In January 2024, a water testing project conducted by British citizen-scientists found 83% of the UK’s rivers contain evidence of high pollution. This followed an Observer investigation from August 2023 that showed 90% of England’s freshwater habitats were blighted by agricultural runoff and raw sewage. Such environmental devastation undoubtedly forms a backdrop for Cornwall-native Rachael Allen’s God Complex (Faber, 2024), an impressive work that reckons with the consequences of human violence both on the environment and on other humans, especially those whom we claim to love.
Many rivers run through this collection, streams which guide the speaker’s journey through the end of an abusive relationship toward the uncertainty of life on the other side. Early in the collection, which reads as an interconnected narrative sequence of mostly untitled prose and lyric poems, Allen’s speaker reflects on the damaged nature of the man she loved: “I came across you / so deep in sadness,” she writes, “a sadness that churned / like a river bottom.” Accustomed to his moods, she diminishes and blames herself to console his incurable sorrow and self-hatred. The speaker loses sight of her identity, carrying the weight of his emotional burden beyond even their breakup: “Immediately after you left, I swam in the toxic river.” Having come out of a toxic relationship, the speaker enters another poisoned environment, “thick with hard-scummed edges, / feverish from farm waste and floating cut grass.”
In the next poem, she wonders what would happen if she let the river “take [her] wherever it wants to.” Having lost control of her life for the sake of another—or rather, having been coerced into doing so—the speaker’s self-negating logic echoes a wider concern in the collection regarding the attitude with which people relate to nature: “There is a disruption of fate by not allowing rivers to do what they want.” In seeking absolute control—of our lives, of the environment, of others—what other possibilities do we sacrifice?
The collection’s title clues us into this concern, as does its untitled opening poem, an epigraph of sorts that appears outside of the book’s two-part structure. “Perhaps,” the speaker wonders, “I have a deity in me — / lucid angel in the soft reflection —” God Complex suggests that our struggle for control reflects a deeper alienation from our own humanity. Alluding to angels and martyrs in a collection that explores the suffering we inflict upon ourselves and others, Allen emphasizes the spiritual decay at the heart of a tradition—Western, Judeo-Christian—in which suffering begets salvation. These poems trouble those waters. What happens, Allen asks, when we are faced with elements that refuse to conform to our desires, our godlike demands? “The final house we shared was by the river,” she writes, “[it] would burst its muscly bank / all over the closed bars and into our house, / dark, destroying our rooms, like someone in unpredictable rage.” Like a river that surges long after the storm, the past pours into the present, so that “even now” the speaker wakes up “in the night, / sweating over flooded documents.”
Just a few pages later, in “how to eat a lotus”—one of a handful of titled poems in God Complex—Allen writes: “In living I wanted to disrupt the history of women’s stories in my life, but it turned out I couldn’t.” Irony here serves to highlight the speaker’s dejection while emphasizing the gravity of her burden as a woman. Her exhaustion is palpable, as is her sense of disappointment, both in herself and in the world into which she was born. If existence alone is not enough to transcend an imperfect past, then what is? At its core, this collection is both a fragmented narrative of womanhood and a critique of systems of oppression. In the book’s second section, Allen’s speaker post-breakup begins to actively interrogate her relationship to a damaged world:
The rural military base on the edge
of the beach near the shoreside
firing range. In it, red alert sounds
in the fake suburbs built
to practice catching terrorists
Allen’s concise lyricism offers striking moments of juxtaposition, highlighting the fine line between sanctioned and unsanctioned spaces of violence. These lyric fragments work well alongside the collection’s more reflective prose poems, which often read like notes for unfinished essays or hastily drafted diary entries: “The hormones I take live in the water around me and alter the water and me.” Again, the speaker considers herself in relation to her surroundings, her chemical makeup inseparable from that of the river.
If she couldn’t transcend a history of violence, can the speaker hope to rewrite an uncertain future? Perhaps the next chapter has already been written: “These obsessions with interface reach back in time, which is to say, the form of the past pollutes a future terrain. There is blood in my carcinogens, like alphabet soup.” It is a strength of Allen’s that she ultimately leaves these questions unanswered, allowing the reader to wade through the flood alongside her, in search, perhaps, of something less fleeting than hope.
God Complex explores many of the same spaces first charted in Allen’s debut, Kingdomland (Faber, 2019): girlhood, late-capitalism, climate collapse, and the grotesque lurking just beneath the surface of domestic life. God Complex, however, has the most in common with the haunting sequence of Kingdomland, “Landscape for a Dead Woman,” in which an unnamed speaker reflects on the devastating cost of gendered violence, hoping at first to “rise from these dead,” only to find herself chasing after their ghosts. Rather than seeking to rescue or reconcile with the dead—an impossible task—Allen’s second collection navigates the difficult waters of survivorship, the psychological cost of losing all sense of what it is “to love a person,” to long instead for a reality in which one has never “written a poem about falling in love, which is much the same as moving through a sticky spring stream.”
Allen’s poetry is preoccupied with the parallels between interpersonal and environmental abuses. If people can treat their loved ones with such disdain, how can we hope to repair our broken societies or heal our ravaged planet? While Allen wisely avoids grandstanding, her poems offer new ways of looking, both at ourselves and at the world we inhabit, while also questioning the role of poetry in such dire times:
What’s the point of all this text?
I still have to live without you.
I watch people who block
the ants’ nests’ swirl outside
their homes. What kind of god
complex is this? Let them live;
let them maul the house
and surfaces with black trail.
Deify them and their paths.
Perhaps the answers are not beyond, but rather all around us. Perhaps there are systems—rivers, ant colonies—we destroy based on the false perception that they undermine our own. Or maybe it’s simply that in failing to love ourselves, we fail to love the world around us. If God Complex is a river, it is equal parts poisoned and pure, an imperfect stream filled with eddies, rapids, snags, and pools. A river we enter unknowing and leave, like the speaker, transformed: “I rise with time clogging in me / but am growing –”
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