess/post-partum “she-bitch” Misti Rainwater-Lites, and the serrated, tortured howling of Debbie Kirk which proclaims all of the above. 

The hard truth is that there just aren’t that many female poets who work mostly as poets.  Many often do poetry on the side or as a hobby while working the non-fiction/fiction/performance circuits. The book is slick, sexy and its content delivers on much of that promise, but it isn’t necessarily going to create a wave of fearless alpha girls on the poetry circuit.  In theory, it should sell like hotcakes to legions of depressed alienated beta-lit boys…but it’s a poetry anthology, so it won’t. 

And part of the reason for that is that there isn’t a whole lot of feeling good to be found in its near three hundred pages (as is so frequently the case with poetry, not just with “underground” or “indie” poets.) It serves as exhibit one that sex, drugs and rock are failures as some sort of commodity salvation but empirically successful in having integrated with the landscape of the apocalypse.  You can only take the redemptive moments in the rare cases where they occur:

                                                My therapist said
                                                I absolutely
                                                Could not have
                                                Any more unprotected sex
                                                With strange men
                                                Because it was self destructive
                                                Behavior         

                                                So, I shoplifted condoms
                                                And lube
                                                To use
                                                When I have sex
                                                With strange men
                                                Sometimes improvement
                                                Is subtle.

                                                -“Improvement”
                                                Debbie Kirk

 But these little “improvements” or miniature calms in the storm are more the exception that the rule:

                                      “…because despite all the insanity
                                      and hard times
                                      we had a lot of good times too.
                                      We did have a lot of fun
                                      scaring the other kids
                                      and playing tricks on them.
                                      It was that whole
                                      us against them thing.
                                      We were bad.
                                      I never discuss it
                                      with my brothers,
                                      we buried a lot of it
                                      with my dad
                                      when he passed away.
                                      Sometimes I think
                                      they don’t even remember.
                                      I’ll bring something up
                                      and they’ll just give me
                                      a real foggy look
                                      and say, ‘God Iris,
                                       how do you remember all that?’
                                      And I’ll think
                                      God how do you forget?
                                      …
                                      they all came out unscathed
                                      and well, I kind of didn’t.”

-      From “Greetings From Branford Park”
Iris Berry

Kirk and Berry bring a heavy punk aesthetic to this collection (Berry has collaborated w/Exene Cervenka and Kirk has toured with the Dwarves) and both hearken back to the spoken word renaissance that barely caught flame, and only then briefly, in the early 90’s.  Kirk in particular has kept that flame burning in times (especially post 9-11) when it was not trendy for “girls” to be in “hard” lit.

The good times here are primarily memories.  In some cases, like Cynthia Ruth Lewis, they don’t seem like they ever really existed.  Her poems may be the most frightening in the book, full of homicidal impulses that appear to be quite well thought out. Neither is Lewis work here all give and no take. Her poem, “Aftermath,” is simply the most brutal and dehumanizing piece in the entire book, explaining why this pure rage, perhaps more “confessional” in its plain and honest depictions of unthinkable violence than consciously confessional poetry, stands above the others.  In many ways, she is the most outside outsider of this quintet:  “I never call myself a poet; I even cringe at referring to myself as a writer, because if you’re talking to the wrong person, that proclamation can open up a whole bunch of idiot question…” 

This is assuredly not an issue for the other four writer/poets in this collection. Rainwater-Lites in particular is clearly more comfortable than most in wrapping herself in the poet’s charge.  “Anorexic Rant” in particular stakes MRL out as a self-realized prophetess by doing the Whitman thing, addressing history’s most self-conscious and neurotic empire:  

                                      “go to jail, America
                                      go to jail and visit
                                      your illiterate single mom on welfare raised
                                      tattooed criminals
                                       go to hell, america
                                      the hell that is your prison system
                                      visit Damien Echols on death row in arkansas
                                      look into his eyes and beg
                                      for his forgiveness
                                      look in the mirror, america
                                      see how ridiculous you are
                                      your hair is a mass of writhing
                                      hissing snakes
                                      your eyes are bugged
                                      your ribs are showing
                                      you have become a grotesque caricature
                                      you are over the hill but still dressed
                                      in a raggedy ann costume
                                      no one believes you…”

This take on manifesting “America” is as old as Walt Whitman, hell; it’s as old as the old prophesy “America” by the reverend George Berkeley in 1726.  Rainwater-Lites is immersing herself in one of the oldest dialectics of romanticism (appropriate…she has recently published that she reads Mayakovski to her young son…now that’s subversive parenting.)

Rounding out the collection is longtime Babel contributor Jude Lynn, whose poetry is almost entirely confessional style prose, but of course, without the typical confessional “remorse” that one gets with say, Elizabeth Wurtzel or James Frey. If anything, Lynn’s style smacks of a hesher Denis Johnson:

                   “He calls the next day. He doesn’t sound the same. He’s less
                   interesting. Annoying. We meet up again. There’s nothing to
                   talk about. Now that we’ve played the cat & mouse word game
                   prior to the fuck, there’s nothing to say. He likes sports. I like
                   foreign films. He likes Heavy Metal, I like jazz. He’s a Republican.
                   I’m not. He talks a lot about his car, his clothes, his college days
                   & his wild “buddies.” He no longer gets my sarcasm. My wit. I
                   put it away and sit there with a bored look in my eyes.

                   His phone calls become infrequent. Mainly when he’s drunk and
                   all the other girls have told him no.
                   Months pass. I don’t even answer my phone anymore. I don’t
                   go to the same bar. My hair isn’t clean. I put my cleavage away,
                   hidden beneath comfortable clothes. I spend my nights on the
                   couch, in the dark, perfecting my smoke rings. And I laugh
                   thinking about him, him, him & him. Whoever they were.  The
                   boys of my past who hopefully went on to become men.”

-      From “A Myriad of Cock-N-Balls: A Brief Study of Esteem, Repetition & Antagonism   

At times, Lynn’s vignettes seem to serve as the synopsis for the whole collection here; at times an endless parade of half downed drinks, half smoked cigarettes and half fucked lovers. 

It’s a bit unfortunate that all the poets here are white, primarily hetero and none from the East Coast.  A little more diversity might have made the whole thing seem less repetitive, possibly even less depressing.  One wonders if the collection might have benefited from contributions from poets such as MK Chavez, Jennifer Blowdryer, Kathleen Wood, Daphne Gottlieb, Lydia Lunch, Danielle Willis, Maggie Estep, or Hollie Stevens, certainly hard writing, fast living sirens at some point or another.

But it’s true that after this list, the number of “underground” or “counter-cultural” females who traffic primarily in poetry gets quite thin.  The hope is that this anthology does get into the hands of enough younger, and even older female poets, who might feel the urge to indulge a bit of their darker auras and lower chakras and prevent them from  giving up on a world the irrepressible Debbie Kirk herself refers to as “the endless dick dance.”

-Paul Corman-Roberts