She can write and even publish a poem in what seems like the next thing to real time, as kind of journal of a failed relationship, and yet still give it a shape and arc that couldn’t have been planned out to be any more satisfying or true. She is able to burrow through the weltering, needlingly poetic emotions of breaking up and somehow bring the whole thing down for a safe landing in the prose of getting-over-it, without any feeling of anticlimax—she is able to make an anticlimax that feels earned? She is able to take apart this guy, the guy she had the relationship with, so intimately and so relentlessly that you actually feel sorry for him even though it’s pretty clear that he pretty much deserves it, and she is able to make herself more and more engaging as a narrator the meaner she is. She is able to make you feel embarrassed for the guy and for yourself just by quoting a few bits of his love letters, which are pretty normal, among her own language, which is seriously not. She is also able to drop old-school poetry lines like this on you and make you fucking believe them:
Where are the messy women who love the fragile boys.
Where are the suicides who are my heroes.
Where are the bitches who know what they want
Who love what they do, bosomy and declarative,
Happy to be artistic in this stupid night.
She is able to write a second book in the year after publishing her very successful first book that is better, more profound, and yet also more accessible than that first book, and then publish it herself in a tiny run with no blurbs and little promotion like, “Oh, here’s this great book I wrote, I’ll just toss this out there, I’m sure there’ll be more where that came from.” And, unless I’m seriously wrong, she is able to be right about that, because this woman seems to produce poetry the way that other people produce sweat, as if she just has some special glands that make her excrete amazing poetry just by sitting around. Or else she is really good at giving that appearance, like Yeats wrote, “A line will take us hours maybe; / Yet if it does not seem a moment’s thought, / Our stitching and unstitching has been naught”; I wouldn’t want to give the impression that she doesn’t do that, I’m sure she does, or she might anyway.
The Coeur de Lion of the title turns out to be a cheese, which at some point in the poem gets compared to the poet’s vagina. She is able to make that comparison work, as like, the central motif of a one hundred page love poem. She could write stuff like “Where is the ‘you’ of You / Tube” all day and it wouldn’t make this book any less amazing; delivered in her skinny, almost violently controlled lines, with her mysterious and unrelenting conviction, that shit sounds fucking profound.
When I got to the page in the book where the following lines appear, by themselves, I actually read them over a good five or six times, because she told me to, that’s why:
I love words
Cos they’re so weak
(repeat)
Basically, she can do what the hell she wants, is what I’m saying.
