Lynn Melnick's Unsettling Mixture of Authority & Uncertainty in Landscape with Sex and Violence

Lynn Melnick’s Landscape with Sex and Violence (YesYes Books, 2017) is reviewed by Calista McRae at Boston Review. "The book’s disclosures are grounded in this profoundly unsettling mixture of authority and uncertainty," writes McRae, who ends up focusing on the book's dual focus: "Melnick represents two related dimensions of rape culture: that it is a constant feature of the world in which one lives, and that it changes the way one sees that world." More:

Physical menace recurs in shocking and wearily familiar forms: one poem addresses the man who ties a woman to a deck—he has also, at some point in the past, lit her hair on fire—and another addresses an everyday street harasser. As the book records its barrage of objective events, its subjective processes shuttle between almost surrealistic close-ups and conspicuous elision. After an image of “polka dot panties” lined “with rest stop receipts,” the speaker turns abruptly away: “I think probably we’ll pause in Barstow to continue / these lyrics.”

Occasionally the detached tone of Landscape with Sex and Violence becomes less manifestly impassive. Such moments occur not so much when the speaker mentions what people have done to her, but when she mentions how little she has been able to discover about the rest of the world, especially the natural world. “I am thirteen before I know that ants can nest / in a log,” she notes in one poem. In another, when a stranger begins to tell her about a weeping willow, “it’s the first time she’s learned the name of a tree.” Encountered within the larger sequence, these passing statements are resonant: trauma has put this speaker in a terribly defensive relation to her environment. As two sentences near the book’s opening reveal, “At night I hallucinate the grunting discord // which leapt from a human body as he destroyed mine. / That very month, I obliterated a beetle on a shiny walkway.”

Read the full review at Boston Review.