The Stranger Manual, Catie Rosemurgy. Graywolf Press, 2010. $15.00 (95 pp)"The sense of being crushed will once again be the source of the erotic in the story"
Slate magazine’s Chris Wilson recently called out the New Yorker for the solipsistic cliquiness of its poetry, finding, apparently, that over a quarter of the pieces printed in the weekly since 2008 are in some ways concerned with poetry itself. It’s easy to find something somewhat sad in that, a sense of people playing around in Plato’s cave, if Plato’s cave was stocked with Ogden Nash and Updike.
Or, as Catie Rosemurgy puts it in “A Poem About Poetry by Miss Peach, Hobo/Provacateur,” “Poems about poetry are like bowls of sequined fake fruit—you can’t eat ‘em and you don’t want to, but they symbolize abundance on an affordable table in your home.” Rosemurgy’s second collection, The Stranger Manual is from the complete opposite kind of the tracks, the wrong side, the side where misshapen women play Marx Brothers games with language and beauty and truth. There’s no room in it for even glancing at the local library.
Rosemurgy’s poems are sordid and intensely visceral, constantly reminding the reader of the body’s essential temporality in a way best described as “icky.” The word, maybe, being “fleshy.” Her guide through the fictional town of Gold River, Miss Peach, is like a cartoon character sketched by John Waters or Cronenberg, a shambling shape plagued by outrageous health issues. In one poem we learn that she “…presents with an alternating overabundance/ and absence of bone,” and is “3’4” biscuit-shaped, powdery/ but incredibly adept at climbing trees.”
Elsewhere, a neighbor opines “Someday I’ll find words for the dripping. Like rain mixed with teeth.” Rosemurgy’s eye fixates on the too-close, the uncomfortably naked—cuts of meat, warped bodies, objects dripping wet or viscous, “runny mixture”. The body becomes a strange and intimidating thing, foregrounding “the insanity expressed in the mechanics of the knee./ The winged desperation of the pelvis.” Sex is transformed into a kind of messy heap you’d want to politely nudge away with the toe of your shoe, “the love I needed massaged/ into my hamburger meat,” or “the sound of a cat unable to deliver her backlog of kittens/ because of the design failure of her own body.” Physical embodiment is taken on critically as a slapdash fix to some sort of engineering problem, and not a particularly successful one.
For all that, the poems are light on their feet and often very funny. The point isn’t to look at the display set before us and recoil in disgust, but simply to recognize it as something discreet from our intellectual and social conceptions of the self. Miss Peach, almost monstrous in the poems narrated by neighbors, an object of skeeved out pity to her doctors, at times approaches the heroic, an absurd hero taking up arms against every molecule of freaky stuff going on under the skin: “I’ve got all these/ organs inside me and I can’t resist teasing them/ to see if they’ll go away.”
The great work of alchemy in the collection, the element that swings it from amusing and disconcerting “American Grotesque” to something numinous in the strangeness of its truth, is exactly Miss Peach’s plurality of selves. She’s disgusting, sweaty, toothless, possibly with live animals living inside of her, but also a sexualizing if not quite sexualized figure, a master of her body and an impassioned gourmand of others’. Even more intriguing, she fulfills the role of town revolutionary, kicking down barriers of gender and aesthetic normality with a deft mutant foot. An early poem shows us Miss Peach at the mall seeking “a rosier nipple, a new front tooth,/ some pseudo bruises” and other accessories to ugliness. But beyond that, she’s dignified entirely by her lack of dignity, her peeling back of polite and beautiful curtains. Rosemurgy highlights the deep function of the appalling and the blasphemous as a sanctified role: “We thank our monsters for letting us invent them. They let us feel dignified/ and unsutured by comparison.”
This asymmetry ends up linked to the whole gamut of organic and generative powers, eating, fighting, growing, blooming—eating in particular is dealt with as an unsightly but important pact between mouth and mush.
Rosemurgy engages with the unspoken and unspeakable bond between our pretences and the natural world with a lot more dirt under her fingernails than Wordsworth or Heine or even a relatively “earthy” poet like Gary Snyder. Her poems seem to say fuck the flowers and the fields, nature is what’s going on wrong in my intestines and in my brain, and what’s going right. It’s every sub-cellular process that tyrannizes causality and lets us sleep with werewolves, if we so choose, as Miss Peach does. It’s what we’ve got, ugly as it is. Oh well. “The sense of being crushed will, once again,/ be the source of the erotic in the story,” she writes. And elsewhere, “we’re all so damn beautiful.” It’s a heavy theme, but Rosemurgy attacks it with the light touch of the completely natural, and an unerring sense for tossing out perfect aphorisms. The Stranger Manual is a strange book of poetry, with wild swings in tone and more weight in its mouth than it can safely chew, but it is electric with wit and conviction and humanity. As Miss Peach is to Gold River, Rosemurgy sets herself as to the contemporary poetry scene; iconoclastic, vulgar, and an anarchically brilliant challenge.
Can't wait to read this.
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