Your Turn to Speak!
Your Turn to Speak!
Lady Red Ego
Your Turn to Speak! is, as the title would suggest, brimming with exclamation; sometimes indignant, as Hera calls out to Zeus ‘[i]f only I could sew my soul shut, like you do.’ In other moments, the poems caution, as in the piercing dialogue between Gaia and her son Cronus, each word carefully weighted and placed. Exclamations even jut out beyond words into noise, in the recurring ‘*bird sounds*’ of Philomela, which I particularly loved.
This is not to say Lady Red Ego’s book confines its feel for dramatic timing and its incisiveness, like that of ‘[f]ields lined with teeth,’ to the level of the phrase or even that of the poem. I found the overarching structure, or conceit, or whatever you call it when someone has crafted a play out of poetry and prose to be rich and enveloping. Moreover, these poems are replete with the lushness of old-school red velvet curtains and lively as a play whose ‘ears perk up at the sound of its name.’
In this collection, the poet unfurls her fusion of ancient Greek myth and epic poetry with touchstones of queer life, the everyday of Scotland, and navigation of the world from the position of a Chinese and Scottish writer. On this amalgamated stage, Jason glares at an unyielding Medea, ‘Helios and / her native magic’ out of his grasp. Aphrodite proclaims herself ‘big golden boy’; Dundee station appears ‘so much / like a palace’. Polyphemus, achingly, finds that ‘HOME IS THE NAME OF THE ANIMAL / THAT I SLAUGHTER AND BLEED OUT!’
These concerns are held together by a tongue-first lyricism and an exacting sense of rhyme and music; I am confident I will remember jewels such as ‘Our future is that flower’ and ‘[p]upiled apricot pit, / egg white orbit.’ for some time. These poems run the gamut from performance to mortality, weapons of all kinds to glances stolen and blatant, magic and defiance. ‘Yes, we were kissing!’ as the Chorus gleefully announces.
It makes me think of what José Esteban Muñoz wrote in Cruising Utopia, on momentariness and (queer) time: ‘Some will say that all we have are the pleasures of the moment, but we must never settle for that minimal transport.’ Why not (re)turn to overlaps and collisions of different times, to the unruly transformations and becoming of myths both historical and personal, to being read as we read.
—Ali Graham