To mark National Poetry Month, In other Words is being guest-edited by rob mclennan. Throughout April, rob will present the work of dozens of poets he thinks deserve readers' attention, as seen through the eyes of their fellow poets.
Today: Natalie Zina Walschots on Jenny Sampirisi
Jenny Sampirisi is the managing editor of BookThug, the co-director of the Toronto New School of Writing and associate director of the Scream Literary Festival. She is a poet and a fiction writer. Her first book is/was was published in 2008. Her new manuscript, Croak, is a work in progress.
Frogs
girl, kiss and make us. we will marry you. what is a chorus without a jaw anyway. lip some poison. splay us. legs that go on and on. tongue our parts girl. trade digit for digit. one jaw sucking poison. one to zero; koax to koax. teethe it sweet girl and we'll make you. tidy girl. sexy girl. flirtygirl2000. compromise for us, girl. take us to drink. to dinner. to pillow. lick deeply until our sockets empty. flip us on and off. instant compositions. plate us on porcelain, girl. see how shiny we are. bite bite bite. put explosives in our bellies and throw us at walls. you'll like us better in pieces. do your job. we will become women and you will be our prince. we will marry you.
Frogs by Jenny Sampirisi is one of those pieces I heard aloud once and could not escape from, as though the poem's long legs had kicked deep into my brain. I heard her read it for the first time at the Plasticine Poetry reading series here in Toronto back in mid-January. I had a beer in my hand, my ankles crossed, had worked my shitty job all morning and afternoon on a Sunday, and was in no mood to pay attention. Then. Then I heard this and was thrown for a loop, thrown against a wall, left empty as a spent egg-case. There are some subjective reasons for my reaction, of course.
I have a deep weakness for ugliness and undesirability, a fascination with disgust, which this poem has in abundance. There is also a sense of discomfort here, inversions/explosions of the integrity of the body and constructs of gender. But there is a deeper horror here as well, as slippery and repulsive as a frog skin: For all its grotesquerie, this is a poem intended to seduce. It is a love poem. It wheedles and bargains, promises more than it could ever deliver, whispers and slimes. This poem wants. It wants deeply, it wants desperately, with an all-consuming dampness. What it wants is such a little thing, really. Something small and simple. This poems wants you. It wants every inch of you. This poem wants to marry you, and if it takes you by surprise, you may never get its stench off of your plate, your cup, your hands, your bed.