Susan Leary’s More Flowers is a woven exploration of what can happen when a poet juxtaposes craft and theory. As the speaker avoids discursive identity, this poetry collection relies on scientific study, images of the grotesque, and monstrous tropes to analyze what it means to live in a feminine-coded body, slipping in and out of public visibility. When visible, the speaker becomes grotesque, either bursting with flowers or peeling away from her own skin. When invisible, the speaker loses the snippet of identity claimed during her moments of visual monstrosity. Underneath it all is a complicated mourning, a daughter suffering grief, but Leary shies away from a simple emotional turbulence and carries the reader into a much richer metaphor exploring how grief and femininity intersect and manifest on the body.
Leary begins her book with the aptly named “Pseudo-Myth,” a poem introducing us to the collection’s speaker as an opaque and grotesque figure: “Trust / me. I, who have neither head nor heart, whose / name is not mine but Girl.” Here, Leary poses Girl as an unnamed subject without subjectivity, external to self-recognition. This absence of identity is an ongoing theme in More Flowers, coalescing with the grotesque to create a monstrous othering inside the female-coded body. “& what is the head / without the mouth or the heart? Without the corpse / clad anonymously in dirt?” Leary asks the reader in “On Sundays, I Do Laundry.” This form, Frankensteined from various body parts, takes on an autonomous role, both mechanized and expected. As readers, we inspect her performances of labor and evaluate the necessity of identity for these performances.
These missing body parts edge into and then embrace the nonhuman, engaging with hybridity. Creating something of an optical illusion reminiscent of Georgia O’Keeffe’s paintings, Leary renders repetitive floral depictions of the female body in her poetry, but she rejects the assumption that these depictions must be beautiful. Instead, she integrates uncanny and discomforting imagery to purposefully underscore dehumanization. In “I don’t want to write about flowers,” Leary contextualizes Girl within a natural landscape, and the metaphor lives close to the human form:
A flower is without history
because we think we know what happens: soil, seed, sun,
water, bloom. & even if laughter is considered, or drowning
or drought, or one seed’s envy of another, we forget
what the flowers may have endured before they were flowers.
If flowers are stand-ins for women—and, perhaps, mothers and daughters—Leary packs both frustration and longing into this poem. From the title that indicates resentment toward needing to explain, to the collective first-person we, Leary calls for a holistic approach to understanding a body torn apart, something that seems both impossible and necessary. This poem pairs closely with “Girl House with Epigenetic Effect, or, A Tumult of Flowers,” which suggests that Girl can never claim her own subjective identity:
Girl, you bloom just the same, perpetually engaged
in a long argument, blade
held scrupulously
to the neck. Nothing lets up because the blade
is you, is your mother.
Even biology, poses Leary, defines the female consciousness—both the body and its interiority—more than the self. The mother predisposes the daughter, and the grandmother predisposes the mother. And so on and so forth. Inside that lineage, even when the body is seemingly harmless as a flower, violence can take hold, pitting the self against the self: the blade against the neck in a seemingly unending and internal argument. Perhaps this is why, in “We Examined Survival Under a Microscope,” the tulips “empty / themselves of a body.” There exists no way to abandon these predispositions but to rid the self of the container that holds them. Flowers, often described with adjectives indicative of gentleness and beauty, become empty signifiers for a woman’s discursive identity.
Beyond performance and floral resonance within selfhood, Girl also becomes the object through which action can occur—a tool, an instrument. In male hands, Girl finds both ordinary and extraordinary uses. For example, Leary reaches to Judeo-Christian mythology in “Neither David nor Goliath” to propose the female self as a useful object: “you’re not the hero or the giant but the slingshot. // Niftiness is at its peak & you don’t need to be human / anymore to be relevant.” Pulling no punches, Leary bluntly writes what we’re all thinking: Girl’s body is machine, a fleshless nonhuman. Later in the manuscript, the speaker becomes a “makeshift screwdriver” in “Self-Portrait as Loose Change.” The dehumanization of the female body renders it useful only so far as others can employ it for their personal gain: in the declension of subject and object, the slingshot is object, a tool through which a subject performs an action. Girl is daughter, mother, woman. Girl is both everyone and no one. In other words, Girl is interchangeable with any other Girl.
This grotesque suturing of body parts all builds to allow for what I think is the most poignant emphasis in Leary’s writing: an identity that acts as a mask, whether that mask poses as Girl or flower. Leary writes in “We Examined Survival Under a Microscope,” “Carefully, I dress in another girl’s arms & legs, / wear her checkered uniform to bed. The dark before me, that deep / nothing, how even nothing seemed to possess a face.” Here, nothing carries a duality. We could read nothing as an actor in the poem—a subject with a face more readily identifiable than Girl. Or we could read nothing as a finger pointing toward everything: if nothing has a face, everything is faceless. This doubleness creates unending possibilities, and both seem to nestle easily inside Leary’s poetic landscape. If we opt for the second connotation, we must interrogate what it means for Girl and everyone else to be faceless. In his essay on exteriority and alterity, Emmanuel Lévinas argues that the face of the other is a discourse that solidifies the subject’s own position and identity. But if the other has no face, the subject defines the self without selfhood. Leary leans into this theoretical lens: in “Photograph Theory,” she writes, “even when photographed I do not exist.” With her lack of reflection, the designated speaker becomes nonhuman, or ghostly—a vampiric warning sign that points toward the monstrous, the unidentifiable.
There’s something so wonderfully cathartic about an abandonment of self in these faceless poems when we can feel Girl start to take shape, even if that shape is an unexpected one—perhaps, even, a fearful one. In the collection’s final poem “Because My Tongue Is Not Welcome Here,” Leary writes “I am not me / but the animal inside me: a mosquito / cased in amber […] I’m not looking / for praise, rather for some glossy truth / spun from my bones into lullaby.” Throughout the book, Girl undergoes an almost alchemical breaking-down process, but Leary builds this body again, reaching for unexpected, soft, and often horrific parts to create something new.
References
Lévinas, Emmanuel. 1969. Totality and Infinity: An Essay on Exteriority, translated by Alphonso
Lingis. Duquesne University Press.
