Virility at Home

River Ellen MacAskill
Death of Workers Whilst Building Skyscrapers

A stunning book, with a typewriter effect on beautifully printed paper, Virility at Home is a highly addictive read, a long-form poem, traversing multiple landscapes, both natural and built up: this is a raw, close look at the social and political realities of living in the past year, both as individuals and communally with humans and the more-than-human.

The opening line ‘I wake up’ motions to the day-long constraint of the poem, immediately giving a heady feeling to the pamphlet in its hot spring Glasgow lockdown surroundings, as claustropia, body dysphoria, the need for escape and a re-imagining of the world, mixes with moments of bliss, gratitude, beauty and desire: ‘the euphoria comes in deep waves and then//the undertow of dread catches my knee.’ The stream-of-consciousness swerve of the language is held together with a distinct voice, repeatedly jolted by the unrelenting rhythms of everyday capitalist reality: ‘inbox goes ping! ping! ping!’, a startling awakening to the tight boundaries we are held within.

The poem echoes Eileen Myles’ statement: ‘A Poems Says I Want’, not only in its explicit language: ‘I want a hormone for electricity/hormone for virility/hormone for telekinetic wealth distribution//just wake and crave that sweet prescription’, but also in the undercurrent of emotion, deeply felt throughout its structural movement; a reaching towards and beyond, filled with a wonderfully intense clarity.

—Kirsty Dunlop