Although I don’t normally review free verse, I agreed to do a little review of Breona Dorch’s poems because she offers it as erotic poetry. However, having read her poems (and unlike the other erotic collections I’ve reviewed) her own poetry doesn’t strike me as principally erotic. In fact, the work in its entirety, which isn’t long, is unlike anything I’ve read before. Dorch, still quite young (and striving like any young author to get her voice out there) offers us a poem along with the narrator’s own interpretation of the poem. That’s a bit like poets who footnote and annotate their own poems. I’ve come across this before. In short, the work must be taken in its entirety. That is, Dorch’s work isn’t just a poem, but also an explication of a poem. The poem doesn’t stand on its own but is part of the work’s entirety. Do we take the narrator’s explication as authoritative? Or is it a part of the fiction? I lean toward the latter. Are the poet and interpreter the same? My impression is that Dorch means for us to treat them the same, although this may be a missed opportunity (on her part).
First for the title. It’s for the reader to decide how they want to interpret “Pimp”, but the street meaning of pimp isn’t necessarily a man who controls a brothel. For example, the Urban Dictionary states that pimp “Also refers to a ladies man with immaculate skills in the art of pulling women with the end result of having sex. Generally is someone who oozes with confidence, has a good sense of style and appearance, and most importantly has a way of using his words to initiate sexual relations with a female.”
Although the subtitle is “A Book of Love”, the narrator (because we can’t always assume the narrator is the same as the author) asks at the outset, “Will we let what we love continue to hurt us or will we find the strength to break free?” This question, unfortunately a bit like an elevator pitch, is the final sentence in a small paragraph called the “Introduction”. Here the narrator tells us that love can elevate those we love, but can also become destructively addictive. The Introduction, as I read it, introduces a narrator whose notion of love is somewhat questionable. Is she really in love, or is her attraction a bit more shallow that that. After all, she refers to her lover as her Pimp, which argues that she’s more attracted to the bling than the boy, to reputation and appearance instead of the content of his character.
The Introduction is followed by another short paragraph called “Description”. Here, the narrator speaks of herself in the third person. Why? Is she enforcing the idea that this is all a fiction? The short paragraph ends with another rhetorical question: “Can she juggle both college and her pimp or will she fully succumb to the allure.” This is essentially the same question already asked in the Introduction. The reader feels the narrator baiting them with questions which, ideally, should be asked by the reader and not the author.
Now we get to the heart of the work. They are four short free verse poems, each followed by a passage entitled, didactically, “Poem Interpretation”. I’m reading a PDF. I don’t know if it’s representative of the printed work, but there’s no line break between “Poem Interpretation” and what followed. One wishes it were bolded, at minimum. Not only does the narrator interpret what she’s just written, but she repeats the parts of the poem in whole. So, for example, the first four lines of the poem will be restated as follows:
Poem Interpretation
I just want to pick your brain
I want to see your heart
What makes it beat?
And what can I do to make one of those things me?
My ex-pimp would always complain to me that he had a strong bond with his family, that he was very caring and considerate towards them and would go out of his way for them but they wouldn’t return the favor. Meanwhile he didn’t even acknowledge me as a person. I would wonder what made him want to form such strong bonds with them and what could I do to be someone he wants to form a strong bond with.
Unfortunately, the PDF isn’t as clean as I’ve made it. The recapitulation of the first four lines mislineates how they were initially presented and there’s no separation between the quoted lines and the explication.
Since my opinion has been asked, my preference would be to have the poem do the work. The interpretation adds more detail, but one isn’t sure which narrative takes precedence? Ideally, each would be equal, but my feeling is that the poem takes a back seat. I can’t see a reason why the “interpretation ” couldn’t have become part of the poem.
There are a number of typos. She writes, for example, that “I don’t know how I made it through life if I’ve been this week[sic] from the start.” There are typos in my own work, so I’m not going to get on my high horse about it, but between the typos and the poor layout (of the PDF at least), one wishes her poem had also gotten a little more love.
The overall impression one has is of an author who hasn’t yet developed a trust in their own ability to communicate ideas without stating and overstating them. For example, she writes:
“I was orgasming consistently, I was golden showering, I was experiencing things with my body (stemming from sexual pleasure) that confused me so much I had to hook up what was happening to me online. I started to wonder if this was what those sexual liberation and body positivity movements I had been hearing about was[sic] promoting”
The narrator is “orgasming consistently” but still feels the need to clarify that she’s writing about “sexual pleasure”.
All in all, the author’s experience is both compelling and puzzling, and not an unusual dynamic between women and the abusive men they love (interpret abusive how you will). Clearly, it remains compelling to the author, who categorizes her book as erotic, while also troubling. Her humiliation is alchemized by her youth and sexual desire into something both psychologically painful and physically pleasurable—transformatively so. When the one becomes associated with the other; that’s the stuff of addiction. Not everyone would respond as she has, but the sexual imagination is one more thing that makes human beings unique and wonderful. I’m sure there would be many readers (women but also men) who would recognize themselves and their own contradictory desires in Dorch’s story—who could easily (perhaps wishfully) imagine themselves as the pimp or the narrator.
What’s my literary impression? The author mixes some rhyme in her free verse, imparting a hint of rhythm:
But you just kept smiling and kept the conversation light
And when you hit it—you hit it right…
But other than that, the lineated verse is substantially the same as the prose of the “Intepretations”. The final poem, in my PDF, dispenses with lineation altogether. Is it poetry at that point? To me? Not really. By modern standards? Sure. Call it a prose poem; but then why not call all of it a prose poem?
I do think the author has had an experience that is compelling, and, to a degree, a not uncommon one; but (setting aside typos and layout) the chapbook feels like the work of a very young author whose art falls short of her ambition. There is much too much telling and far too little showing.
Thinking about my college life, and other aspects of my life that were falling apart made me desire to only indulge in him and the feelings he gave me, to escape endlessly.
This is a succinct, comprehensible and sympathetic explanation of what happened to her. But this belongs in a work’s outline, not in the work itself. Her “poem” feels more like thoughts on a planned short story or novel than a poem. “Tell it slant” said Emily Dickinson. Poems, in part, evolved from riddles. They don’t like to be interrogated. Poems are cagey. They know that what the reader infers is more memorable than anything told outright. The author hasn’t yet sorted out where her power as a writer resides, and it’s not in what she explains, but in what she lived. If her ambition is to be a writer, she will have to learn how writing can allow a reader to live her experience, and not just read about it.
- Breona Dorch’s Note to the Review: “The book is actually based on my real-life experience and is meant to be read as a nonfiction, autobiographical work. I’ll be updating the Amazon listing to better reflect that and avoid any confusion around the narration.“
- The book may be obtained from Amazon here.
