JAY
BESEMER reviews
Garments
Against Women by Anne Boyer
(Ahsahta Press, Boise, ID, 2015)
Most of the poets I know are or have at one
time been obsessed with Garments Against
Women, Anne Boyer’s deep meditation on gender, illness, poverty and trauma.
I am too, and no wonder—it’s a book that insists upon multiple readings, over
time, and in various contexts. Using the actions of sewing, shopping for and
inhabiting garments as a framework for her examination, Boyer both exposes and
complicates a specifically female experience of poverty and embodiment. The
specificity of her position is made richer by the power of her language. The deft
combination of vulnerability and risk-taking with analytic prowess make this a
fascinating and subversive book.
I have found myself following two major
through-lines in Garments. One is the
title, which resonates all throughout the book to varying degrees of overtness.
It is itself a three-word poem, descriptive of clothing that is simultaneously
(and specifically) opposed to and in close contact with women. The tesseract of
the title keeps opening out the more one considers its implications. It’s a brilliant move. So much punishment
centers around clothing for the female body; women are constantly punished for wearing
the wrong type, the wrong style, the wrong brand, the wrong degree of normative
femininity, the wrong color, the wrong class expression (and most likely on the
wrong kind of body) for someone’s agenda. It’s not hard to extrapolate that, in
service to capitalism, the clothing itself is a punishment. And yet there’s
something magical in the action of sewing, with its problems of
multidimensionality:
Sometimes when you look at smoothly joining at least two
different-sized pieces of flat but pliable material so that these pieces might
correctly encase an eternally irregular, perspiring and breathing
three-dimensional object that cannot cease its motion you think that there is
no way ever this could happen, yet sometimes it does (30).
A three-dimensional
object that cannot cease its motion: A human in an environment. Sewing is
an ongoing engineering problem, a practice in applied physics. And in that
sense too, Boyer is included in her own title, as a woman literally confronting
the problem of garment construction.
The other key idea for me in this book is
presented on page nine:
Inadmissible information is often information that has
something to do with biology (illness, sex, reproduction) or money (poverty) or
violence (how money and bodies meet). Inadmissible information might also have
to do with being defanged by power (courts, bosses, fathers, editors, and other
authorities) or behaving against power in such a way that one soon will be
defanged (crime).[1]
Boyer’s definition and expansion of the categories of
inadmissible information function here as a sort of mission statement, clearly
giving notice to readers that Garments
Against Women will contain such information. This is a vital move, and a
radical one, stepping up to the page and refusing to wait for permission before
conveying so many interdicted realities.
The refusal
to wait for permission—or rather the imperative to write while in full
awareness that permission will never be given—is probably one reason the book
is an obsessional object for so many poets. Many of us struggle to write from this space,
and the stakes for doing so are high. The work becomes all the more linked to
the self, and the text must be all the more powerful and limber to handle the
roles it must play. Poets as readers gravitate toward books like Garments Against Women because they
offer a sense of possibility (or possible approaches) and an antidote to
isolation. Boyer presents the most inadmissible information possible: how
precisely the mechanisms of neoliberal economics function to regulate bodies in
service of the already-powerful, perpetuating that power (in the form of wealth
and violence) and rationalizing it. Boyer speaks directly of and from the
consequences of neoliberal practices on the exploited, burdened body; the physical
cost of being a cog in a wealth-perpetuating machine is illness and disability,
which disqualifies a person from participation in further wealth-perpetuation
while shifting the blame for the loss of wealth firmly (again) back onto the
body of the exploited. This is a complicated transaction and Boyer’s approach
is both thorough and nonlinear.
One way that
the text is built involves interaction with texts by other authors, some of
which are woven into Boyer’s own dialogues with herself, her daughter and
various lovers. These texts are wide-ranging, covering Rousseau, a vintage
sewing handbook (that seems also to double as a gender-policing social-control
medium), a self-help book and occasional other poets. An especially effective
example of the latter is this part of page 71:
I thought about the poet Marcia Nardi who wrote “as if there
were no connection between my being stuck at the ribbon counter at Woolworth’s
for eight hours a day at minimum hourly wage, and my inability to function as a
poet.” I was melancholy and wrote defenses of my melancholy. I totally forgot
to shop.
The last sentence reminds me of George W. Bush’s infamous
admonition to U.S. citizens to express appropriate patriotic grief and support
the freshly-overt “anti-terror” war effort by getting out there and
shopping. Did Boyer really “forget” to
shop? Or was this experience and defense of melancholy more of a resistant act
in solidarity—and in conversation with—Nardi? What about the inability to shop? To carry out the
order to shop, which was never rescinded, just like we’re still at war?
Garments Against Women rewards repeated
readings by highlighting the ambiguity in supposedly straightforward
experience. Language choices are both accurate and uneasy, allowing readers to
inhabit the page according to their own immediate experiences. I found myself
returning again to this sentence: “These were the days I had to go do dim
things in government offices, and believed, once again, in the danger of
aspirations” (80). This speaks so clearly to the special humiliation of
encounters with government bureaucracy, especially if one is applying for
public assistance, or in court to change a name, or anywhere trying to change a
gender marker. Of these three examples I’m guessing the only one I share with
Boyer is the first, which is enough to evoke bodily memories of the waiting
room, the face-to-face with a case officer. Yet those memories are also
complicated by my uncertain relationship to the second half of the sentence—the danger of aspirations.
What is
that? Is the danger in having aspirations, or in the aspirations themselves? Is
it all aspirations, or only certain ones? Ones that society deems
inappropriate, like being a poet? Boyer writes of “believing once again” in the
danger. Did she once doubt that aspirations were dangerous? When I look at this
clause, I can’t help but consider my own life, my own aspirations, and try to
sort out which ones were dangerous, and in what ways. I’m grateful to Boyer for
this catalyst, because I’ve realized that the most truly dangerous
aspirations—dangerous to me, my well-being—were the ones I held and pursued
because they were expected, even demanded, by others. If this is inadmissible
information, then it is so because of its potential for liberation. No
algorithm can touch it.
[1] I
resist the temptation to quote the entire page here, despite its importance to
the reading of the book as a whole. But
I will add something from my own subject position, which Boyer’s book naturally
would not include because it’s outside of the one presented in the book:
information having to do with queer bodies, transgender bodies and/or bodies of
color definitely also falls under the heading of “inadmissible.”
*****
Hybrid artist/poet Jay Besemer is the author of many poetic artifacts including Chelate, Telephone (both from Brooklyn Arts Press), A New Territory Sought (Moria), Aster to Daylily (Damask Press), and Object with Man’s Face (Rain Taxi Ohm Editions). He is a contributor to the groundbreaking anthology Troubling the Line: Trans and Genderqueer Poetry and Poetics. His performances and video poems have been featured in various festivals and series, including Meekling Press’ TALKS Series, Chicago Calling Arts Festival, Red Rover Series {readings that play with reading}, and Absinthe & Zygote. Jay also contributes performance texts, poems, and critical essays to numerous publications including Jacket2, Nerve Lantern: Axon of Performance Literature, PANK, Petra, Barzakh, The Collagist, Rain Taxi Review of Books, The VOLTA, and the CCM organs ENTROPY and ENCLAVE. He is a contributing editor with The Operating System, and founder of the Intermittent Series in Chicago.
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