June 4, 2016

Again, Desire: A Review of Flower Conroy’s The Awful Suicidal Swans by Michael VanCalbergh

Cover Credit: Headmistress Press
The Awful Suicidal Swans by Flower Conroy
Headmistress Press

Reviewed by Michael VanCalbergh

Desire is the only way to describe the dominate subject of Flower Conroy’s The Awful Suicidal Swans. Words like “lust” and “craving” are too layered with judgement, which these poems quickly do away with, while “love” or “adoration” seem devoid of the physicality that connects all of them. Desire ends up the only adequate idea when considering how Conroy’s book confronts the violence and the unabashed joy of wanting another and being wanted by that person.

“In the Wolf’s Den * Gentlemen’s Club” starts the book by balancing the explicitly sexual and deeply emotional layers of desire. Conroy’s speaker ogles a woman stripping, even referring to her as “lamblike,” but immediately complicates this sexualizing by stating:
… You, in love,
on the playground, spinning April on the merry-
go-round, untamed laugh, poppy field of freckles,

head thrown back as the sky turned… They panted,
howled, wagged
By setting up the panting and howling of the crowd next to the image of a girl on a playground, Conroy challenges her readers to see these emotions as layered. Her poems explore more forbidden or out-of-reach aspects of desire in “Your Body the Unnameable Body.” This speaker imagines: “If I were on the other side of that steam-cloaked glass / with you, I would touch your edges” but states shortly afterward, “I am almost afraid of you.”

While her early poems address this tenuous area of wanting but not having, she also introduces the dangerous side of desire. In one poem, a shirtless man is on top of a woman in an abandoned meat factory with “Upside-down / ? hooks dangled / from the ceiling,” while in another a prostitute enters a man’s car and “Fetches from the gaping linen, the planted // squid & milks it, warm, aglow udder.” These poems don’t ignore the dark or disturbing side of sex. Instead, they refuse to look away, examining these moments just as deftly as the poems that come before.

Conroy’s goal is to give voice to all sides of desire instead of highlighting just one perspective, which includes the beautiful and simple. Her poems start this shift with “How Did the Everlasting Begin?” where she states, “There was nothing spectacular about the fire…” between two lovers. She ends the poem with:
There was everything spectacular about the fire
because it was ordinary.
Because it was contained
& then it was not.
Conroy maintains this exploration of beautiful simplicity in “Of Exaltations,” wherein she imagines two lovers spending all their time together. By asking “do you never wonder / who will feed the chickens?” she allows the moment to speak for the loss of time one can feel with another. Similarly, in “Granting Passage,” her speaker describes wanting a lover’s mouth:
… To your blessing
bestowing mouth.

Therefore I am: crucified—
open, starfish-splayed.
Begging for drink. Begging

for fountain.
Conroy describes these sexual encounters as need being fulfilled. A speaker says to a lover, “You suckle the hollow” of a shoulder; has another told, “Now; let me siphon that bite for you…” and another stating, “Without her narcotic sweat, her voodoo breath / breathing down my neck, how did I survive?” These moments build upon each other to present a clearer image of desire as a whole. These poems both watch and touch closely, allowing readers to have tactile and visual connections with the speakers. In this way, Conroy transforms readers into the desired and the one who desires, never making us comfortable enough to feel completely in control.

Conroy’s penultimate poem, “The Morning After,” provides the perfect metaphor for her book. The speaker describes a lover who, while making her breakfast, gets so close that she thinks, “you’d singe me / with the coffee press.” Then the lover touches her and makes a command: “You pushed my bangs / from my eyes, put a cup in my hands / & commanded, sip.” Conroy’s poems offer themselves as the loving act of making breakfast, but they’re also demanding more. They demand that you, not only, face the desire laid in front of you but also “sip” and experience everything that is bitter, warm, and delicious.

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