Revenge Body

Rachel Wiley’s Revenge Body tackles a culture of fat-shaming, queer-shaming, and racism, in poems about desire and childhood, and about coping through pills and therapy. Wiley does all this with a garrulous and deadpan humor, for example, personifying Adderall as “without a doubt a fire sign.” 

I’m struck in particular by the word “revenge” in the title, and think that revenge in art works best when it is dramatized and conspiratorial with its target audience. So, too, the best poems in this collection are those that involve a certain theatrical voicing and in which the backstory for the speaker’s anger is complicated by a disorderly empathy for the many players involved. In the incredible “Poem for Susan ‘Boomer’ Jenkins,” about a character on the Australian TV show Wentworth who is portrayed as “fat and loud,” the speaker admits that they have “worked my whole fat life to never be, embodied.” She believes the character is “all fight no flight / has never been weightless enough for flight” and has been depicted cruelly and unimaginatively, as she has herself, as “a mascot of greed.” In another poem, “What Brings Me In Today,” the speaker repeatedly tries to talk her friend out of suicide: “No matter what time he calls, I pick up / and charm a belt from around his neck/ slow-dance his sneakers back from a ledge.” 

These poems really are not about revenge as much as they are passionate, fabulist renderings that humanize those who are wronged or made invisible. When it works, it works powerfully. But at times the anger is so unambiguous that it leaves little room for interpretation and such poems feel inert, as if we’re being cheated out of Wiley’s gifts for an energetic and reparative rage, of what Toni Morrison, whom Wiley quotes in this book, calls a “lovely surging.”