Sex Depression Animals

Sex Depression Animals, Mag Gabbert’s first book, tells two origin stories. One is about Gabbert: her childhood firsts, adolescent middles, and every ingredient in her “Recipe for Quiet Ferocity.” The other is about language, Gabbert’s unruly medium, each word aswarm with connotations and near-synonyms. Almost every poem takes as its title a single word, which Gabbert first glosses with book smarts (etymologies, Bible verses, canonical utterances) then reconsiders with the skin-close evidence provided by personal experience. “Crack,” a poem written in bullet points, traces its titular word to “the Greek to split; Sanskrit knife; Latin void, empty; and Old Church Slavonic scythe”; it also relates a father’s wisecracks about ass-cracks, his past crack use, and gaps in an addict’s stories: “You see, the nature of crack is to crack between the narrative.” Nobody is exempt from Gabbert’s many-angled scrutiny, not even herself: “Imagine even the root of your name—the name you were given—meaning to scrape, gnaw, or eat away.”

Ambidextrous storytelling comes to the fore in polyphonic experiments like “Rhinoceros,” a poem in stereo:

there are wild elephants
in the country
wrote Marco Polo

 I once mistook
 the word blubbery
 for blueberry

while exploring the kingdom of Basma
now called Sumatra

 then was known for imagining
 bears bluely
 and for getting
 pregnant at sixteen

and numerous unicorns

From left to right, from Polo’s Asian travels to an American teenagerhood, “Rhinoceros” pans like a radio switching between stations. Amid the staticky crackle, Gabbert uncovers common motifs: misidentifications, megafauna, and the drive to explore, whether geographically, sexually, or linguistically.

Gabbert’s intertwined narratives give nothing precedence, lending equal credence to favorite poets’ best lines and the so-called lower senses—taste, touch, and smell. Her distinctive emotional hues are not primary colors but gradients and swirlings—proud masochism, inappropriate laughter, unplaceable heat: “I couldn’t / tell the difference between desire and rage.” Refusing to simplify, the poems resemble the bewitching finger tattoo Gabbert describes in “Bathtub,” which depicts

a simple black compass
or the helm of a ship or
the symbol for chaos
[…]

but which one
the men keep asking
as if it can’t be all three