Devotion is a craving carving our lives. Inherently, we yield our devotion; inherently, we pull toward people and places where devotion might alight on us. Such desire settles within early on and bends without quite often.
Cassandra Manzolillo’s debut collection, I Want to Take You Everywhere (BlazeVOX, 2024), conveys the manifold nature of devotion in her own language, a beautiful blur of childlike need and erotic, kink-friendly want. The speakers of Manzolillo’s poems softly—and sometimes not-so-softly—demand the care and satisfaction a parent might give along with and through sexual gratification.
Opening the collection, “Thigh High Love” establishes Manzolillo’s highly embodied style and seeds the spirit of poems to come with elements such as “macho men in hardy heels & chiseled corsets / who act like pageant mothers to me”; verbs such as “bite” and “capitulate”; the fragility of gender roles—and the strength found in flouting them; and specific expressions of more universal “daddy issues this mommy issues that.”
“I deserve / a love please could someone, anyone / come back,” the poet concludes.
Across these poems and pages, such need feels fathomless and yet not too much to ask. Ever true in her observation, Manzolillo seeks devotion through fine details: toothy smiles and rainbow sneakers, in the company another keeps; and in the distance of stars, “dying lights” that feel too far when another person’s eyes, when her own skin, is right there for the taking.
Manzolillo discloses the early-and-often nature of devotion in poems like “Forbidden Fantasy Foreplay,” with its thumb-sucking need to be soothed, desire to be frightened and protected by the same person, and the urgency of drawing close to a body.
“I dream of a big strong mommy / who will lick off all my wounds & fly me / to the moon with her,” the opening line reads.
As the poem progresses, the speaker asks to play the role of a dog underfoot: crawling, bearing punishment, accepting admonition for the sake of accepting anything at all.
The collection continues and devotion spoons a lover who makes a nest of their childhood bedroom in “Skins Stitched at Saturday’s Sunrise.” Devotion attaches to a creature in a “hot pink skirt” and fishnets (“The Floor Shakes When You Sit Down”).
“You don’t care / take up space while you still can / I wish I could do that asphyxiated the world through thin lips,” Manzolillo writes.
Speakers express their devotion as reminiscent objects and crayon-crafted portraits commissioned in “The Color Blue”; and as a kind of cohabitation that bridges past and future in this present tense in “Building a Home when you are Broke.” In the latter poem, Manzolillo delivers one of her most beautiful and desolate passages:
“You’d give me the / heat off your chest if you could & you do, you, do you. I wake with a bliss, night / turns cold. I am alone in a pile of chalk trying to dust off all of the plans you’ve / abandoned me with a naked dream of growing old beside you.”
The poet blissfully bends her own formal conventions in poems such as “the depths I dove with Dove” and “When in Love.” The latter reads like a scolded schoolkid’s chalkboard confession, imparting new meaning and dimension with each repetition of “I am not a person when in love.” Readers absorb the speaker’s sloughing of their own nature but also, in greater context, assent to the speaker’s surrender, to their implicit identification as a creature of desire.
Lodging in the bottom third of nine consecutive pages, the former poem is Manzolillo’s version of an epic. The poet opens with discussion of consent and bodies played like instruments, then quietly pivots into a state somewhere between loneliness and attachment (“there’s so much left unsaid when we lie in bed”).
Fear of abandonment meets sexual frolicking here; full submission to another’s touch dances with a desire for definition. All the way, Manzolillo sets the emotional scene with small touches that shiver the body of the poem. Describing a bed-and-breakfast encounter, she writes with sexuality and sacredness:
“who’s to say we couldn’t live here for a few days or weeks? / sun rays on the covers, make a wedding dress out of butters we steal from the kitchen / in our socks freshly steamed for the first time, that night / you hold my hand like you are saying a prayer, then dance on air through the cosmic dust light”
By the time I Want to Take You Everywhere reaches its coda, each successful—or aborted—exchange of devotion attaches to the reader. Like Manzolillo’s speakers, we know pleasure, pain and the pleasure of pain; memorize moments, assigning them facial features and articles of clothing; drain satisfaction and dissatisfaction down to their dregs and come up for air, breathing out I deserve / a love please could someone, anyone / come back. We have been like children and become consenting adults and, in all this, felt the acute presence of desire and lost desire.
This is the strange, cutting magic of Manzolillo’s poems: like her speakers, we are lost to a line or a moment, found inside our accumulated need. I Want to Take You Everywhere forms a rich debut statement and the promise of other darkly sexy poems, gestures toward and from devotion.
Aarik Danielsen is the arts and culture editor at the Columbia Daily Tribune in Columbia, Missouri. His essays, poems and journalism have been published at Image Journal, Plough, Split Lip, HAD, Rain Taxi, Tinderbox Poetry Journal and more. Find more of his work at https://aarikdanielsen.com/