On Saturday I attended the 17th Annual Poet’s House Showcase—a truly inspiring start to the month’s on-going writing events, with the goal of finding Amy Lawless’ debut book of poems, Noctis Licentia. I have a special relationship with Ms. Lawless’ poems; having read them in earlier iterations, heard her read them aloud, and seen to their posterity by publishing them myself. I found her book on the shelves, pleased to know that it would be in such a wonderful collection of poem books, and took the occasion to reread her book and reflect on what makes her such a powerful young poet.
Lawless’ comedy is—and has been—the easiest point of access to her poems. Whether in the raging soliloquy of an ape speaking to her fellow captives at the zoo in “One Ape’s Quest”:
“You envisage a noble ideal, but are you such a noble stone that such a divine image could be fashioned out of you?...
We mated each other in the open air,
Flung our shit through the trees,
And laughed through our teeth.
Or in the pat reportage of insect deaths in “Selections from Top One Thousand Insect Tragedies”:
After mating a stunningly gorgeous female mantis named Julia, Mathew Mcdonald was eaten limb by limb. His last words were “Non, je ne regrette rien.”
Ms. Lawless deals in the absurdly comic to great effect. But within each mark of the absurd is underpinned the dangerous potential of an existential crisis.
Gender is a boisterous participant in Lawless’ poems: “Not everyone has to divide his manhood from his clover,” a lover is promised in “My Edge of Country”, and sometimes feminine strength seems a spine in the book to which we might rely on, though it lurks beneath the absurd. “You’re Amazing and I Love You” generously doles out the violence of sex: “Your cattle, splayed with a mace, my bed, a bull’s eyed waste.” But the speaker’s “cleanest-shaven” legs remain hidden underneath frilly clothes up to the final line.
Humor, violence, identity, and the erotic run a strong line in Noctis, but Lawless has an ability to leaven each of these elements expertly with the other. This is what makes her poems such a pleasure to read — the anticipation that Lawless will deftly glide from one diabolical scene to the next in short order. She brings her unique view of the carnival to us opiated and insists that we partake in this panorama. I look forward to following this poet’s trajectory as she continues to bring us the manhood, the womanhood, the sex, the thrashing and the porno-comedy.
-- Alex Smith
Alex Smith’s LUX is available on Amazon.com. He published Nathan Austin’s Survey Says! in March, and has work forthcoming in Brad Downey’s Vanity and Black Ink Horror.
