Reviewed by Cynie Cory
I Want to Take You Everywhere
by Cassandra Manzolillo
BlazeVox
July 2024, Paperback, 91 pages, ISBN-13: 978-1609644536
Cassandra Mannzolillo’s debut collection of poems (themselves bodies), I Want to Take You Everywhere, makes public meaning-making: the search for identity, and belonging, in fits and starts, and missteps; in forms that splash and shrink; in both flimsy and semi-automatic voice and style that mitigate becoming through the rush and fury of starts and stops to the sequencing of poems that fold and unfold, directing the reader, and the poet herself, to ways the body and the body of the poems –in this vaster form– creates further meaning: The cost of this poet’s neo-confessional, therapeutic process, invents the replay of the trauma memory, which is often established in antiseptic diction, lacking tension, vitality and visceral imagery resulting in poetry on the verge of collapse. The reader must be patient. The process is messy. The poet’s saying – she cleverly posits a listener, one of whom is the reader, as in therapy – is tasked with excavating and untangling experience and memory, which are located in domains of time incongruent with events that “cannot happen.” Here meaning-making is hyper-challenged by the speaker’s cognition. The rhythmic unearthing of the body creates trust in the process of identity. If the poet persists and is willing to handle the snakes in her psyche, she will no longer conflate love and comfort with sex. She will shed herself from her mother’s pathology. She will be transformed. The evidence is in the poem-making. The lines have integrity, they can stand alone. You can hear it in the unwavering confidence of her voice. She no longer questions herself. She is the authority of her body and her meaning-making. Her body, which is part of her identity, is achieved through the body of her work and is transferred to the reader’s body, where along with the speaker and the poet, we come to a clear understanding of the shape, no pun intended, of the poet’s journey.
We too make sense of bodily experience, (often before cognition begins). This complicates the author’s search for meaning, and wholeness, for a place in the world. We learn in the third poem, “Forbidden Fantasy Foreplay,” what the adult Manzolillo knows and what the child Manzolillo may intuit. The pathology or “crisis” is that the act of reaching out for her mother’s comfort results in the violation of the child’s body. What is at stake here is the child’s moral, ethical, and spiritual identity as she encounters the world. The poem establishes for the reader, the foundation of the themes of the book. It is highly significant, that the poet mistakes the pathology of the mother as her own, which creates themes of entanglement these poems wrangle with, fully charged with repeating the sexual trauma of the past, the poet conflates love with sexual power, which fundamentally culminates in the speaker’s experimental attempts to unlock meaning in a fully realized aesthetics of her body as it meets experience. The book is rooted in the speaker’s persistent craving to make sense of the emotional and physical blurring that is central to her codependency, and the hunger to understand and break the patterns that keep her from achieving wholeness.
The body is the origin of meaning, thought, and language.
The body is both an object and a subject. The body is relational. Its quadrants are relational to spaciality, and identity. It is responsible for modes of thought. The body in all its parts, in cognition and pre-cognition, is charged with meaning-making. It is meaning itself. Word made flesh and all that. Our bodies first define us when we are children. Our bodies help us understand our place in the world, they give us a sense of belonging and love. However ill-formed, the body contains its cognition, if you will. As children, sense when we are safe. The body is the boundary of the “I” and is charged with where it ends and the other begins. When this blurs, our identity is undermined. It is the beginning of disembodiment, fear, and the question of self.
The cover art of I Want to Take You Everywhere is brilliant and provocative. Some readers may be embarrassed by the spectacle-enmeshed desire. You cannot avert your eyes. To this reader, it says OPEN THIS BOOK! The image is of a man and woman wrapped in cellophane in a nude embrace. It is smothering. Claustrophobic. You cannot help but feel the sealing of the air. It is like a death mask but here a couple is sealed together for eternity – in love? desire? or need the lowest form of engagement. As the title suggests, I Want to Take You Everywhere is a collection of poems that reckon with the need to love, the imprisonment of love, and the act of negotiating the distance between the body and emotional needs in the relationship. This young poet, lays out her psychology, not unlike the confessional poets of the 1970s. The process of saying acts as a performative device whose action includes the reader as a participant, while the poet posits a second and primary listener, real or imagined, her therapist. This poet is a dog after the bone of her past trauma in often sensational self-reveal, aiming to find her identity by uprooting the shared pathology of her mother, the dominant presence in her childhood, the initial and primary cause of her trauma.
Love does not ask us to give up one’s life and self to another. I Want to Take You Everywhere will make you believe otherwise. It will reveal the human soul-sickness that overwhelms the body after trauma.
In America, we are prone to recognize the violence to our humanity that cheats our identity.
1.
Jorie Graham, Pulitzer winner and professor of writing for years at the Iowa Writer’s workshop, now Harvard, once lamented that in today’s poetry, the line isn’t earned, that there is nothing at stake.
What is at stake here? A voice without a body. Lines that indirectly name a thing or the thing is not named at all.
At first sight, the poems are solipsistic and narcissistic.
This reader experiences the poems early in the book as lazy, not poems at all but journal writing. They are without form. The poems spotlight media, freeze-frame childhood, questions of molestation, and parents who are incapable of questions of their own.
Above all, in these pages is a need for self-connection, a correction of the surface and depth of annihilation.
What is the repetition theme? Written in numbered sentences like lists. The movement is under investigation. A need to cry out, self-help, no help, need for help, a voice disembodied, pornography, innocence shattered, self-flop-self-love not happening. A girl feels beautiful if a man tells her she is.
These poems verge on marrying form and intent. The reader feels the breakage like ice across a lake –the sound is instantaneous, storms your body down flat and you wait for something to save you.
A man
A family
A witch
A leprosy
A beer
You do not trust because you know how it feels to fall.
++
2.
I question the tradition this poet writes against or from. There is nothing to hold the familiar disjointed phrases in place. The voice has no agency. The lines defy measurement and purpose. Tradition must make room for itself, “the past should be altered by the present as much as the present is directed by the past” squawks Eliot in his historically controversial essay, “Tradition and the Individual Talent.” He also says “self-sacrifice to this special awareness of the past, once this awareness is achieved, it will erase any trace of personality from the poetry because the poet has become the mere medium for expression.” We can see that Eliot has a point here, and if I apply it to the work of Manzillo in this case what is self-sacrificed is the individual who splays out her pathologies and anxieties, not so much ideas in things. She serves herself, does she not? It is artless, as though we are overhearing her therapy sessions and in time, the form and voice become joined with the poet’s understanding and acceptance of her past. Why should we care about yet another poetry that rages for identity, fails to communicate, to love and be loved, the trappings of the traumas that pattern her relationships through time?
The truth is that we know humans suffer and have suffered and will continue to suffer. Great prophetic visions of totalitarian regimes have helped shape our understanding of the human mind, freedom, and imprisonment, Doestoevky, Milton, Kafka, and Viktor Frankl for instance. I confess I have high expectations.
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9.
In 1969 I spun the album Abbey Road backward to hear that Paul was dead. Since I WANT TO TAKE YOU EVERYWHERE doesn’t spin, I read the book backward, back cover to front cover. I hoped to discover what I was missing. I wasn’t patient. Why should I be?
By reading the book from its end first, themes identify themselves like a pop-up book. The writing is better. The writer matures and marries form and content. The poems become generous and open to the reader rather than leave us stylistically short-changed.
The poem, “Temple Watching” leaves the reader with an unconcealed beginning –Why did this author place this poem last in this collection?
“I sit on the marble steps wondering why it is so hard to be human” is a line, unlike others in her collection. Foremost, it has integrity. The line stands like a brick on its own. It gives us clarity because it is a statement whose voice is not to be reckoned with: it believes. The result is that the reader also believes. This equation has largely been absent in the poems before this. The style opens with honesty and directness. There is an authority of wholeness that doesn’t equivocate. tease or distrust itself. To trust the speaker is everything. Unless the point of view is meant to be distrusted, meant for us to warble and meander within trustworthiness. This is the Manzolillo of new maturity who kicks out the tricks. She no longer relies on gimmicks, forced images, or stale phrases, her voice does not hang in the corners to say what my ear hears as untrue.
3.
The body breaks from the soul, and the psyche tells the self that the body’s dislocation changes us. Yet the voice and form are forced – This is poetry that has not yet matured: no fault in the writer. Manzolilo has not fully mastered the content or the ability to create tension in the emotions she struggles to express. This is poetry that fumbles. The poet relies on juxtaposing antiseptic images and unearned drama, all caged by flimsy and undisciplined diction.
This makes for images that cannot hold, whether she is trying to illustrate the disconnection her body experiences alone or in connection to others, there is some control, some discipline in the authorship that is missing. There is no irony in my comment. Let me explain:
I have no sense of anything real. I want to empathize or respect – I want to feel something but these poems are created with poetic infidelity. It is easy to write what we can say, it is easier to say what we think is the easiest way to say it – Where we don’t have anything at stake, not just our hearts, but our cerebral cortex, or our entrails. Give me a spleen and I’ll give you my soul’s attention.
Initial questions to ask oneself: What tradition does this poet write against or from?
In every poetry, a form emerges within the tradition of the past. Does Manzolilo make a point against form or about form? Or has she abandoned the notion of form altogether?
I don’t think the answer to my last question is affirmative.
7.
In “People Watching” each line is important. We know this because, as I said, each line has its integrity. I have said that I believe the speaker. What the speaker says she could not have said before. It is difficult. There is tension in each moment: the punctuation: the line breaks. Nothing lies.
None of it. This poet proves that she knows the craft of poetry.
“Thigh High Love.”
The voice pleads and questions a love that opens the collection. The fragmentation begins in the poem that follows, “11 Times.” In a sense it is a list poem, each stanza is numbered and is quickly reduced to single lines. Eleven lines are repeated after the first eleven, to say, this is how it happened?
“Forbidden Fantasy Foreplay.”
This poem is spoken in the voice of a child who “dream(s) of a big strong mommy/who will lick off all my wounds.” It disturbs because the tone, juxtaposed with its diction, sexualizes the boundaries of intimacy of mother and daughter. It also disturbs because the child’s voice intersects with the adult voice. This creates a perversion that is atypical in poetic discourse. It’s cringy, this Electra tendency, which Freud would surely revel in. Without question, this poem sets the impetus for the overarching themes in I Want to Take You Everywhere and sheds a neon light on the pathology of the content. Manzolillo continues:
I’m special, nuzzle me
forever. See me as hers to have & to own
cuddling curled toes under cold covers choke
away the outside monsters. Suck my thumb, comfort me
hush hush
when come the- oh help me, help me
I’m all alone. Pretty please stick
with me, you’re mean & scary
with soft lips, a faint heart
leaning against our backs arch
kiss me on the neck. I need to feel
your warm breath, your touch-my touch is there.
The child, the poet, has no choice but to learn, thanks to mommy, that emotional comfort means sexual proclivity. Despite its diary-like style and uneven voice, the poem gets under the reader’s skin. It feels wrong. It demands a visceral and moral response from the reader. This is precisely why the poem works.
Each section of the book becomes more sexual. In the second section, My First Time Falling, the poems sprawl across the pages while white spaces allow the reader to question the speaker. For instance, the speaker of the poem, “The Floor Shakes When You Sit Down,” states, “over time I’ve become giddy as a school girl” whose diction connotes a vulnerability in the speaker that will place her in danger, yet she does not know. I applaud this moment where the poet splits the speaker’s body from her mind. It is the first of many moments the reader participates in the shift of the speaker’s awareness. Manzolillo has come to a place in her writing where she trusts the reader enough to let us in.
I Want to Take You Everywhere is declarative, it outright states the dysfunction of the subject that the reader expects the poet will explore. I Want to Take You Everywhere is an alarm, it broadcasts the hunger to devour the object by breaking the boundaries agreed upon to achieve and maintain a functional society. This poet, out of the gates, lays the groundwork of her fierce desire for balance, identity, and wholeness that can only be achieved through the willingness to give up suffering and to recognize and challenge the outdated dynamics of dysfunctionality in relationship to self and others. This author asserts boundaries for herself through self-help, therapeutic writing, and the hard work of self-interrogation.
This book is an honest process – of saying – not writing – where the speaker posits a listener: the reader, the friend, the therapist, yet the poems break from the confessional school, as these are not confessions per se– the poems in of themselves are a reversal of horror. They kill the nightmare of a childhood laid bare, where parental figures set up the child to have to unlearn the powerful object lessons of owning a body whose boundaries will not be given over to others. This is a powerful testimony to overcoming sexual violence and dismantling one’s self for another.
About the reviewer: Cynie Cory is a poet (“American Girl,” New Issues Press 2004), playwright and essayist. Cynie grew up in Marquette, Michigan. She is a graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and florida State University, where she earned a Ph.D. Her poetry has appeared in The American Poetry Review, Another Chicago Magazine, Black Warrior Review, Crazyhorse, New American Writing, Shade, Verse, and Western Humanities Review. She currently lives in Tallahassee, Florida.