Maria Sledmere Discusses Rachael Allen's Kingdomland

Jacket2 shares Sledmere's review of Allen's volume, encompassing "poems congealed with the by-products of feminine selfhood and 'humankind' in the context of the Anthropocene: a period in which anthropos becomes a geologic agent, affecting the Earth’s systems by dint of industry, mass consumption, and fossil fuel extraction." More: 

And yet, the planetary grandeur affected by many other poets of the Anthropocene is absent here: Allen, a Cornish-born poet, opts instead for the eerie locales of edgelands: anonymous zones of touch, encounter, austerity, and harm. In an age of digital mediation, Allen transplants our obsessive consumption of image to a weird, four-dimensional “meatspace,” where bodies undergo acts of force, erasure, and transformation. Her indigo is the sun-starved complexion of a girl on the brink of existential pause: translucent as she stands there, flickering between existence and myth. Her poems are slices of antinutrition,[3] swathed in rushes of sugar and set to form in an airless space that longs for the all-consuming sea. She leaves you with a bloodletting lurch that demands the filling of words, as though words themselves could heal our tender flesh, our hollows with salt.

Meatspace refers to the physical world, in opposition to a virtual environment, frequently associated with the cyberspace utopias of the 1990s. We should of course question the derogatory, implicitly gendered binary set up whereby one world is objectified as a primitive, fleshly mulch in contrast to the smooth, “logical” terrains of digital space. In Allen’s collection, meat and space are recurring themes in their own right. The collection is chock full of livestock and their culinary destinies as dairy, gelatin, or meat: alongside “Dad the Pig,” “Beef Cubes,” “Porcine Armour Thyroid,” and “Cravendale,” there are barbecues, cannibalistic seas, mammalian glands, and octopuses “swallowed in kitsch restaurants.”[4] To be held as flesh is to be silenced. Kingdomland, with its title of biting grandiosity, harks back to a kind of medieval grotesque that is firmly situated within the gendered ecologies of the present. It bears the labor of what it means to carve out a poem, a safe space, a cry of expression in the context of violence, decay, and shame. It is a title in excess of itself (surely a kingdom is already a land). It is, apparently, “an old name for Cornwall.” Its landscapes are strewn with situations held aslant, its cryptic narratives tightly held, on the edge of a cliff or a knife. It questions the boundaries that divide us.

Read on at Jacket2.