Like Essa’s Echidna who ‘wakes up every morning and chooses violence cos what choice does she really have?’, Kaho’s narrator finds relief in dreams of returning the wounds to those who would violate her. ‘It’s beautiful how ready I was / to hold his / eyeball in my fist.’ After the assault, a British guy she meets at a party: ‘disagrees when she says she’d have shot him if she’d had a gun. Make his face swallow itself / a close-up of – a drop of water / hitting a larger body / of water / like in nature documentaries.’
No you wouldn’t have, he says. Yes, I would, she says. And knows it to be true. As true as there being clouds above although it’s night so they can’t be seen. It’s a good idea to have sex with the British guy and prove she’s not traumatised. He doesn’t want to use a condom.
How to separate the decisions made by the conscious self from the decisions made by trauma? Essayistic vignettes portray how PTSD may be expressed through hyper-vigilance and risk-blind bravado, but also makes way for episodes of pure poignancy – outbursts of compassion in saving bugs and burying birds, or crystalline awe at the ‘perfect architecture’ of a ‘dew-encrusted dandelion seed-head’. In ways, the book begins to resemble a bouquet – of climbing roses and red-hot pokers, but also poison berries and soured wrinkly grapes, or ‘hibiscus flowers, dawn’s mini-mes, lighting up their veins to show the trick: pretty faces with no flesh behind’. As the world turns in HEAL!, tough flowers bloom:
Everyone I love has died in one way or another but it’s spring. I died too, to make way for something new, and we can call it spring. Blossoms swimming in the veins of trees all winter are emerging.
For these poems, to speak about death is also to understand wanting to live. HEAL! isn’t a self-help manual oozing easy therapeutic platitudes. It’s a testament to survival hard-won – through an embrace of bloodlust for the retribution denied victims, but also through uncompromising tenderness that sees the speaker hunting cuttings of noxious silkweed to feed a caterpillar that’s eaten its moth plant down to twigs. The reward is a chrysalis luminous in the weeds – the determination of life winning out.
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Life and death stuff is the bread and butter of The Surgeon’s Brain by Oscar Upperton, another new title from Te Herenga Waka University Press. Like a scientific drawing of the surgeon’s de-skulled brain, this book acknowledges the necessity of the gory for the cerebral. The Surgeon’s Brain engages with the organic work of medicine at its stickiest – exposing liver and lung, muscle and cartilage, knowledge of life acquired from death upon death as ‘every book on anatomy is written in blood’.
A poetic biography, The Surgeon’s Brain bears testament to an extraordinary life despite the odds, inhabiting the character of James Barry – a brilliant cantankerous transgender military surgeon in the 1800s. Barry pioneered humane care, surgical hygiene and caesarean sections, and was quick to quarrel or duel. Speed-running this biography, Upperton deftly balances elucidation with mystery. Each poem carves out a moment to breathe with Barry through his gnarliest moments – grudges, grief, surgeries, estrangements from a mother and from motherhood itself. The brain’s three membranes too are named as mothers – tough mother, spider mother, tender mother.
Rorschach emphasises the difficulty of stitching queer histories from lived secrecy and subsequent erasure in the record. In this poem, Upperton quotes from competing sources on Barry’s life, noting that ‘we will never know all we wish to about James Barry / for the simple reason that he did not wish us to know’ while he had also ‘begged to be buried / without any post-mortem examination of any sort’. In the absence of Barry sharing his personal views on gender and his motives to spend his life as a man, Barry’s own examined body has become ‘Rorschach’ – its interpretations revealing the views of those who examine it, and often preferring the ‘least queer possibility’. This poem is a stirring case study on the ongoing rediscovery of queer history, and how we continue to fight for our place in the record. Denial of transgender lives in the past enables present existence to be dismissed as a ‘passing fad’. From the facts of Barry’s life as processed in the operating theatre of history, Upperton draws a compelling portrait of a brilliant and committed surgeon who risked everything to live as he chose, with secrets kept even from himself – and certainly, still, from us.
Lying still Am I a liar? Well, I have written things down, and in doing so changed them into different things. The biggest lie of all is an anatomical drawing, organs laid out just so on a butcher’s block. Some would say my life is a lie, but I know what I’m about. I know what I’m about. I lied to my daughter many times, oh many times. I told her the moon was a boat and I had sailed in it.
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In Joanna Cho’s People Person, also from THWUP, the moon rises over a portrayal of Cho’s own mother as a swan princess in a folkloric retelling of her upbringing, marriage and journey from South Korea to New Zealand. Cho’s debut is at turns diaristic and surreal, blending deadpan reporting of personal affairs with basketball highlights or twists into parable. Accounts of dating men are unfortunately agonisingly familiar, as in ‘A winning attitude’:
You hate cleaning the bathroom, but when I asked five times in a row, you did it. But you made it sound so hard! […] You sprayed and wiped all surfaces with such vigour I thought of rock faces eroding.
