Curating a Different Display: Review of Molly Cross-Blanchard's Exhibitionist
Molly Cross-Blanchard, Exhibitionist.
Coach House Books, 2021. $21.95 CAD
Buy a copy from Coach House Books.
There are certain conversations that we rarely get to have as adults. Close-faced, whispered, deepest-darkest-secret-sharing comes naturally in our younger lives. In other stages, we tend to be more guarded, afraid of saying the wrong thing or saying too much. Reading Molly Cross-Blanchard’s Exhibitionist offers a return to the forthright intimacy of our younger years. The book—a collection of confessional lyric poems—is dedicated to “the young people who feel so embarrassed, all the time” (n.p.). Without necessarily speaking to these younger selves, Exhibitionist uses lyric poetry’s special status as utterance overheard to display what the decades ahead might hold. In a way, Cross-Blanchard suggests that adulthood is more of the teen same: fantasies about crushes, daydreams about celebrities, and the deep love of friends. It’s anxieties about your body, worries about who loves you, and fears of the future. Throughout the collection, Cross-Blanchard’s poems harness the exuberance of a youthful exchange of secrets, drawing on the all-or-nothing stakes of these conversations to craft an intimate and humorous poetic voice.
Exhibitionist puts a particular geography on display: it traces the route of a young person who, like so many others, moves from the prairies to Vancouver, making connections in and through the city, and while maintaining more back home. If a younger self in Craven or Regina or Meadow Lake might have dreamed up this future as excitement and adventure, the speaker in Cross-Blanchard’s book is a bit more clear-eyed about what it’s like to live in one of the world’s most expensive cities. Poems like “It’s So Hard to Live in the World” document exhaustion, racism, fatphobia, bad dogs, isolation, and the fear of getting fired:
I give the world my body
and the world gives me insomnia
and meetings in pubs where I buy
my own beer. I’m only here
because my face is white
and my grandpa sells furnaces
to all of America. I keep FaceTiming my friends
so I can cry. (40)
It’s not just what’s described here, it’s the rhythm: enjambments race ahead and then slam to a stop with a caesura, a bit of assonance, or sometimes both. Who can keep up? Cross-Blanchard deflates the fantasy of adulthood and offers a return to childhood comforts in its place: “It’s been raining and raining so I slink to the window and / picture this: Mom pulls up in the Buick. I sprawl across the back seat and leave everything behind, even the books. / On the prairie, I play Paper Mario in the basement for hours / while Reece feeds me crusts from her grilled cheeses” (41). The poem ends with its speaker “lying on the trampoline watching / the birdfeeder I made in freshman shop class. No birds come” (41). The fantasy turns around: rather than the prairie kid dreaming of a glamorous life on the coast, the exhausted Vancouver adult fantasizes a return to care, to comfort, and most of all to “rest” (41).
One of the most important insights of Exhibitionist is that this dreaming—fantasizing a future, imagining what’s next, projecting continuity—isn’t just kid stuff, but it often does involve kids. This book has babies everywhere—usually imaginary ones. In one poem, the speaker enthuses about the addressee’s “good Métis cheekbones for my babies to inherit and for me // to smooch on” (18). In another, “a ghost baby with all your hair / hovered there between us, so I sang it the saddest songs I knew ‘til it fell / off the edge of the bed and tumbled out the open window into traffic” (22). A later poem imagines a “baby [that] will have / brown hair because blond ones are always getting sick. The baby / will infect the poems and the resulting book will go largely / unnoticed but oh well” (75-76). Obviously, these babies are conjured a little jokingly, but the penultimate poem, “But If,” projects a baby more seriously: “their eyes open and their hands / on our faces. // our baby took care of us in our old age. // our baby got old” (103). “But If” has the same playful humour as the other poems, but in fantasizing a little more seriously this poem suggests that we can do is live in this world, in a time that the poem describes—elliptically but evocatively—as an “apocalypse” (102). All we can do is imagine a little future. The poems in Exhibitionist touch on our moment’s difficulties, standing close enough to gush and whisper, but also to ask what’s the plan, to ask what we need to survive and continue.
The final poem in Exhibitionist challenges readers and addresses us directly: this is “a book written by a woman / and it checks all the woman’s book vibes” (104). Conventionally, such books are labeled “vulnerable” (104), as though speaking from a feminized position were itself a risk—it often is. I think that Exhibitionist takes a somewhat bigger risk, though. Exhibitionist, as its title suggests, puts the reviled and rejected parts of womanhood on display, offering a well-curated tour of the things that don’t appear within woman’s-book-womanhood, like being a weird teenager, or farting, or wanting sex, or living on the edge of the whiteness that defines conventional femininity. In Exhibitionist, these purportedly shameful things are not simply “raw” subjects of poetic confession. Instead, Exhibitionist, with its sudden flashes of flesh and its carefully crafty solicitation of our regard, offers an exuberant presentation of other ways to construct and display the self.
Sarah Dowling is the author of three books of poetry, including, most recently, Entering Sappho. Sarah teaches in the Centre for Comparative Literature and Victoria College at the University of Toronto.