Reviewed by Kathleen Kirk
Hyacinth Girl Press is “a feminist micro press” that aims “to bring feminism, mysticism, and scientific inquiry together with awesome poetry,” according to editor Margaret Bashaar, and has certainly done so here with Juliet Cook’s 13 poems, all titled “Designer Vagina,” and “partially inspired,” the poet says, “by looking up Vaginal Rejuvenation Surgery online.” Remind me never to do that.
I much prefer reading these lively poems, rich in humor and wordplay, but also rather frightening in what they suggest about what can be done surgically to alter or repair women’s nether parts. Unless that is done in the woman’s mind and/or of her own free will. “I was just looking for a new female doctor, / but I got sucked into this Exclusive / Embossed Edge.”
These poems are consistently provocative in a variety of ways. “A bonbon and a boner walked into a bar” is now one of my favorite first lines ever, but it does invite us to question the value system that makes women into bonbons and celebrates vaginas for their “boner” potential, and then treats it all as a joke. “In between a pair of masochistic doll legs, // a designer vagina might be just another punch line poem.” Not to mention the implied violence in all this.
I appreciate the questions raised in these poems, and the speaker’s dogged, half-repulsed pursuit of knowledge and self-knowledge.
Why do I write mutant love letters
to men who don’t even read?
to men who don’t even read?
It’s like a botched cosmetic surgery
when all they want is push-up bra love.
when all they want is push-up bra love.
Together the poems evoke an experience similar to relentless page-turning in a medical textbook, or, since the poet’s own research was online, repeated clicking on websites offered in a search, but the poems render the anatomy in unexpected ways, often with images of food:
The heaviness of this body, raw biscuit dough
swelling out of its tube. Am I wrong
to want to be more like a patisserie,
instead of a discount grocery store.
An exotic candy-making machine
instead of a homey spoon rest.
swelling out of its tube. Am I wrong
to want to be more like a patisserie,
instead of a discount grocery store.
An exotic candy-making machine
instead of a homey spoon rest.
There is plenty of design here in Thirteen Designer Vaginas. A pink ribbon in poem #1 carries over into poem #2; the bonbon in poem #2 carries over into poem #3. The endpapers are pink. The covers are “jeweled,” evidently each one uniquely, with tiny shiny glued-ons that remind me of the jewelry-like surgical scars in one of the short films in Aria, “Nessun Dorma” directed by Ken Russell. I’m glad to have encountered all 13 of these vaginas.
Full disclosure coincidences:
I am eager to see the other books available individually or by subscription from Hyacinth Girl Press, one of which will be mine in winter 2011-12 (!). I am also included in the anthology Make It So…, an anthology inspired by Star Trek: The Next Generation, published by Prime Directive Press, an imprint of Hyacinth Girl Press. It’s nice to see a chapbook anthology (and fun to be a Kirk writing about a Picard).
