Review: Alexandra Teague’s Or What We’ll Call Desire
On Alexandra Teague’s Or What We’ll Call Desire
by Tyler Truman Julian
In his proto-feminist work, Tess of the d’Urbervilles (1891), Thomas Hardy suggested that humanity was plagued by the “ache of modernism,” a pain rooted in the constant motion of the present age and the desire to quantify and qualify everything surrounding humanity. This ache reinforced gender and socioeconomical inequity, bolstered misplaced Victorian ideas of morality, promoted legalized cruelty, caused greater environmental degradation, and, for Hardy’s heroine, brought about tragedy and death. Alexandra Teague’s newest poetry collection, Or What We’ll Call Desire (Persea Books, 2019), extrapolates this ache beyond the Modernist period, both forward and back, engaging with and challenging it in a refreshing and troubling way. Teague’s work appeals to ancient heroines and anti-heroines, seeking some sort of universal truth in their representation in art, scrutinizes the words of modern starlets in search of new wisdom, and develops a questioning speaker, whose everyday interactions with women and our present American society synthesizes the broad conversation of what it means to be a woman in America into an incisive examination of form, appearance, and the male gaze.
The meticulous research and careful word choice that is so typical of Teague’s previous work shines through in this collection and slowed my reading in a meaningful way. Or What We’ll Call Desire took me several days longer to read than I expected, not because of a lack of interest, but because the work asked me to slow and engage critically with its themes. I ended up spending as much time on Google and in conversation with other poets as I did reading Teague’s words. This was both a challenge and pleasure and showcased Teague’s particular poetic genius.
From page one, I was confronted with images of women, both real and fictional, that Teague seeks to recreate on the page and engage in dialogue about our country and its treatment of women. In “Self Portrait as Curious Lunatic’s Sketch of a Dancing Girl,” Teague’s speaker asks, “Who was I ever / but a girl climbing through the choices of being human?” From this question, Teague leads the way into a gilded, violent world of control, representation, and patriarchy that fails women. Teague’s speaker questions cubism, in its attempt to capture all sides at once, saying, “A woman posing for a portrait expects / her face, not a radio sputtering / disassembled circuits” (“In the Case of Mlle. Zina Brozia od the Paris Grand Opera Versus M. Jean Metzinger, Cubist”). She returns to her childhood, noting the violence and silence that surrounds growing young women: “without words what are we / but ourselves—inarticulate as the sky, as the fighter jets / to explain their sound” (“The Giant Artichoke”). She uses misrepresented mythology to demand that women “not believe Freud that your almost aliveness is what frightens: that you are yet are not” (“Baba Yaga Rides It’s a Small World”). And, slowly, she develops an image of various historic women that contradicts society’s (read: men’s) representation of them. Of these women, she spends the most time with Audrey Munson, a young model who posed for many of the famous statues still standing in New York City and whose story ends in tragedy much like Tess d’Urberville’s. Gradually, Teague’s speaker builds to the crux of this aching, this painful reality for America’s women, as it negatively impacts the whole world: nature, humanity, architecture, the very foundation on which our comfort is based. A lynchpin poem appears a little before the halfway mark in the collection, dragging this message to the forefront of the narrative of the collection. In “Suicide Notes (as M.C. Escher’s Impossible Constructions),” the speaker shows the historical progression of violence, its representation (often unseen by the male artist), and its ongoing impact for the speaker herself. Teague writes,
Someone told me [early] depression is a box and when I’m not
I see it as that cube I was so proud to learn to draw as a child
square overlaid on square and then those diagonals [at first it seemed
like so much space] My mother said Drawing boxes mean you feel
trapped Drawing flowers means you feel lonely [A doctor had electro-
shocked her in the 1960s for feeling too strongly]
…
I can’t I tried and family history of and my nephew
will not in the future survive
a room of a gun and himself and will leave no note
except his body
…
[It was decades old already]
[my nephew has been dead a year] [my mother has been dead
more years thank I was old when she used to call
Rise and shine like I was the sun
meaning come down the stairs]
These boxes repeat throughout the collection. The women Teague channels and her speaker appeals to are often boxed, split into pieces. “How to Become Stained Glass,” one of Teague’s Munson poems, explores the male artist-creator’s relationship to his subject. Teague writes, “Be architecture. Be guileless // in pretending to be sky. If he says, so few girls possess / figures which are beautiful, separated into their details, / learn fragmentation.” Audrey Munson’s decision to appear as a man asks her is one of “the choices of being human” Teague asks us to evaluate. Presentation and form run through Teague’s work, begging us to interrogate our expectations of others, especially women, and the powerful need for self-determination, even in the current era that often seems so far from the past, 1891, for example.
In Or What We’ll Call Desire, Teague is asking us to allow ourselves to experience discomfort, to decentralize our gaze from the mainstream male-dominated representation of life and undergo a new way of looking at art and the individual art of each human. Thomas Hardy wrote during the transition from the Romantic and Naturalist Periods to Modernism. Of his ache, he writes, “[W]hat are called advanced ideas are really in great part but the latest fashion in definition—a more accurate expression, by words in logy and ism, of sensations which men and women have vaguely grasped for centuries.” This ache is never addressed by the characters of Tess of the d’Urbervilles, and as a result, they fail to save Tess, making her to die a martyr. This ending is perhaps one of the great, unbearable tragedies in modern literature, but it seems fitting as Hardy critiques the society in which he lived. Writing of the ache that runs through Or What We’ll Call Desire, one that stretches from the ancient world to the Modernist period to our current time, Alexandra Teague’s speaker, in “The Meteorologist Receives More Letters Asking,” explains the pain that fills the poems of the collection: “Because there / is no choice but to imagine the unbearable to bear it.” The glittering art world covers up the violence surrounding the subject, asking her to smile, pose, live a certain way, and Teague pulls back the curtain for us to see and experience (however briefly) the unbearable, engage with it, research it, critique it, then go out into the world and try to be better humans. This is the challenge posited by Teague’s speaker in the final poem, “Selfie with Pomona: The Goddess of Abundance”: “Where’s the best light to look human?”