INTRODUCTION
This is an odd, uncomfortable book, sometimes oddly moving, about a woman, and others. The woman in the book watches daytime TV, she reads Virginia Woolf, she fucks, she goes to parties; she has a child, she is single; she lives in a residential hotel, a commune, a suburb, cities. She is like a visitor from Mars, who reads all the literature and doesn’t find her sex, her experience, her self, there. She decides to “write her own”.
Notes, questions, jargon, graffiti: she uses cheap, everyday materials, whatever catchwords are at hand: orgasm, fantasy, the “bruising penis”, “the whore,/ dangling nipples out of his reach”.
the priest [who] decided to marry/ the twice married, once widowed mother who’s 24./ That’s what I wanted, wanted for them…..
It’s a splintery job. The notes are abstractly graphic, innocent, corrosive, raw. They refuse to get up and dress and be poems. They’re not friendly.
But neither is this voice easy, or familiar: not indulgently angry, fashionably monstrous. Not, either, petulant, that “fretful anxiety” that William James called “frivolous.” At its best, original, flat, urgent, the voice stays with us:
You have not woken up. You lie on your back spread
naked on the double bed.
Sam in a corner plays with his trucks, eats
crumbs he picks from a tractor tread.
I answer the knock at the bedroom door: Sam’s teacher, concerned.
I start to explain but her
mouth on your mouth, teeth in your skin .....
Gradually the persons in the book take on more particularity, grow more alive and familiar and strange. The woman’s questions become (especially in the course of the long last section, the Appendix) the questions of human risks: the risk of nurturing, of friendship, of change; and the risk of witnessing – not being (necessarily) pleasing, or pleased — witnessing, telling. Keeping all the edge of that curious, green, Martian’s eye view; an awkward, restless, honest presence, that won’t sit down and talk, and won’t go away.
— Jean Valentine
** & laughs. & laughs. & laughs. & laughs.