Evelyn Berry’s Grief Slut
In Evelyn Berry’s Grief Slut, Hauntology of Self claims its rightful place as avenue for exploration in gender politics and spirituality, taking a scope of sex and bodies that is gracious in its language, fevered by a modern-made-old religiosity, yet systematic in its approaches to chronological narrative despite the text’s compulsive, lyrically fitful reboots and rebirths:
“we show each other magic tricks / we learned from the internet. / we swipe the apps, hypnotized pixeldumb…”
Recounting, recollection, the re-remembrance of childhood flattened by abiding misplacement, shined by the spit and spirit of a youth gone stagnant and sideways, Berry reenacts and rebels against the parameters of language to spellbind the reader with lines reading like lightning bolts to the gut:
“home is what we swallow”,
“he learns to knot his brainstem”,
“holyspirit-hamstrung”.
Berry’s text is measured by Easter Eggs of the jubilant, Vanitas variety: glitter, koi fish, mouths, rotting fruit, and gin, offering a rare glimpse into the psyche of the Trans mind and body/soul. The esoteric vision, the myth-hood of Self and self-making is placed at the center of this collection—serves as offering—like some small statue of a favorite patron saint. Sex as possession, the carcass made magic by the censorious droplets of sweat on the body, perceived—bidding desire, a replacement of what secular society’s been taught about the spiritual contracts of sexual acts. Self as religious artifact, kept on the cradle of alter: alteration of selfhood, the body, the sharp bend of genre and gender that Berry so fervently scrutinizes with symbol, psychic scalpel, and fishing pole.
“I hold my ear to marble & listen / for the living person on the other side. / how do I enter a person, a portal?”
Boyhood is romanticized with specificity of atmosphere and such care to setting that a breathing portraiture forms below the reader’s rosy face, a sense and smell of the place arrives beckoned on cue by lines like:
“grief is a clown car we can all fit inside.”
Home is cut adrift like an alien limb shot through by white, hot light, in lines like:
“…to discover home, first, / one must study / the contours of loss.”
Berry meticulously arranges her first gender’s death on the page like precious artifacts, posing it in likeness to the constant crucifix, rouging its lips and cheeks with absented grief, the sort one has, out of necessity, to make minor moons of.
“i lick each star. / hold them in my cheeks / like luminescent jawbreakers. / i cannot see heaven from here, / but i can see your house.”
She accomplishes this through relic: makes and meets and metes out to memory with gloved hand a sparse, glittering sharpness that hangs the moon up better for us to glimpse the ghost of the other by:
“[m]emory is a museum with a leaky cealing, / an archive slowly filling with water. / the artifacts become damp & undistinguishable.”