Darcie Dennigan’s Madame X conjures a post-apocalyptic vision whose darkness is always imbued with play and benign strangeness. The speakers in these poems seem genuinely (and, somehow, amusingly) undecided on the question of their own humanity—yet humanity seems to be at the very center of Dennigan’s work: these poems ruminate on human identity and the centrality of art, even as they wander the strange landscapes of the imagination, the holy, the comic, the tragic. Take, for example, “The Job Interview”:
“At one point, I also did some work as a skydiver.
It was a strange summer because I was pretty young and had just gotten my period.
Not to be gross, but I basically bled all summer. And that was mostly fine.
It was beautiful weather and I, you know, wore dark pants, took loads of baths.
But there was one cloudy day, and they sent us up anyway.
I thought—if the crotch of my pants rubs against a cloud, I’ll leave red streaks.
And I did fall through a cloudbank and even kind of tried to do a split mid-cloud.
But clouds are nothing to rub against, are nothing but emptiness.
…
I’m so sorry,
so sorry to have a body.
But how else.”
The poems carry the weight of contradiction: they are living, bleeding, oddly-shaped bodies tumbling through space—apologetic for their thrown-ness but somersaulting nevertheless, uncertain of the reason for their freakishness, yet completely certain of their presence. This “sorry/not sorry” disposition creates tremendous energy in poems that fuse the sacred and profane, life and death, innocence and sex, waking and dream life, all while maintaining their comic levity and stunning beauty.
Dennigan’s “sorry/not sorry” oscillation is not limited to the narrative elements of the poems but is enacted formally in rather overt ways. Many of the poems share a form: a highly experimental prose poem with intermittent ellipses. This curious structure ostensibly aspires toward formlessness, as the words tumble in compact units and breaths, bursts of unnerved lyric that seek to undermine their own authority. The result is a compelling occupation of a liminal space more akin to linguistic vapor than the more stable forms we’re used to seeing in American verse—they float about the page in odd patterns, drifting on whims and asides, wafts of strange speech. And yet, despite these gestures towards formal indeterminacy, Dennigan’s poems are so deeply certain of their uncertainty that, eventually, forward momentum becomes unavoidable. We begin to see that what first appears as reluctant weight shifting between nervous feet is in fact a kind of dance: an entirely new and strangely beautiful step.
“They … thanked us … patted our / lab jackets … Then they turned away from us … They turned back / to the children … in the sand … building castles … and alphabets /… and … grand frigates … with sand yes … but also with pieces of / … They were building pillars of … bone … they built a frieze … / with an image of the sun … it was a sun the size of a heart … a heart / the size of the fist of a kid …” (from “The Atoll”)
To further counterbalance the weightlessness of the form, Dennigan roots these poems in conventions more characteristic of prose: character, dialogue and narrative. And the narrative arc of the collection can be viewed as one of the strangest bildungsromans ever.
We see the speaker as a young adult contemplating the various paths art has to offer:
“I went / on … Wanted the summa cum laude next to my name in the art / school graduation program … I asked the school how to … They / presented three honors tracks … suicide … jail … madness … / Madness was graded on a curve … madness being … relative … / The other two … strictly by the book .. Okay I said … Jail sounds / good …” (from “The Corpus”)
We see the speaker as a young wife and mother:
“We were frozen in the yard of a dollhouse. The yard was turf instead of grass. I was the wife doll in a lounge chair. The husband figure had a rake in his hands. The kids were also dolls and there were bubbles around their dolls heads and they were posed as if trying to pop them. Then the yard suddenly exploded and in my doll head I thought, Run.”
(“Whale”)
We see the speaker as a male Pietá defending the maternal identity of men:
“As if a chorus of female opinion / were a prerequisite to knowing my … It just happens that some / of the most exciting … I mean … the long line of great Pietá advancements in the 20th … I mean … the Virgin laughing over / Christ’s body … the Virgin mourning Christ as a miscarriage … / the bitch Virgin holding Christ between her teeth by the nape / of his neck … the Virgin who left to find herself … so many / variations on the pierced milk ducts Virgin … women … all women … This is not to deny my own … my own work … has / … greatness …”
(“The Matriarchy”)
The world into which the speaker grows is absurdly cruel, so it only makes sense that the speaker’s development would itself be absurd. The collection’s title, Madame X, places it in the tradition of the famously controversial Portrait of Madame X (later renamed simply Madame X) by American painter John Singer Sargent. Like Sargent’s portrait (and the countless productions on both stage and screen since) Dennigan’s collection is engaged in the problem of feminine agency in a bleakly patriarchal world. The women in this collection are often seen in positions of cartoonishly-exaggerated, corporeal suffering:
“I closed the doors (every season is too full of longing!) and
rechristened myself Flora.
I drank a vat of rose water and put both my wrists through the
slicer.
And then I began to bleed—a white powder.
Flour.
And then you came in.
I would have known you even if you were not wearing in your
buttonhole a carnation.
The bakery is closed, I said tersely.
I was bleeding profusely.
I loved you even before you said
Nothing breaks more slowly, more silently, than bread.”
(“In the Bakery”)
The artist suffers to create art. The woman suffers in a world that hates women. The woman artist, then, if she wants to create, suffers a unique violence: a brutalization of the female form that renders the “feminine” the result of sustained violence both figurative and literal. So we see blood-streaked clouds and arteries spewing flour—we find the speaker with scars in her throat from blowing divine light.
Madame X is a fearless collection: formally adventurous, thematically compelling, and unflinching in its aesthetic risks. Its combination of strange apocalypticism and comic levity is reminiscent of Matthia Svlaina’s wonderfully odd Destruction Myth (Cleveland State 2009), and its meditation on female agency in a cartoonishly-violent, patriarchal milieu suggests Dennigan’s place among the best poets of the Gurlesque.
Notable poems: The Job Interview; Out of the Ether; In the Bakery; The Center of Worthwhile Things; The Matriarchy
Madame X, Darcie Dennigan
Canarium, 2012
Page length: 112
Retail: $14
Bradley Harrison is a graduate of the Michener Center for Writers and a PhD student at the University of Missouri. His work can be found in New American Writing, Fugue, New Orleans Review, Forklift Ohio, Best New Poets 2012 and elsewhere. His chapbook, Diorama of a People, Burning is available from Ricochet Editions (2012).
