jaz papadopoulos, I feel that way too

 

Birthday invitation reads No Barbies Please.
Means, Barbie will hurt my daughter’s life
with her long neck and neck-sized waist.
Really means, Daughter, I don’t know how to explain to you
my fad dieting, food restriction, exercise regime.
I don’t know how to explain to you the things that men and boys will say,
      shout, whistle.
The complexities of dominance and subjugation stifle me.
I fear my place in the world and now your own, that of your small body
      that is my own small body that I cannot control.
So instead, when you hold her, inevitably, against all my attempts and
      insertions,
when you hold your first Barbie—our enemy—let us do this ritual.
We will build her a soul with all the words we fear to hear:
Your body is wrong (too long).
Your intentions, irrelevant.
Your aspirations, offensive.
Take her iconic body, make it an emblem of our grief and fear
—emblem, from the Greek emballein, to throw; insert—
put all that inside her
and throw her away. (“LESSON 8: BLAME WOMEN,” “history of media”)

The full-length poetry debut by Lambda Literary Fellow, “interdisciplinary writer, educator and video artist” jaz papadopoulos is I feel that way too (Gibsons BC: Nightwood Editions, 2024), a collection of poems that, as Amber Dawn offers as a back cover blurb, “flay[s] rape culture open in ways that discourse cannot.” Across four sequence-sections—“The Rules,” “History of Media,” “I Feel That Way Too” and “Epilogue”— papadopoulos articulates a study of and around sexual violence via lyric narrative, composing a contemporary conversation of depictions, dismissals, agency and ongoing trauma through erasure, repetition, specific examples and cultural markers. “A beautiful man / asks if I would read him a poem.” papadopoulos writes, as part of the extended title sequence, “I open / whatever I’d last written: hyssop help me, hyssop health me // hyssop help me now. Flowers pressed / over the Ghomeshi trial, its inescapability.” I feel that way too offers an explosion of lyric exposition that bursts out of a conversation long repressed, until it has no choice but explode, and hopefully part of a larger, longer trajectory of cultural shift. The language papadopoulos utilizes is thick and rich with gymnastic, rhythmic density, including further in the title poem-sequence, as they write: “Bloated raspberry. Overfilled / red balloon fishnets bulging plump / diamond rubies. The cochineal / is a parasitic scale insect that lives on cacti in North and South America / looking like Jessica Rabbit’s lips / procreated with a cob of corn and the offspring / came out kernelled, in scarlet / rows, swelling at the seams.” This is a book about harm and solutions, and about how both are portrayed, mangled, represetend and misrepresented, writing out a string of savage truths and circumstances, and the possibility and impossibly, the very limitations, of language, thought and action. Or, as they write as part of the title sequence: “It is so very / frustrating / when none / of the words work.”