“You’re not supposed to chew / the pomegranate seed.” This line from Caplan’s opening poem, “Ars Poetica with Influence from Marina Abramović,” couples beautifully with the title of this collection, Exhibitionist. Theories suggest that the pomegranate, not the apple, is the fruit on the tree of Eden, and this collection explores women as they have been observed and treated from the beginning of human existence—as physical objects. “This is the gallery of my body,” she writes, pointing out that the scar on her foot
thrills
all the way
up my leg
when touched.
This is the physical reality even as the “I” searches for intimacy and relationship. Images in this opening poem recur throughout the collection. For example, “the flashing / open and closed of a towel” is echoed in “Exhibit : 10” in “Josefina’s towel hung open” or the all-important eye, which appears in the image at the beginning of the collection, is voyeuristically given “a pinprick for your eye” in the opening poem and appears in “Exhibit : 18” when the “I” “unveiled / the shut-up eyes of my chest.”
Many of the poems are titled “Exhibit: [number],” reinforcing the importance of viewing and being viewed. Many are quite short, but reveal more and more of the complexity of the physical with the intimate, and the cultural constructs behind them. For example, “Exhibit : 30” in six lines careens from “Whiskey-colored horses wild on her hills,” through sex with her husband, to “All the cars we drove over licking / their leather for her” (point of view shifts among the poems in this collection). This poem evokes the west, sex, and the car culture. “Exhibit : 27” is complete in four lines:
Suits to lingerie as injustice to America.
When my husband comes home in shirtsleeves
from an interview, I pine after the suitjacket
and ask for reverse strip-tease.
In these lines, the poet encompasses, once again, the culture as reflected through images of intimacy and the humor of a “reverse strip-tease.”
Other poems carry similar themes although they are not titled “Exhibit.” Instead, they reference characters (imaginary and real), places, and events, but primarily characters, from Titania to Tippi Hedren. “Titania the Sexbot Wakes to Love in the Bower of the Interweb” begins with the word, “[Gawking],” continuing the theme of voyeurism. The poem is written with a Shakespearean slant, but references our technological age with lines like these: “What channel shakes me from my filament?” “Out of this doom do not aspire to screen,” and “I’ll gif airis to attend, fetch thee pixels of deepweb.” The humor is ironic, even sardonic.
In “The Female Gaze: Tippi Hedren,” the poet references the actress’ sexual assault experience: “Hitch wants to climb inside me / and look out from my eyes.” In this poem, not only is the female object viewed, the male wants to stare out through the object’s eyes. The poem is deeply poignant as the “I” of the poem (in this case, Tippi Hedren) asks questions: “Does he think the mountains / hulk less from here?” and
Doesn’t he know the mountain
with a crown of letters we’re asked
to bow to is his body?
The ache of that is palpable, but the poet increases the stakes in her last two lines: “I see my daughter in every tiger / imprisoned by the movie studio.” This assault, this taking-over of the body will not end with one generation but be visited on the next.
Other poems are titled “The Female Gaze”: Laura Mulvey, Lee Miller, Frida Kahlo, Faith Ringgold, and Leonora Carrington. In her acknowledgments, the poet explains: “For the Female Gaze series, I began by creating erasures from the letters of Frida Kahlo, from Laura Mulvey’s essay ‘The Male Gaze,’ and from an interview with Faith Ringgold, as well as employing ekphrasis on the works of Frida Kahlo, Lee Miller, Laura Mulvey, and Faith Ringgold.” It should also be noted that the collages through the collection are by the poet.
These poems, therefore, are real-life testaments to the poet’s perceptions of how women are viewed and treated, including racism (women of color). In “The Female Gaze: Faith Ringgold,” the poet has crafted these lines from the actual texts she’s “erased”:
White men on television, movies, everywhere, as anything want
to hear again and again and again and again a black family
like a formula – strong black mother, father not there,
kid who’s bad and can’tread: I always have to look for their insertions,
spit them like seeds from my teeth.
These seeds hearken back to the pomegranate seed “you’re not supposed to chew.”
There is anger in this collection, but, more importantly, there’s exposure, not just the exposure of women as objects, but the poet’s exposure of the injustice referenced in “Exhibit : 27,” when she writes, “Suits to lingerie as injustice to America” and asks for a “reverse strip-tease.”
Her final poem, “Breastfeeding the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston,” begins with “Venus points her marble nipples / at everyone’s mouths.” The “I” tells the story of her mother breastfeeding her in the gallery over the objections of the security guard. Through the poem, the “I” imagines “the goddess turning to milk, / spilling her torso, splattering the floor,” and all the “marble nymphs” liquifying. The art comes alive as “milk dots appear on Tintoretto damsels” and “angels abandon their corners to drink.” The “I” drinks it all in and the poem ends: “She stands in the gallery like a performance artist. / See, this is life. This.” There is a sense of acceptance, but the reader has been made aware of the injustices, the voyeurism, the challenge of forming intimacy and relationship. Yet, there is nothing else, except the struggle to make change, one infinitesimal step at a time.
Aline Soules’ work has appeared in such publications as the Kenyon Review, Houston Literary Review, Poetry Midwest, Galway Review, and Flash Fiction Magazine. Her book reviews have been published by Tupelo Quarterly, Colorado Review, Los Angeles Review, and others. She earned an MFA in Creative Writing from Antioch University Los Angeles. Online: https://alinesoules.com