Reviewed by Liv Mammone
When I was nineteen and beginning my academic study of poetry, my teacher, Phillis Levin, had us study Terrance Hayes’ collection Wind in a Box. Reading Hayes was the first time that I understood that a book of poems often is not merely a series of “the good ones” that a poet has written over a given period of time. A book of poetry could be, in the only way I had to describe it at the time, a book. It can be an object that details an author’s thought process over time.
torrin a. greathouse’s new collection, DEED, is a series of wonderful, layered, challenging, thought provoking poems on the individual level. However it is also a treatise on the origins of the words we use. Every word has a history and so every poem of greathouse’s becomes an excavation into layers upon layers of meaning. This should have been more obvious to me as a poet, as this is the medium we all work in. But I have not yet found greathouse’s equal in the ability to make words both their tools and their fodder for inspiration. Language is like clay to greathouse but it is also ore. She uses her passion for linguistics alongside her tremendous talent for seeing the connective tissue between images to ask, how can marginalized people cloak and love themselves inside a language invented by those that don’t care about them? “There is no known root for how the word cum/came to mean what it does,” greathouse begins the collection. Here, they are neatly summarizing some of what these poems are concerned with: joy, sensuality, and language. There is such clarity of motif and thematic thread as to dazzle. This is achieved largely through a deft, modern love of both traditional and newly invented forms and, in the free verse poems, a masterful understanding of how structure can act as propulsive agent.
This is a bar greathouse has only raised for themself since the already acrobatic formal play displayed in Wound from the Mouth of a Wound. There are sonnets, sestinas, pantoums, elegy for craigslist personals, a double golden shovel which braids itself into a sonnet, and aubades which are also sonnets (one of which is also an ekphrasis of a photograph.) greathouse’s own invention, the burning haibun, which heralded them earlier in their career as a formalist of note, makes several appearances. These feats of dexterity are framed by long poems that ostensibly deal with the origins of words but which greathouse uses to weave together everything that is important to them thematically. For example, the poem “On Possession” explores the linguistic connection between the root of the word epilepsy and the word for latch. So greathouse draws connections between disability and desire. In rendering her body during a seizure, she asks, “what happens to a poet in the moments where language is taken from them? When do we give up our body as a gift (as in sex) or to an outside force? In another piece, the roots of the word punk open up a queer past before that label existed in all its wonderful porousness” (39).
Maybe I’m trying to say
this: Every word is a woundthat opens back onto history.
Punk: once worthless. Once,
rotten wood to stoke a flame.Now, the flame itself. Before queer
was a cigarette burned to my tongue,the word punk was a rainbow flag
dyed black with ash. […]
As if the craftsmanship and formal dexterity were not enough, these poems take the book from being a collection of poems to an anchored work of research and study. It is impossible not to see the labor that went into these poems as a unit with a thesis as well as individual, faceted jewels. Greathouse allows the complexity of her life and identity as much space on the page will allow. She owns her pages. She allows her ideas to sprawl, grow, bloom. She gifts herself space our current world does not want them to occupy. This book is a profound act of self love. And that is a learning experience for me as a queer, nonbinary, disabled, sick reader. They never shy away from the complexity of their own life but their language is so sharp that the poems illuminate, rather than obfuscate, what they are striving to understand. These are not poems that are finished—maybe not ever. (“This is not a poem; it’s a cut thread” greathouse writes, letting us know how purposeful she is in this.) But they are so crystalline that I will continue to read and gain sustenance from their evolving ideas for as long as greathouse chooses to write. It’s a wonderment to bear witness to a writer I only know will grow more powerful. Let alone to call them a friend.
Yet, the beauty and the multilayeredness of the poems somehow never make them take themselves so seriously that the air can’t be let out a little. This, too, is part of the joy. greathouse wants to guide readers through their delight in language, even if the experiences they grapple with are challenging. I always know I will be well fed on their words and see worlds that I have not seen but that have a place for me. For example, I guffawed at the opening of: “I was Looking for Dick and All I Got was this Lousy Poem.” “A man/asks me if I’m a sissy & I say/“Yeah,” thinking he means/like Sisyphus, right?” (23) There seems to be more permission greathouse has given herself in this book not just to push but to play. Even a poem about going through airport security in a trans body dances on the boundary between detailing danger and pointing to absurdity. “In one pocket I carry a list of all the places I am prohibited—/bathrooms & airplanes, churches & young adult literature” (29). “Gait Training” a poem that felt like a hand unfurling and reaching out in its crip sexiness, opens with: “I crack a joke to my physical therapist/that I’ve forgotten how to use my knees, except/for lust.” (32) I absolutely laughed aloud and placed myself inside the scene as someone who has done gait training. This moves so effortlessly into what might be another chuckle at the title of the next poem, “In Praise of the Rim Job.” But the poem relies on such a profound mixture of sexuality and sincerity that I don’t often see (33).
A confession: Even as the heavens glimmered
apocalyptic, my first thought was of a lover, thighs
horizoned across a mattress. Body tongued as if
it were the eucharist. Lips pressed to this fleshy crown
that canonizes the saint of my tongue. Ring of fire, tiny
halo, slot in the confessional door.
I could not help but love my own body under the influence of all greathouse makes theirs capable of. Crip, trans sex is revolutionary. I feel the closeness between revolution and revelation at the back of my throat. greathouse reveals the sweaty, beautiful truth. This love was the beating heart of the book as I held it in my hands. The word that I couldn’t stop thinking of is “scope.” There are far too many examples of her linguistic genius for this review to not simply become a list of quotations. But more than that, it is a book specifically for disabled, trans people. In one poem, she poses the question, “‘How do you survive the body that you’ve been given?’” This has been the most distilled question, certainly, of my life. I had to read this book in parts. I would read until I was breathless. I was so grateful to feel included in the audience to which she sings with such intent of purpose. She’s someone I feel so lucky to know well enough to be able to create a Pandora station of bands while I read this book. I know her well enough that I can hear how their speaking voice would give space to each word in my mind. It’s a tremendous privilege to feel held and loved as an audience member and contemporary by some of the greatest poems I have read in recent memory. It is such a feeling of hope. There are ways to live and live and live. With destruction nipping at our heels so close it’s a friendly stray, we live.
Title: DEED
Author: torrin a. greathouse
Publisher: Wesleyan University Press
Date: 2024
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About the Reviewer
Liv Mammone (she/her) is an editor and poet from Long Island. Her poetry has appeared with Button Poetry, The Poetry Foundation, The Medical Journal of Australia, and in many places. In 2017, she competed for Union Square Slam as the first disabled woman to be on a New York national poetry slam team. She was also a finalist in the Capturing Fire National Poetry Slam in 2017. A Brooklyn Poets Fellow and Zoeglossia fellow, she is currently an editor at Game Over Books. In 2022, hers was one of the top ten most read poems at Split This Rock’s poetry database, The Quarry. Her first collection is forthcoming in 2025. Her work can be found on livmammonepoems.com