What We Are Too Frightened to See: On Kristin Bock's "Glass Bikini"
Kristin Bock | Glass Bikini | Tupelo Press | 2021 | 100 Pages
In Leviathan, Thomas Hobbes states that human life is “nasty, brutal, and short” because people, left to their own devices, are naturally vicious. Though things would seem to have gotten better since Hobbes’ witch-burning seventeenth century, Kristin Bock’s latest collection Glass Bikini suggests otherwise. Glass Bikini offers the reader a dark, often surreal vision of an Hieronymus Bosch-like world—one gone so horribly wrong that sexual perversion runs rampant and everything is coming up rifles instead of roses. Prose poems speak of nightmares. A list of titles may give the reader an idea: “Snuff Poem”; “Everything’s Coming up Rifles”; “Gaslighter”; “Barn Burning”; “The Killing Show”; “A Snowman is Crying Tears of Fire”; “Postcard from the Coffin.” According to Bock, without the comforting structures of religion, in the spiritual void of a postmodern age, people are revealed as intrinsically brutal and cowardly (with spines of glass), and the end of the mucked-up world, promised not only unpleasant but unredeemed and unredeemable, may be near.
The poems in Glass Bikini force us to look in on a cruel world seen horrible to the core. In an incantatory list poem, Bock has the dwarf planet Pluto welcome a Miltonic procession of evildoers drawn from current events, popular culture, and personal experience to its “vacuous core of ice and ash” for there’s “a place” for them there:
Come bomb cookers, come potion makers, come girl biters, come water boarders, come dress torchers, come lone gunmen with the sidereal eyes, come rageful lovers, [], come baby shakers, come fag haters, come proud proud boys, come serial chokers… come bury-her-up-to-her-neck-and-stone-her stoners… come joyful lynchers… come Genderciders, come vehicle rammers, come good old-fashioned back stabbers.
In “Everything’s Coming Up Rifles,” rifles are “pushing up in the garden [and] graveyard” and the “church bell’s tongue is a long, black rifle.” Even titles that promise a happy ending, such as “Spring Comes,” introduce poems that are really about annihilation. A boy stones a wounded sea bird to death with bigger and bigger rocks while yelling “You’ll like me.” In another, a boy knocks the head off a snowman. When the snowman asks “why did you hurt me,” the boy responds, “My father says a freshly severed head will always try to bite the earth.” These are the poems of someone who has been beaten and all but buried by a tyrant; of one who, when still a child, “came to understand [her artist father’s sexually abusive] long shadow at the end of the day.” Though it isn’t always the male of the species condemned (girls can be cruel, too), these are the poems of one who sees the world through a feminist lens darkened by outrage and a pain so severe it is hardly to be borne.
Bock, who holds an MFA in poetry from the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, begins Glass Bikini with an epigraph borrowed from Emily Dickinson, that narrow-eyed nineteenth century poet raised like a crucifix from hard New England soil: “The Truth, is Bald, and Cold.” The epigraph is fitting for a book that relentlessly analyzes human cruelty and defenselessness. In a disembodied, prophetic voice, and in surreal images that distort time and place, Glass Bikini shows us a world governed by tyrants and devoid of gods. (“Where are the refs?” she protests in “Alice’s MMA Fight With the President”). If from the beginning, religion has tried to explain why we are here and how we must behave in order to end happily, modern science has chipped away at such explanations and we find ourselves wandering in a psychological and judicial void where the human proclivity for evil is free to spawn unchecked in a universe without meaning.
The book’s first poem, “Overcome” (set aside as a prologue), can be read as parable or precis of the whole. “Overcome” hits the reader rudely, confronting us with the nastiness of things; with the things us “monkeys on the bench” who wish to “see no evil, hear no evil, and speak no evil,” do not want to admit or see. Instead of the chipper, superficial, smiling world promoted by our current ad-selling corporate America, Bock’s proem “Overcome” offers a grim vision of a miserable futuristic world gone mad, unmediated by the philosophy or consolations of art:
And it came to pass, art became extinct. Still, we flocked to museums and stared into barren rooms. Look! Someone would exclaim. There’s a man rolling around on the floor, acting like an unbalanced washing machine, knocking into things and coughing up wet rags.
In this museum people whizz in fountains and blow each other where “L’Origine du monde used to hang.” They weep, shred their clothes, ooze from chandeliers and hang themselves. The poem ends: “A child said, Look, those red velvet ropes clearly symbolize our happiness, and another child said, oh no, our happiness symbolizes those red velvet ropes. And thus began the gnashing of hair and pulling of teeth that lasted for the rest of the unknown world.”
In Paradise Lost, Milton calls on the muse to help him become the medium through which the story of all human time from Edenic origin to apocalyptic end passes. In “Overcome,” Bock introduces in micro a similarly ambitious cosmic history, one that spans Genesis to Revelation, with herself, like Milton, as the narrator. The poem’s biblical first phrase “and it came to pass” tees up Glass Bikini as a rebuff to religious doctrines, and specifically to Christianity. Similarly, in references to the beginning and end of time, Bock dispenses with the comforts of religion. If in Paradise Lost, a new dispensation is available promising justice—for the good are sent to heaven and the bad to hell—in Glass Bikini no such outcome occurs. Here there is no deus ex machina to bring on a happy ending. Rather, misery prevails and happiness itself is a red velvet rope, suitable for suicides.
Having laid down this gauntlet, having depicted the miserable world as coming to this unpleasant non-end, Bock devotes the rest of Glass Bikini to exploring the causes of our doom. Some have to do with cruelty: capitalism, greed, violence, racism, sexism, classism, a cult of white male supremacy. Some with the bald, cold “nature of things”; the randomness of an unsupervised universe formed for no particular end.
In “Snuff Poem,” the speaker becomes the voice of evil, being not only its victim, but the thing itself, implicating all of us.
I have a monster. It has a hole in its belly. You can see straight through to the other side. Sometimes, I reach into its cage and put my hand through the hole. The monster doubles over and cries for a time. I let it out, ride it around like a donkey. I tie feathers to its neck and bid it sing like a waterfall. I point. I laugh. I eat a rabbit on the floor.
The speaker’s cruelty is made all the more abominable for its childishness. A child should be innocent. A child’s play should be innocent. But this child has a monster for a pet with a hole in its belly and the child torments the monster, causing it enough pain to make it cry. She rides the monster like a donkey. She [tars?] and feathers it. She forces it to sing. She points at it and laughs. She stops to eat “a rabbit on the floor.” Later she hoods and leashes the monster. In the end, the monster revolts. The child’s monstrous behavior yields more monstrosity, for every night “thousands of soldiers collect at the hole and stare out at me. They all have the same face. They pour from the monster’s belly, tumble over each other like mice from a silo. I press my palm to the hole, but they shoulder through. By daybreak, the army holds me at gunpoint.”
Under fascism, it may not be uncommon for people to ride by death camps in trains with their eyes turned away, not wanting to admit the horrors humans are capable of. Bock does not allow us to turn. She tears aside the veil and offers a postmodern analysis of human cruelty, exposing aspects of our culture most are too frightened to see or admit to. In images of a monster coldly playing with another “monster” as if it were a toy—caging it, riding it, laughing at it, decorating it, hooding it, leashing it, broom-sticking it—“Snuff Poem” subtly evokes images of CIA black sites where naked Iraqi prisoners were spread-eagled under black hoods to be tortured by dogs and humiliated by fellow humans.
The point of Bock’s dark commentary is not only to catalogue cruelty but to satirize it. Bock’s satire (or sarcasm, whose root is “to tear or cut with the teeth”) can be plucked from almost anywhere, but it is nicely demonstrated in a pair of poems that appear together: “Welcome to the Dollar Store” [WDS] and “Welcome to the Dollar Store: A Translation” [WDST]. In WDST, Bock depicts the world careening without religious or moral anchor, no answer or exit for sufferers. In the poem, an artist visits that classic of capitalist exploitation: a Dollar Store. The clerk asks if he can interest the artist in an “inspirational painted rock.” The artist replies he is looking for something else; something that “epitomiz[es] the post-modern dilemma,” for “we were meant to be simple animals, like this trilobite here, but something went terribly wrong and our brains grew too big, and now we’re all freaking out wearing gas masks.” Postmodern America, the whole of the technocratic-global twentieth century, beginning with the gas-mask-requisite First World War, is a godless world where human beings lack the wherewithal to make things right and where evil—which begets itself like mice spilling from silos or like Sin tumbling from the belly of Satan in Paradise Lost—reigns, unchecked and indisputable.
Here is Alice in Wonderland in an MMA match wrestling with President Trump trying to tap out in a ring with no refs. Here are drones, sleeper units, rockets, and space ships; here are hopeful repopulations of other earths; here is a field trip to the White House where children are mauled; here are children in cages and women being stoned; here is a cosmography of the world where people and places are distorted and turned upside down, made large or small, as in a drug-induced, terrifying dream like something out of an Hieronymous Bosch painting. Here is a doll without eyes running through a cornfield. Here is a doll without hair with cigarette butts in her head. Here is the father-as-artist sexually abusing the doll.
Some readers may turn away from these poems, for, however brilliant, they are relentlessly stark. As T.S. Eliot said, usually humans cannot bear “that much reality.” Though most of us slow down for road accidents, curious to see what happened—glad it is not our necks snapped, this time, in death’s sudden mousetrap—most of us do not really want to look at frightening things. We turn away. It takes extraordinary stomach to confront, to analyze. It is said that Sylvia Plath had one such stomach, that she used to cut out frightening bits from newspapers of particular horrors and pin them to her writing wall, that horror was her subject. The same is true for Bock. She is like a prophet standing by the side of the road in ancient Jerusalem. Dressed in rags. Blind. Spelling out human crimes to frightened passersby who would rather turn away. But unlike the ancient prophet, Bock does not implore us to change before it is too late. Rather, for Bock, we are who we are: unchangeable, already doomed, caught in a biosphere that’s not aging well.
In 48 short poems that read like distortions of surreal and chilling dreams, Glass Bikini offers one long Juvenalian satire. The poem and the book itself is like a Russian Doll with its terrifying little self intimidating self, found inside itself, over and over again. These are not the confessions of an ordinary woman struggling with day-to-day affairs in contemporary America, but the abstract, almost impersonal associations of a Cassandra seeing the world from a promontory: delivering her sermon-on-the-mount in the garb and gait of the grim reaper, telling us not that the meek shall inherit the earth, but that the tyrant shall devour it. Everyone loves a happy ending. Bock tells us to expect no such thing.