Reviewed by Cynie Cory
I Wish to Take You All over the place
by Cassandra Manzolillo
BlazeVox
July 2024, Paperback, 91 pages, ISBN-13: 978-1609644536
Cassandra Mannzolillo’s debut assortment of poems (themselves our bodies), I Wish to Take You All over the place, makes public meaning-making: the seek for identification, and belonging, in matches and begins, and missteps; in types that splash and shrink; in each flimsy and semi-automatic voice and elegance that mitigate turning into by the push and fury of begins and stops to the sequencing of poems that fold and unfold, directing the reader, and the poet herself, to methods the physique and the physique of the poems –on this vaster type– creates additional which means: The price of this poet’s neo-confessional, therapeutic course of, invents the replay of the trauma reminiscence, which is usually established in antiseptic diction, missing stress, vitality and visceral imagery leading to poetry on the breaking point. The reader have to be affected person. The method is messy. The poet’s saying – she cleverly posits a listener, certainly one of whom is the reader, as in remedy – is tasked with excavating and untangling expertise and reminiscence, that are situated in domains of time incongruent with occasions that “can not occur.” Right here meaning-making is hyper-challenged by the speaker’s cognition. The rhythmic unearthing of the physique creates belief within the means of identification. If the poet persists and is prepared to deal with the snakes in her psyche, she is going to now not conflate love and luxury with intercourse. She’s going to shed herself from her mom’s pathology. She might be remodeled. The proof is within the poem-making. The traces have integrity, they’ll stand alone. You’ll be able to hear it within the unwavering confidence of her voice. She now not questions herself. She is the authority of her physique and her meaning-making. Her physique, which is a part of her identification, is achieved by the physique of her work and is transferred to the reader’s physique, the place together with the speaker and the poet, we come to a transparent understanding of the form, no pun supposed, of the poet’s journey.
We too make sense of bodily expertise, (typically earlier than cognition begins). This complicates the creator’s seek for which means, and wholeness, for a spot on the planet. We study within the third poem, “Forbidden Fantasy Foreplay,” what the grownup Manzolillo is aware of and what the kid Manzolillo might intuit. The pathology or “disaster” is that the act of reaching out for her mom’s consolation leads to the violation of the kid’s physique. What’s at stake right here is the kid’s ethical, moral, and non secular identification as she encounters the world. The poem establishes for the reader, the muse of the themes of the guide. It’s extremely important, that the poet errors the pathology of the mom as her personal, which creates themes of entanglement these poems wrangle with, absolutely charged with repeating the sexual trauma of the previous, the poet conflates love with sexual energy, which essentially culminates within the speaker’s experimental makes an attempt to unlock which means in a totally realized aesthetics of her physique because it meets expertise. The guide is rooted within the speaker’s persistent craving to make sense of the emotional and bodily blurring that’s central to her codependency, and the starvation to know and break the patterns that maintain her from attaining wholeness.
The physique is the origin of which means, thought, and language.
The physique is each an object and a topic. The physique is relational. Its quadrants are relational to spaciality, and identification. It’s answerable for modes of thought. The physique in all its components, in cognition and pre-cognition, is charged with meaning-making. It’s which means itself. Phrase made flesh and all that. Our our bodies first outline us once we are youngsters. Our our bodies assist us perceive our place on the planet, they offer us a way of belonging and love. Nevertheless ill-formed, the physique accommodates its cognition, if you’ll. As youngsters, sense once we are secure. The physique is the boundary of the “I” and is charged with the place it ends and the opposite begins. When this blurs, our identification is undermined. It’s the starting of disembodiment, concern, and the query of self.
The quilt artwork of I Wish to Take You All over the place is sensible and provocative. Some readers could also be embarrassed by the spectacle-enmeshed need. You can not avert your eyes. To this reader, it says OPEN THIS BOOK! The picture is of a person and girl wrapped in cellophane in a nude embrace. It’s smothering. Claustrophobic. You can not assist however really feel the sealing of the air. It is sort of a loss of life masks however right here a pair is sealed collectively for eternity – in love? need? or want the bottom type of engagement. Because the title suggests, I Wish to Take You All over the place is a set of poems that reckon with the necessity to love, the imprisonment of affection, and the act of negotiating the space between the physique and emotional wants within the relationship. This younger poet, lays out her psychology, not in contrast to the confessional poets of the Seventies. The method of claiming acts as a performative machine whose motion consists of the reader as a participant, whereas the poet posits a second and first listener, actual or imagined, her therapist. This poet is a canine after the bone of her previous trauma in typically sensational self-reveal, aiming to seek out her identification by uprooting the shared pathology of her mom, the dominant presence in her childhood, the preliminary and first reason for her trauma.
Love doesn’t ask us to surrender one’s life and self to a different. I Wish to Take You All over the place will make you imagine in any other case. It would reveal the human soul-sickness that overwhelms the physique after trauma.
In America, we’re susceptible to acknowledge the violence to our humanity that cheats our identification.
1.
Jorie Graham, Pulitzer winner and professor of writing for years on the Iowa Author’s workshop, now Harvard, as soon as lamented that in at this time’s poetry, the road isn’t earned, that there’s nothing at stake.
What’s at stake right here? A voice and not using a physique. Strains that not directly title a factor or the factor shouldn’t be named in any respect.
At first sight, the poems are solipsistic and narcissistic.
This reader experiences the poems early within the guide as lazy, not poems in any respect however journal writing. They’re with out type. The poems highlight media, freeze-frame childhood, questions of molestation, and fogeys who’re incapable of questions of their very own.
Above all, in these pages is a necessity for self-connection, a correction of the floor and depth of annihilation.
What’s the repetition theme? Written in numbered sentences like lists. The motion is below investigation. A have to cry out, self-help, no assist, want for assist, a voice disembodied, pornography, innocence shattered, self-flop-self-love not occurring. A woman feels stunning if a person tells her she is.
These poems verge on marrying type and intent. The reader feels the breakage like ice throughout a lake –the sound is instantaneous, storms your physique down flat and also you anticipate one thing to avoid wasting you.
A person
A household
A witch
A leprosy
A beer
You don’t belief as a result of you know the way it feels to fall.
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2.
I query the custom this poet writes in opposition to or from. There may be nothing to carry the acquainted disjointed phrases in place. The voice has no company. The traces defy measurement and function. Custom should make room for itself, “the previous needs to be altered by the current as a lot as the current is directed by the previous” squawks Eliot in his traditionally controversial essay, “Custom and the Particular person Expertise.” He additionally says “self-sacrifice to this particular consciousness of the previous, as soon as this consciousness is achieved, it can erase any hint of character from the poetry as a result of the poet has grow to be the mere medium for expression.” We will see that Eliot has a degree right here, and if I apply it to the work of Manzillo on this case what’s self-sacrificed is the person who splays out her pathologies and anxieties, not a lot concepts in issues. She serves herself, does she not? It’s artless, as if we’re overhearing her remedy periods and in time, the shape and voice grow to be joined with the poet’s understanding and acceptance of her previous. Why ought to we care about yet one more poetry that rages for identification, fails to speak, to like and be beloved, the trimmings of the traumas that sample her relationships by time?
The reality is that we all know people endure and have suffered and can proceed to endure. Nice prophetic visions of totalitarian regimes have helped form our understanding of the human thoughts, freedom, and imprisonment, Doestoevky, Milton, Kafka, and Viktor Frankl as an example. I confess I’ve excessive expectations.
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9.
In 1969 I spun the album Abbey Highway backward to listen to that Paul was useless. Since I WANT TO TAKE YOU EVERYWHERE doesn’t spin, I learn the guide backward, again cowl to entrance cowl. I hoped to find what I used to be lacking. I wasn’t affected person. Why ought to I be?
By studying the guide from its finish first, themes determine themselves like a pop-up guide. The writing is best. The author matures and marries type and content material. The poems grow to be beneficiant and open to the reader slightly than go away us stylistically short-changed.
The poem, “Temple Watching” leaves the reader with an unconcealed starting –Why did this creator place this poem final on this assortment?
“I sit on the marble steps questioning why it’s so laborious to be human” is a line, in contrast to others in her assortment. Foremost, it has integrity. The road stands like a brick by itself. It offers us readability as a result of it’s a assertion whose voice is to not be reckoned with: it believes. The result’s that the reader additionally believes. This equation has largely been absent within the poems earlier than this. The model opens with honesty and directness. There may be an authority of wholeness that doesn’t equivocate. tease or mistrust itself. To belief the speaker is every thing. Except the perspective is supposed to be distrusted, meant for us to warble and meander inside trustworthiness. That is the Manzolillo of latest maturity who kicks out the methods. She now not depends on gimmicks, compelled photos, or stale phrases, her voice doesn’t hold within the corners to say what my ear hears as unfaithful.
3.
The physique breaks from the soul, and the psyche tells the self that the physique’s dislocation adjustments us. But the voice and type are compelled – That is poetry that has not but matured: no fault within the author. Manzolilo has not absolutely mastered the content material or the power to create stress within the feelings she struggles to specific. That is poetry that fumbles. The poet depends on juxtaposing antiseptic photos and unearned drama, all caged by flimsy and undisciplined diction.
This makes for photos that can’t maintain, whether or not she is attempting for instance the disconnection her physique experiences alone or in connection to others, there may be some management, some self-discipline within the authorship that’s lacking. There isn’t any irony in my remark. Let me clarify:
I’ve no sense of something actual. I wish to empathize or respect – I wish to really feel one thing however these poems are created with poetic infidelity. It’s simple to write down what we will say, it’s simpler to say what we predict is the simplest approach to say it – The place we don’t have something at stake, not simply our hearts, however our cerebral cortex, or our entrails. Give me a spleen and I’ll provide you with my soul’s consideration.
Preliminary inquiries to ask oneself: What custom does this poet write in opposition to or from?
In each poetry, a type emerges throughout the custom of the previous. Does Manzolilo make a degree in opposition to type or about type? Or has she deserted the notion of type altogether?
I don’t suppose the reply to my final query is affirmative.
7.
In “Individuals Watching” every line is vital. We all know this as a result of, as I stated, every line has its integrity. I’ve stated that I imagine the speaker. What the speaker says she couldn’t have stated earlier than. It’s troublesome. There may be stress in every second: the punctuation: the road breaks. Nothing lies.
None of it. This poet proves that she is aware of the craft of poetry.
“Thigh Excessive Love.”
The voice pleads and questions a love that opens the gathering. The fragmentation begins within the poem that follows, “11 Occasions.” In a way it’s a record poem, every stanza is numbered and is shortly decreased to single traces. Eleven traces are repeated after the primary eleven, to say, that is the way it occurred?
“Forbidden Fantasy Foreplay.”
This poem is spoken within the voice of a kid who “dream(s) of an enormous robust mommy/who will lick off all my wounds.” It disturbs as a result of the tone, juxtaposed with its diction, sexualizes the boundaries of intimacy of mom and daughter. It additionally disturbs as a result of the kid’s voice intersects with the grownup voice. This creates a perversion that’s atypical in poetic discourse. It’s cringy, this Electra tendency, which Freud would absolutely enjoy. With out query, this poem units the impetus for the overarching themes in I Wish to Take You All over the place and sheds a neon gentle on the pathology of the content material. Manzolillo continues:
I’m particular, nuzzle me
eternally. See me as hers to have & to personal
cuddling curled toes below chilly covers choke
away the skin monsters. Suck my thumb, consolation me
hush hush
when come the- oh assist me, assist me
I’m on their own. Fairly please stick
with me, you’re imply & scary
with gentle lips, a faint coronary heart
leaning in opposition to our backs arch
kiss me on the neck. I have to really feel
your heat breath, your touch-my contact is there.
The kid, the poet, has no selection however to study, due to mommy, that emotional consolation means sexual proclivity. Regardless of its diary-like model and uneven voice, the poem will get below the reader’s pores and skin. It feels improper. It calls for a visceral and ethical response from the reader. That is exactly why the poem works.
Every part of the guide turns into extra sexual. Within the second part, My First Time Falling, the poems sprawl throughout the pages whereas white areas enable the reader to query the speaker. As an illustration, the speaker of the poem, “The Flooring Shakes When You Sit Down,” states, “over time I’ve grow to be giddy as a college woman” whose diction connotes a vulnerability within the speaker that may place her in peril, but she doesn’t know. I applaud this second the place the poet splits the speaker’s physique from her thoughts. It’s the first of many moments the reader participates within the shift of the speaker’s consciousness. Manzolillo has come to a spot in her writing the place she trusts the reader sufficient to allow us to in.
I Wish to Take You All over the place is declarative, it outright states the dysfunction of the topic that the reader expects the poet will discover. I Wish to Take You All over the place is an alarm, it broadcasts the starvation to devour the item by breaking the boundaries agreed upon to realize and keep a purposeful society. This poet, out of the gates, lays the groundwork of her fierce need for steadiness, identification, and wholeness that may solely be achieved by the willingness to surrender struggling and to acknowledge and problem the outdated dynamics of dysfunctionality in relationship to self and others. This creator asserts boundaries for herself by self-help, therapeutic writing, and the laborious work of self-interrogation.
This guide is an trustworthy course of – of claiming – not writing – the place the speaker posits a listener: the reader, the pal, the therapist, but the poems break from the confessional college, as these will not be confessions per se– the poems in of themselves are a reversal of horror. They kill the nightmare of a childhood laid naked, the place parental figures arrange the kid to must unlearn the highly effective object classes of proudly owning a physique whose boundaries won’t be given over to others. This can be a highly effective testimony to overcoming sexual violence and dismantling one’s self for an additional.
Concerning the reviewer: Cynie Cory is a poet (“American Lady,” New Points Press 2004), playwright and essayist. Cynie grew up in Marquette, Michigan. She is a graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and florida State College, the place she earned a Ph.D. Her poetry has appeared in The American Poetry Overview, One other Chicago Journal, Black Warrior Overview, Crazyhorse, New American Writing, Shade, Verse, and Western Humanities Overview. She at present lives in Tallahassee, Florida.
