Throat Flower
Erotic adventures with a backhoe, subway sex (not sex on the subway, rather, riding the subway as a metaphor for sex), the obligatory fruit/sex metaphor. These sensual poems have everything to do with the physical. Even the poem about the dying friend has a sensual physicality. Ugliness and pain are expressed in terms of the numbness of a body slammed against the world, whether it’s the world of machines (“cold steel jaws against my hot lips”) or the natural world (“frozen together as the flakes/fell down around me”) or some mundane thing made magic by juxtaposition (“fill a laundry basket/of bright/to light the night sky”). The one story in this chapbook lacks the erotic imagery of Pohl_Weary’s poetry, lacks anything very compelling, actually. It’s the story of a girl who has days of the week underwear and can’t find Monday one Monday morning. This busts her chops and Pohl_Weary would have us consider, along with her heroine, the possibility that “perhaps missing Monday has had ripple effects.” I’m sure I could be convinced of the possibility of this sort of connection, but Pohl_Weary is not convincing in her prose the way she is in her poetry. If the heroine of this story is one_dimensional, then the villain is no_dimensional. The guy is such an asshole, it’s impossible to take an interest in anything he does. “What do you want?” he yells at the underwear girl, “To come like a man?” (KS)
chapbook, 16 pages, Emily Pohl_Weary, $2, Petra(fied) Press, 18 Virtue St., Toronto, ON M6R 1C2,