Love Lies Bleating

The title of Elaine Kahn’s new collection, Romance or The End (Soft Skull Press, 2020), feels like an ultimatum. Traditionally—heteronormatively—the end comes just after the wedding, or after the first kiss, signifying that once the girl has got the guy there’s no more to be said, the two will live happily ever after. Except Kahn turns that fairy tale on its head. “There is nothing truer in this world than the lie of love,” she writes in the book’s title poem. Even if our desires are shaped by messages gleaned from fiction, she seems to suggest, that doesn’t make them any less genuine.

Kahn has published one previous collection and several chapbooks, and is attuned to discomfiting truths. The poet and novelist Dodie Bellamy likens her to the late artist and photographer Hannah Wilke, whose work takes a similarly confrontational approach to feminism, sexuality, and the body. Kahn’s repeated invocations of shit, blood, and cum in these new poems demonstrate her own blunt engagement with those themes. For her, desire and trauma can be two sides of the same experience. 

“This is a book about love,” she declares in the book’s title poem. But also, “This is a book about separation.” These oppositions aren’t mutually exclusive; indeed, the book’s many contradictions skewer the whole enterprise of binary thinking. There aren’t “good guys” and “bad guys” in Kahn’s game of love, only flawed humans who make mistakes even when trying their best not to. The book plunders traditional love story tropes to offer a more authentic, and sometimes more cynical, counternarrative. Arranged into eight chapters, plus an introduction and an epilogue, the deceptively simple love story arc becomes a vehicle by which Kahn examines the complexities of contemporary relationships, gendered power dynamics, sexual violence, and recovery. How to reconcile desire in the wake of trauma is a central theme, reflecting Kahn’s interest in complicating an experience that’s too often framed as black-and-white. 

The book opens with “ROMEO & JULIET & ELAINE,” a four-part poem in which Kahn's speaker insinuates herself into the most iconic couple in literature. (The poems’ titles are in all caps.) Shakespeare set a high bar for love and what is expected of it, which Kahn coolly upends. “We are gathered here to worship / the American religion of loneliness,” the poem begins. If loneliness is a religion, there’s also a peculiarly American faith in the potential of certain products, pop psychology books, apps, or self-help seminars to overcome loneliness. And yet, loneliness is about a lack of connection, not a lack of romance per se, and its solution isn’t so easily commodifiable. 

The poem’s second section, subtitled “Love’s Commercial,” plays up this idea of commodification. A character named Maria “says hello to Paul / hello / Paul puts something in his mouth.” Despite wanting “to fuck / the god inside her,” Paul can barely respond to basic pleasantries. The poem’s conclusion points to the transactional nature at the heart of many relationships. Like the poor woman “fucking the text man for texts”—a viral tweet implying that sexual intimacy, at least of the heterosexual variety, is always in service of some contractual arrangement—Maria “serves Paul’s emotional and sexual needs / in exchange for pizza.” The next section introduces the recurrent you addressee of the book in a pointedly unromantic way: “I look up your nose / as you tell me all your secrets.” This kind of comfortable intimacy is at odds with the big R romance of the book’s title, but, as the narrator reminds us, “Obviously, this / is not a love poem.” 

As the book progresses, the narrator moves in and out of enthrallment with the love story. Early poems such as “AUGUST” outline banal everyday actions that are usually left out of Disneyfied versions of coupledom:

I brushed my teeth
I made breakfast
You put the dishes in the sink

It’s hardly Hallmark-worthy, but there are moments of real tenderness. “I lay on the hammock / You kissed my nose,” the narrator says, and later adds, “I kissed you hard.” By the final line, though, the narrator abruptly walks into the sea. If the cure for loneliness is companionship, why, Kahn seems to ask, do so many of us experience the urgent desire to escape? It’s not only the narrator who shares this impulse. “WHEN A SUDDEN MADNESS SEIZED THE INCAUTIOUS LOVERS” ends:

Each evening
we have dinner
and you disappear into a wall

The desire for escape and the desire for honesty coexist alongside a constant negotiation with the past. “My wild mind / will not let me cum!” exclaims the frustrated narrator, a lament that’s humorous on the surface but that alludes to deeper legacies of trauma. In ”A WISH TO BE POISONED / WHAT I WANT TO TOUCH I CLICK ON,” the narrator elaborates, “I examine / my orgasm // Now and then / there is a need / to become / something.”

As the needs of the relationship continue to go unmet, the tone of the poems becomes increasingly disenchanted. In “REALITY STEVE,” the book’s anonymous you receives this threat:

I’m going to send you a drawing and a letter
The drawing is going to have spit all over it
and the letter is going to say
I don’t want to be your friend

But later, the tone softens again. In a postseparation poem titled “I MISS YOU AND I’M GLAD YOU’RE NOT HERE,” the narrator finds comfort in something so beautifully simple as “the smell of water on hot concrete.”

In other poems, Kahn takes a more ambiguous tack. In “IRISH SPRING,” her delicate economy of spacing invites conflicting interpretations: 

Men cry on my stomach
 
 
All my life
I’ve only wanted
someone
 
 
Tell me a story
that I can believe

Lineating the poem in this way confuses the subject of the middle stanza: Is it the speaker who wants someone? Or is it the men who cry on the speaker’s stomach? The poem pushes against stereotypes of needy women and emotionally unavailable men desperate to escape such neediness; here, it is men who cry out and want to be loved. Then again, the final line can be read as the narrator skeptical of whatever these men tell her. Either way, and despite prevalent clichés about which gender is more inclined to pine after romantic relationships, the American religion of loneliness implicates everyone.

Kahn also sets up, and then dismisses, readers’ expectations of her own imagery, as in these lines from “LINEN”:

God has called on me
to wear this breastplate
 
I don’t pay attention
I come open like a blood
 
Orange red of evening

By breaking the line between blood and orange, Kahn introduces a hint of violence into what is otherwise a softly erotic image. In “The Stone Chapter,” the book’s fifth chapter, the violence is more literal, but also more elliptical. Something sinister happens, a trauma whose meaning is obvious but that’s nonetheless described only obliquely, in fragments:

The fear I can believe in
Fuck I let him watch my arms
My face his body is the fear I 
Fuck what you believe
You watch my arms my face
Not thinking of my face my 
Body is what is I fear and
Fuck you can’t believe me

The scar of this event doesn’t just undercut the narrator’s ability to experience joy, it also imposes the cyclical thinking characteristic of assault survivors: am I to blame? In “OUT OF YOUR LOVE,” Kahn left-indents the anxieties that are said to originate in the right side of the brain:

I
don’t
know
what
would
have
happened
if
what
happened
hadn’t
happened

A few pages later, in “I DIDN’T LOOK AT ANYTHING SO THERE WAS NOTHING TO WRITE DOWN,” the grievous act is named directly: “a thin clot / casual as rape / it comes from everywhere.” The juxtaposition of casual and rape delivers an emotional jolt that continues into the last line, which only underscores the ubiquity of sexual violence.

Throughout the book, Kahn challenges the concept of the fallen (or ruined) woman. She presents a female subject who reasserts autonomy over her sexual desires even in the wake of trauma. Kahn’s narrator refuses to be trapped by her “wild mind,” and she continues to explore the pleasures of self-touch, sexual and otherwise, in the aftermath of the relationship:

I am within me
the same and from myself
without you and it doesn’t matter

In “AGAINST NATURE,” the narrator states “to live is to disorganize,” an almost meta description of the poetic techniques by which Kahn remixes literary tropes and romance imagery. “My condition won’t allow me to remain,” the narrator continues, but then she frees herself from this kind of predetermination: “Although / I can’t exempt myself / from wanting.”

The narrator’s desire for love and intimacy even after sexual violence, is complex, yet she captures this tension in three brisk lines:

A woman must
be very poor
to love

Here, she evokes both the unbalanced material conditions that have historically forced many women into heterosexual couplings—and still do to this day—alongside the expression of pity conveyed by the word poor. She is to be pitied, perhaps, because in wanting to love, despite being “in this shit-pile,” she is unable to escape her conditioned desires.

In “ATTACHMENT THEORY,” a poem in the first chapter that examines the expectations inherent in modern psychology, Kahn imagines the earliest impressions of two babies, who observe to each other, “Look, the nurses are smoking / Look, the nurses are beating each other up.” It’s doubtful these are the kinds of impressions behavioral psychologists have in mind when they talk about how childhood observations and cues influence adult behavior. According to attachment psychology, our childhood experiences inform our perceptions of the world, and of other people, in adult life. The manner in which a child is nurtured by her caregivers, and her understanding of how those caregivers view relationships, dictate what kind of partner the child will be when she grows up, and what kind of partners she will seek in turn.

Kahn makes a surreal farce of schools of thought that suggests we are all either of X type (perfectly balanced emotionally), Y type (too emotional), or Z type (not emotional enough). A voice sick of rampant psychological categorization cries out from the center of the poem:

Expecting
puts a seal
onto the world
 
So I am not

Kahn further lampoons the paradox of attempting to dismantle expectations by placing people in definitive categories determined from infancy (even as doing so creates further expectations):

Do you think the reason babies love rattles
is that somewhere
in their softest, infant brains
they know
that’s what a Xanax bottle sounds like?

The babies will probably need all the Xanax they can lay their soft hands on once they learn that their most intimate desires are almost uncontrollable and contingent on how they were raised. In the end, there’s probably little we can do to control how our desires form or how they influence our actions. In fact, this whole area of emotional psychology still isn’t understood well. The power of Kahn’s finale isn’t that it provides a guide for overcoming emotional scars and never accruing new ones, but that it represents a new desire from a woman who desperately wants to be free from desire. “I want to be more / than anything I want,” the narrator says in the EPILOGUE, later adding:

there is real joy
in understanding
 
no one else is going to do it for you

It’s enough of a hopeful note for the book’s various frustrations and contradictions to finally come to rest. After a list of potentially achievable and not unhealthy goals—to have long fake hair, to win a dance off, to be disciplined, to cum—the last words of the book are “desire really can be simple.” It’s a statement that’s both true and a fiction. “When I tell myself a story / I decide the end,” Kahn writes, and there’s power in that.