Madame X

Darcie Dennigan’s poetry can horrify, shock, gross you out, turn you off—her poems are full of spilt bodily fluids, new corpses, nuclear accidents, human beings stuffed with nonfood items or having dangerously or sacrilegiously kinky sex or being taken apart. And yet these shocks come with a twist: most of the poems, and all the best ones, connect their grisly surprises not so much to death and dismemberment as to conception, fertility, and childbirth. In “Bethany Home Hospice,” for example, “the nuclear holocaust happened yesterday” but the employees—surrounded by the dying elderly—try, and fail, to make a baby anyway. “The Youngest Living Thing in L.A.” turns out to be “my baby, whom I held like a heavy statuette”; the poem implies that most of Los Angeles has been leveled, depopulated by vague catastrophe, which may or may not have killed the baby, too: “he never ever cried.” In other poems, what looks like juice or ink or paint turns out to be fresh blood, as from menstruation: the outrageous speaker in “The Job Interview,” who also confesses to drinking from baptismal fonts, remembers how she took on “some work as a skydiver” when “I was pretty young and had just gotten my period… I thought—if the crotch of my pants rubs against a cloud, I’ll leave red streaks.” Her fertility may disconcert us, but it is powerful enough to stain the clouds.

With their babies dead and alive, their delight in bodily fluids, their background radiation, Dennigan’s happy or grisly cartoonish poems push back against polite, adult-driven norms of bourgeois life; they also push back against earlier male writers’ visions of phallic violence, since they announce that the most interesting shocks come from the power to make life, not to end it. “The End Is Near” revisits a post-apocalyptic Los Angeles, the sort of place where, in many male writers’ visions, cold automobiles replace warm human beings; for Dennigan, instead, all “cars are wombs,” including the car that she navigates through this “night of no moon,” past “the loneliness of babies and the loneliness of / the last gas station attendant in bad weather.” The blank night sky is like the blank face of the baby when “Everything is the baby”; in such circumstances “the bedroom is the end of the world, // but when the baby is calm you cannot know its mind.”

Another poem finds premonitions of death in a pot of...