by Jan Beatty
University of Pittsburgh Press 2008
Reviewed by Michael Rymer

 The Real Cameron Poe

In one poem in her new book, Jan Beatty imagines taking a “vacation” from her own body: “Just give me a wife/ beater & an AK-47 & I’ll be Nic Cage/ bustin up Con-Air, fuckin A,” she writes. Beatty doesn’t attempt to develop this scene. She writes in the next lines of a “theoryhead” she knew in graduate school and a friend named Aaron who chants, “panties, panties, panties” when he’s “irritated.” Yet we linger there with her – or her and Nicholas Cage.

The Nicholas Cage character in “Con Air” is not a bad cinematic analogue for Beatty’s poetic persona, especially as it’s expressed in the many brash sexual poems in this collection. (A frat boy dressed as, or quoting from, that character would also work, as would a muscle-bound hip-hop artist doing the same.) Take these lines from the taunting poem, “Skinning It”:

I was fucking every man who crossed my path,
random fucking him or him, no difference &
I couldn’t tell the one about the other – but

Nicholas Cage wouldn’t say this, but Sharon Stone might. The poem concludes with the narrator’s crude retort to anyone who would criticize her desires:

When’s the last time you skinned it hard?
I’d say quiet, polite = not quite
big enough.

Is this poetry, or billboard copy from a debased future?

There is nothing wrong with simple, bluff language – language that verges on grunts – but Beatty hasn’t found a way to use it to capture the physical urgency she seeks to describe. Here is a passage from “Prison Sex,” a prose poem that describes a woman’s perspective on her midday sexual encounter with a man who was just released from prison, after serving an eleven-year sentence for murder: “I’m on my stomach in tees-shirt for pajamas & we’re rolling/slapping/scratching/your hands on my wrists loud your o deep o like the fucking home-run fuck like your fucking-a-teenager-first-time fuck & no time for happy to be out?” “Rolling” and “Slapping” and “Scratching” are beautiful words, but they don’t in themselves evoke a scene.

An even more violent prose poem, “Shooter,” an extended fantasy of killing one’s enemies that begins, “I shoot the man who followed my 11-yr-old body on Smithfield St” and ends, “I shoot all the men I’ve left off the list, so I don’t have to worry my pretty little head about it.” None of the lines in the middle sound much different than these. This poem is more boring than any poem about killing people ever deserves to be.

Red Sugar does contain milder work -  a poem about the 1917 Speculator Mine Disaster, a poem about caring for an elderly parent, two poems about electric guitars. The problem is that the loud, foul-mouthed poems overwhelm everything else. Reading “Procession,” a tender poem about burying a small wren the narrator finds dead under her desk, after slogging through poems such as “Skinning It,” “Prison Sex” and “Shooter” is like being stroked on a cheek that’s still smarting from a slap. The book opens with “I Saw One of Blake’s Angels,” which describes a peep-show performer, “her legs spread wide to pink” and “pinching her nipples,” as seen through “cum-smeared plexiglass.” In this book there is something smeared on the glass dividing reader and poet, too.

Beatty has a capacity for wistfulness. In “In Helena,” a green-eyed “bag boy at Albertson’s,” noticing the narrator’s “shaved blond head,” asks her, “You like Eminem?” She watches as he “punched / the air from the bag’s body,” but says “See ya later!” after he announces, “I get off at 9pm.” The poem ends with these lines:

              & he popped
   up beside me

   so I could hear him breathe:
   you don’t know what you’re missing

  I kept walking,
  yeah I do, and it’s good.

She has a sense of humor, too. In “The Phenomenology of Sex,” the narrator recalls for a friend the lines she used to break up with a professor of phenomology:

I tell her how, in Pittsburgh, he tried
to teach me how to drive my own car.
How I said to him: if this car crashed in a forest,
     you couldn’t hear it, but I would

In these poems about erotic disappointment, which are both in the book’s third section, Beatty seems more herself.

“The Day I Stripped,” the best poem in Red Sugar (it’s also in the third section) begins with a description of a gynecologist who stuck his “wormy” tongue in the narrator’s throat, but moves to Joey Carbone’s Cocktail Lounge, a strip club where the narrator stops on her way home to “pee” and is asked “You the new dancer?” In these lines that fall between that question and the narrator’s response, we understand her simultaneous feelings of pleasure and disgust:

& for a second I was that wild & flexible &
could she see the stripper in me? The doctor’s squirmy tongue
          was still
licking.

The poem concludes with the narrator’s recollection of the time she passed Joey Carbone’s Cocktail Lounge “years later,” when:

workers were stripping the paint from the joint’s marquee – &
          quit one day after half
the name & for 24 magnificent hours, the building existed as
          “Joey Carbone’s Cock”
& not cocktail lounge & it was withered, flaky, but big –
for the first time, as big as he said it was

This is a penis joke, but it’s not a bad one, and it reaches for something else.

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