A Review of Stella Corso’s Tantrum

Format: 99 pp., paperback; William Carlos Williams references: Five; Plums, from the ice box or otherwise: Seven; Male gazes confronted: Forty-three; Dedication: “you probably think this book is about you;” How Love Is Described: “peachy universal;” How Life Is Described: “one big incredible teenage philosophy;” How Death Is Described: “stale cinnamon toast.” Representative Sentence: “You could catch a third-degree tan / die happy.”

Central Question: Are beauty and ugliness sleeping together?

Beauty is rarely greeted with eloquence. More often, it’s welcomed with drool, stares, whistles, and other ejaculations. In her poem “What It Is,” Stella Corso speaks to men on miscellaneous backseats and couches. Each vignette follows a formula: 1) Man compliments a body part of the speaker (eyes, hair, breasts, etc.); 2) The speaker asks why, or what do you like about said body part?; 3) Man flounders. “What do I smell like / Like a woman, he replied.” Corso invites the men to a game: to specify their DOA come-ons, to be more playfully direct in their intentions. Each one loses, with each response more inept than the last, the pattern articulating the gap between their definition of beauty, Corso’s body, and her definition, one that works within the rotten world she’s dealt, spinning an inventory of vapid answers and events into beautiful farce.

This turf war with the male imagination’s flaccidity gives rise to the book’s title. But Corso’s tantrum is not so much a full body quake as a sustained comedic ennui, like the tone Joan Didion courted in Play It As It Lays, or Lana Del Rey’s cheeky melancholia, with equal weight given to lovers, places, and things: “Can you name your sharpest offenders,” Corso asks in “I Get Places By Moving Sideways.”

jeremy, brandon, aaron

and steve

also rowing machine, small inflatable boat

unusual vanity

The world’s items, its products, both specifically labelled for beauty and otherwise, sit center frame. Beauty fades and products break: lipstick on the straw, a seashell necklace, a flat afterglow. A Corso poem lives and dies in its props, which oscillate from married men to a shapely Coke bottle unfinished by the pool, warming and spoiling.

For Corso, beauty and rot are inseparable twin sisters. Her New England has been left too long in the sun: “Clambake      Wednesday     Noon / Super     de    luxe.” Here, spacing measures the expectations of leaf-peeping tourists in relation to the whiteness of Massachusetts’ flaking hill towns, the...