In every poem of Landscape with Sex and Violence (YesYes Books, 2017), Lynn Melnick just about eats the mic, pressing it against her lips as she sings so as to boost the bass and rasp of each lyric. The book’s scene is LA punk and grunge, beginning with the epigraph drawn from Hole’s “Asking for It,” and spilling into alleyways in which “it’s the ’80s / and we’re all wearing a whole lot of electric pink,” the poet “lit by Hollywood in a decalescent dress.” As advertised, sex and violence are the order of the day. The book spins out its “choke of triggers,” laying down riff upon riff of blood, bruise, splatter and harm, as the poet takes us through the boulevards and backstreets of her California past. “Consider this canvas of central valley splendor / dull as the usual set of sucker punches—his distinctive // suggestion for a rainy day,” begins the title poem; “I couldn’t splay my sentences // damp into dark. I tried to detonate my body / differently than he did.” In diction and delivery, Melnick stakes a claim to a lineage of powerhouse women rockers: as much Patti Smith and Exene Cervenka as Courtney Love.
In the book’s first pages Melnick heads off the charge of confessionalism: “I am going to confess this once // and then I am going to confess it again // in different ways I won’t admit to but never mind”; and, later, “I’ve gotten to this point where I am just going to tell everyone // everything / that’s ever been done to my face.” Even the upgraded critical discourse of “postconfessionalism” is insufficient to Melnick’s Landscape. Yes, Melnick tells all with a frankness that recalls the tradition: “I left for a spell, I left for // a spell and was cuffed and gagged / and let go. I’ve never told anyone that.” A few lines later she adds: “So I’ll share // with you my most recent fat lip, how / the new red I bought covers it // pretty good.” But, having made her reader squirm under the pressure of being named her sole confessor (a twisted version of the intimacy effect of a platinum hit that seems to speak to each of us alone), Melnick pins us in a tighter place: “How it hurts when you / kiss me and I don’t dare look // up—there’s no end to this—chemtrails / the world destroying itself.” The poem ends with this abrupt pan upward, to the ominous skywriting that the poet cannot let herself look at and yet is able to describe, leaving the reader holding the smoking gun of unwanted complicity.
Having read generations of forthright, personal poetry, we are used to seeing poets in positions and scenarios we cannot easily unsee (e.g. the widely circulated photo of Love’s stripped-naked body forcibly groped and assaulted by a mob of fans, the image that moved the singer to write “Asking for It”). We are used to deflecting a poem’s second-person address, certain that Plath’s line, “the brute / Brute heart of a brute like you,” refers not to us personally, but to that “Daddy” over there. Faced with brutal revelation, we as readers seek the familiar, if awkward, third point from which we may overhear, without entering into, the poem’s proper dyad. However keenly I feel for Sexton’s young daughter, having been made privy to her mother’s regrets, I am not that child. This distinction is what allows us to be moved by the poet’s candor, and by the imagined effects of that confession upon the one who should be hearing it.
What’s shocking about Melnick’s book, and what takes it out of the space of the conventionally confessional, is its positioning of the reader as the poet’s male assailant. She taunts us: “I think you should grip your dick through your jeans and ask me // if I can handle it because you know I can, right?” And again: “screw me sideways right here on the sidewalk / like you said you might like to screw me,” and “whistle so loud at my fat ass / that I jump like a stray rodent.” Asking, “Why am I walking away from you? Why am I here on the sidewalk?” she answers, simply, devastatingly, “I’m yours.” Strains of Whitman’s great poem “Whoever You Are Holding Me Now in Hand” are almost audible: “Here to put your lips upon mine I permit you, /…Or if you will, thrusting me beneath your clothing, / Where I may feel the throbs of your heart or rest upon your hip.” Take me, says Whitman to his reader, I’m yours. But the poisonous gas of rape culture, catalyzed by the accumulating fragments of Melnick’s history as victim of assault and rape (“holding all my blood in vials on my lap”), makes violence, not seduction, the key term and transforms the compact between writer and reader accordingly. When the reader is made bystander to scenes such as the one wherein a man ties the poet to a fencepost, or another in which a man “shoves [her] face / into the flatbed then punts [her] / when he’s filled [her],” the reader’s choices are severely narrowed. Organizations such as RAINN (Rape, Abuse & Incest National Network) tell us that bystanders may intervene to change outcomes, but there is no “stepping in” for the reader; the violence to which we are made witness in this book is always already after the fact. In such a context, reading becomes an act of muted listening, building in the reader a rising sense of powerlessness to do anything other than stand by. We may not have asked for it, and yet we must take it.
At the end of the book, the poet returns to the idea of confession, simultaneously fulfilling and refusing the promise she herself had broached:
and, while you are probably waiting for confession
because you think that’s what I’ve been doing here all along
this is not a story of how my body was first held down
before I’d even hit double digits
on a dingy carpet whose fibers are still
on my tongue, whose burn to my cheek I didn’t even notice
amid the more traumatic injuries
The cumulative experience harrows and dizzies. I received the book during the first days of the #MeToo Movement, in the wake of Harvey Weinstein’s exposure as Hollywood’s most aggressive sexual predator (as of October 30th, sixty women had stepped forward to share their stories of assault and rape). Numbed by thousands of tweets and testimonials, I approached the book warily. Melnick’s poems subsumed the media stream and swept me to higher ground. In their temporal reach—back to the poet’s youth (“I was smut. / The rest was burnished”), and forward to “the story of how I got to live”—the poems accumulated to let me see behind the gropers and rapists, into the very system that grooms and protects them at all levels of our society. Melnick’s achievement is the crafting of a clarion voice that keeps me reading what I both want and desperately do not want to read, cutting through every scene with language that works by turns as razor wire and lifeline.
Another, unlikely epigraph from Jared Farmer’s Trees in Paradise: A California History shares the page with Courtney Love’s lyric: “…there is no such thing as an innocent landscape.” Farmer tells the decidedly nonparadisial history of the Golden State through an account of the importation, exploitation, and mismanagement of its four most identifiable trees: redwoods, eucalyptus, citruses, and palms. In an interview, Melnick has said that Farmer’s book inspired her own project: to represent her own body and personal history as intertwined with “this dangerous, messed-up, haphazard landscape,” which encompasses both her home state of the 80s and 90s, and the US of Trump et alia. The landscapes that emerge from Melnick’s poems are not mere metaphors. Concrete, pavement, “(tarmac, blacktop, lonesome),” “the neon of a floozy motel,” and the “post-industrial particulate” of “the spiky city” come to feel every bit as natural—that is, as necessary—as the floral species of those southwestern biomes that ground these poems: greasewood, cranesbill, “Doomful orange garden!” Palms appear in the book’s final, fragile oasis: “(I almost forgot to tell you) // I lived // in a desert / where palms are signposts of water, not the want of it.” In counterpoint to the book’s primary story of violence and survival threads the motif of California’s tenuous resilience.
The most important implications of Melnick’s book follow from the poet’s ability to sensitize us to the longue durée of our toxic moment. As victims, allies, assailants, and bystanders, we are with this landscape—not simply in it or on it—and each of us has a hand in its destruction and its rebuilding. “I’ve been trying to plant a palm in every garden / I slink through,” Melnick writes. In her singular, sly way, Melnick names and tends to her own pain and anger so as to bring us as readers into the slow poem-by-poem regeneration of our common culture. Holding us to the act of witnessing her subversive repair—as we hold her book now in hand—Melnick makes us party to her radical intervention.
February 2018
This review was published in Issue 61:2.