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Reviews NEEDY BABIES Dorothea Lasky, Milk, Wave, $18, ISBN 9781940696645 Emily Critchley, Ten Thousand Things, Boiler House, £10, ISBN 9781911343172 Srishti Krishnamoorthy-Cavell on fluidity, the maternal and the avant-garde ... The first poem in Milk opens with the virulent autonomy of blood. Pulling back from a dystopian blood-flooding of space to the still, numb centre of the woman’s body, it acknowledges a traumatic overflowing that strains temporality, stalls action and saturates the text that is to follow. The title, ‘A fierce and violent opening’, issues both a directive to read as well as a play on words, setting up the simultaneous doubleness of the pregnant body the collection explores. In many ways, this poem proposes the core binary that the collection unpicks and conflates in discomfiting ways – of creative vs procreative labour, the violence inherent in the shaping of this (re)productive economy, and art as a strategy for recovery. Speech acts are reimagined as fluids; the transgressive, leaky bodies of Milk write through their histories and selves to produce new, broken forms of matter. Where this generative trauma is conceptualised as being feminine work, there is a complex examination of the affective responses that are deemed socially permissible: 120 The Poetry Review
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Reviews When they propped me up They said, oh, she’s so strong But I am not I cry too I cried for you You left me, always, in the rain Lasky looks at how compulsory courage in the face of loss is a socially mediated performance that cuts against the private self. The exploration of the body itself is textured – it is a function of loss, a seeping, weeping carrier of meaning, a site of artistic labour. For Lasky, the body is a visceral testimony to change and resistance. Her evocation of fluids – milk, blood, ejaculate – mackles the foreground of the poetic text that is concerned with similarly uncontainable, elemental performative utterances. In ‘A hospital room’, the segue to the traumatic interlude of a previous miscarriage is borne out through the physical act of walking. Throughout, this sentiment of “[m]orning walking is like a hospital room” bristles against the various ways in which the body imprisons through pregnancy and childbirth, swollen with language and longing. Later, this will painfully twin with ‘A miscarriage’, where the detached navigation of empty space is performed through free verse, turning the visceral body into a distant object and unexplored territory. One of the best poems in Milk is ‘The clog’, which provides an unnervingly intimate audience with coagulating bodies and their tremendous resistance to relief by interpretation or expulsion. The familiar form of comforting milk is turned inside out – “Nipples hard with liquid or falsities / White and soft / I can’t get it out”. Lasky’s bodies here are occupied with matter and liquid, they fracture under critical duress, yielding objects that are cruel in their unknowability. There is a failure of language in evacuating speech and emptying bodies, and in the desperate, tragic attempt to undo loss, it generates an ever-present, inescapable absence. However, for a collection that is so invested in the question of fluidity and spilling over, including the formal refusal to use punctuation, Milk suffers from the inability to escape arbitrarily normative verse structures, such as the consistent use of capitalisation at the beginning of each line or the unquestioning investment in the personal pronoun. In some poems, such as ‘Floral pattern’, this partial commitment to untreated lyric 121 The Poetry Review

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Reviews

NEEDY BABIES

Dorothea Lasky, Milk, Wave, $18, ISBN 9781940696645 Emily Critchley, Ten Thousand Things, Boiler House, £10, ISBN 9781911343172

Srishti Krishnamoorthy-Cavell on fluidity, the maternal and the avant-garde

...

The first poem in Milk opens with the virulent autonomy of blood. Pulling back from a dystopian blood-flooding of space to the still, numb centre of the woman’s body, it acknowledges a traumatic overflowing that strains temporality, stalls action and saturates the text that is to follow. The title, ‘A fierce and violent opening’, issues both a directive to read as well as a play on words, setting up the simultaneous doubleness of the pregnant body the collection explores.

In many ways, this poem proposes the core binary that the collection unpicks and conflates in discomfiting ways – of creative vs procreative labour, the violence inherent in the shaping of this (re)productive economy, and art as a strategy for recovery. Speech acts are reimagined as fluids; the transgressive, leaky bodies of Milk write through their histories and selves to produce new, broken forms of matter. Where this generative trauma is conceptualised as being feminine work, there is a complex examination of the affective responses that are deemed socially permissible:

120 The Poetry Review

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