Review of "I'm Not Trying to Hide My Hungers From This World" by Kendra DeColo

A review of “I Am Not Trying to Hide My Hungers From The World” by Kendra DeColo

Reviewed by Julia Smith Kendra DeColo’s third poetry collection, I Am Not Trying to Hide My Hungers From The World, unapologetically declares the poet’s desires. Considering DeColo’s history with frank expression, and its punishment—her second collection about bisexuality, misogyny and pornography, My Dinner With Ron Jeremy (Third Man Books, 2016), was suddenly dropped by its Nashville publisher for a conflict of values—this plainspoken desire is of particular note. In a 2016 VIDA article, “Report From The field: Encounters With Misogynists or, The Lap Dances I Never Received” Decolo considers the experience and concludes that striving for desire, even a lap dance in a strip bar, is “. . . integral to my identity that I both keep trying and that most importantly, my desire is never gratified. In this way, I recognize that resistance is inevitable and also necessary to the work. It forces us to name what we want and to create it for ourselves.”

I Am Not Hiding My Hungers From The World announces that DeColo, now 38-years-old, is no longer a rookie: she wrangles life from her body, chooses her political battles, and aligns with allies, both artistic and iconic.

DeColo credits those who’s legacies she follows in the Notes section at the back of the book: Aracelis Girmay (Editor-atLarge for Blessing the Boats Selections at BOA), Rachel McKibbens,

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Maggie Smith, Terrance Hayes, and Yousef Komunyakaa who selected her first poetry collection, Thieves in the Afterlife (Saturnalia Books, 2014), for the 2013 Saturnalia Books Poetry Prize. This careful acknowledgment is to avoid the 2018 Ailey O’Toole plagiarism scandal in which O’Toole stole McKibbens’s language from her blud collection resulting in O’Toole losing her Pushcart nomination and publishing contract. DeColo is announcing her desire to orbit in a vast and varied poetry lineage with respect.

Throughout DeColo’s first poem “I Pump Milk Like A Boss,” she sprinkles McKibbens’ unmistakable words: “teeth,” “sink,” “tattoo,” “god,” and references to the topography of a female body. This poem is also in conversation with Smith’s ode to the power of motherhood, “Invincible.” While Smith writes, “The babies made me invincible” and “I was divine, hovering inches above the floor / in a cloud sweet as milk,” DeColo writes “I pump milk with my bare hands / into a bar’s bathroom sink” and grittily repeats “I pump” like a manifesto: “. . . I pump as if my milk is propaganda,” “I pump like I’m writing my name in blood,” and “I pump like I have a tattoo on my pudenda.” It is hard to say something new about motherhood but braiding McKibben’s plagarized words with Smith’s poem and putting DeColo’s own bisexual spin on it, might fit the bill. What is refreshing and curious is her husband. In “I Don’t Like to Have Sex While I’m on My Period” she writes: my husband is a real man isn’t afraid to smell the shed lining muffle his face in a spasm of cells wasn’t afraid to watch our daughter emerge and split me open

JULIA SMITH

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The collection expands to themes beyond motherhood to include identity, trauma and its legacy in rape culture, and power claimed and reclaimed. Separated into four sections, themes repeat without chronological order. Poetic forms and musical allusions, ranging from Lana Del Rey to Paganini, change like the shuffle play feature on a music app. I search for order in the sections only to wonder if DeColo’s strategy is to defy categorization of gender roles and to emphasize the illogical repetition of issues like rape culture across generations. Subjects repeating over time indicates their persistence—while the pregnant body morphs quickly through stages, the raped body passes trauma over generations through DNA. She writes that the free verse poem “I Want to Burn the Frat House of America to the Ground” could also be titled “my mother tells me her #MeToo stories”: by which I mean my hands became so clean I couldn’t feel my child as she slept in my arms by which I mean my mother held me and she didn’t I mean my mother’s body was a house burning and I’ve been burning ever since

Again, her burning body is an illusion to Smith’s “Invincible”: When I wore the babies and under The babies the blue robe of my suffering, I was lit from within, I burned myself For fuel,

Feeling the weighty urgency of bringing a daughter into the world, DeColo raises her fists at the right target— Brett Kavanaugh. “On the Cusp of 36 I Remember the Only Republican at My College Gave Me Head and I Didn’t Come”

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is a poem that honors Katherine Blasey Ford’s testimony at Kavanaugh’s Supreme Court nomination hearing. The title reflects the slowness of political change over decades, considering that the testimony occurs 36 years after Anita Hill’s testimony against Clarence Thomas. Also, DeColo makes the associations that she is 36 years old, and so the poem’s form is a mock resolution of 36 points. While Blasey Ford was a high school student raped by Kavanaugh without penetration, DeColo reimagines the encounter as a woman at a party being seduced, a potential rape victim. The couplet form encases the irony of the woman’s uncertainty: 21. maybe I’d had enough pleasure that day and wanted only 22. to be close to a body to have someone hold me down 23. to be hummed toward uncertainty like a half-made resolution

At line 24., the couplets become single lines signaling a shift in narrative that ends with the lines: 34. my whole self lovely and stained 35. shimmering with fluids 36. entirely my own

What I think DeColo is doing here is rewriting the script as a college-age woman who is pleasured without penetration and reclaims power with choice. The effect of the single lines is to have the woman acting with the clarity of her own agency.

Again, DeColo defies the categorization of desire this time within the blurred edges of rape culture.

JULIA SMITH

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Throughout all the sections, DeColo charts the passage of time across the topography of her body and as it matures so does her poetic voice. In her plainspoken punk voice she charts the journey: “Pompeii tits Burning Man tits / just graduated and touring Europe . . . happily married and paying taxes / on time tits sometimes unwashed.” Still resisting in “I Write Poems About Motherhood” she takes the birth experience out of the closet and exposes vaginal tearing yet her voice is more complex.

She uses the universal metaphor of birth to describe the messy and divine act of creating art: . . . squatted and squeezed A rocky planet out from the blue horizon Like a ship bifurcating a labial sky. But my asshole, To whom I must now give credit where credit is due, Taught me how to anchor to the earth, locate the hot center

As she’s crookedly stitched up, DeColo writes “. . . I wished // to stay open a little longer, / unhinged and full of silences” and claims she “would give birth a million times” if she could feel “one hollowed self opened wide.”

Returning to the conversation in the first poem, DeColo writes of her maturing body in “I Pump Milk Like A Boss”: “and I know there is a price we pay for loneliness / and a price we pay to forget it and I dedicate my libido // to my younger self and this is how I want to live, milk-stained, a little bit emptied, / a little bit in love with the abundance of my body”.

DeColo experienced the empowerment of motherhood that Smith writes about in “Invincible”: “I was essential. I was too needed / in the world. That feeling was a spell /that is only now beginning to break.”

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DeColo is still in the spell as evidenced by her desire to dedicate her libido to her younger self. Yet, she ends the collection with a premonition that it will break. In her second to last poem, “I Am Not Trying to Hide My Hungers from the World Anymore,” she walks to the Rite Aid and intuits: that a part of my life was ending and isn’t it good to know when life is about to swallow you whole take you in its arms and say “Live, bitch, live”

There is power and anxiety in this anthem. While “Invincible” ends with a broken spell, DeColo ends with a battle cry. Her many desires burn, both libidinal and political, and her frank voice is finding more artistic expression. There is a lot of creative experimentation with boundaries by DeColo in “I Am Not Trying to Hide My Hungers from the World.” She forecasts future conversations with poets of stature who will bring a more layered conversation to her poems. I look forward to how she will pair poets with own voice and resistance as it ages and ripens.