Head Off and Split  Nikky Finney -Feb. 18th

Control and sensuality-Tipping the Velvet and speaking truth to power

    Sitting down to write I have yet to digest all the themes and lucious imagery in these pages…

So I start with some of the lines that ploughed me over…

“My lips are red snails/in a primal search for every constellation/hiding in the sky of your body.  My hand/ waits for permission, for my life to agree/to be changed, forever.” 47

“Breathless, the buttery lights of day sink into dawn; two perfect halves of pink grapefruit,/ skinned, twelve times crushed to velvet, lifted,/ assumed to the inside flesh of new coconut.”  54

Her lungs empty out, then fill, then fill again with the surge of birth & surprise.  For two years, until their velvet bodies begin/ (and end) to fall to pieces, every time the driven-to-woman passes/ the bouquet of them, there, in the vase by the front door, she is/reminded of what falling in love, without permission, smells like.”    51

Such amazing sensual desire from “The Head -Over -Heels” section, such saturated sexy words dripping from the page….  I find myself thinking of the control and sensuality of the Victorian era lesbian sexuality in Tipping the Velvet as Finney considers the discovery of a new world where “If I touch her there everything about me will be true.”  Growing up queer in the south carried its own heaviness in my life, the fear of violence that she expressed in The Aureole, palpapel.  Even as an adult going to the woods with my trans partner we were careful about where we stopped.  Despite the violence the middle section feels some sort of respite of being in the body, in the private sphere, and in viceral revelry in the midst of social control from either side of the book.

    Cut back to the “Hard Headed” Finney grapples with social control and the public figured who carried positions of power to decide the fate of many. In Left, Plunder and The Condoleezza Suite she takes on Bush and Condoleza Rice, illuminating the overlapping crisis of domestic war on the black community,  environmental devastation, and foreign invasions in a country with a legacy of violence and white supremacy handed down through generations of bumbling white men.   

Finney explores what it means to wield personal power in the face all of this structural oppression in the imagery of knives through out the collection:

    “She understands sharpness & duty.  She knows what a blade can reveal & destroy.  She has come to use life’s points and edges to uncover life’s treasures. She would rather be the one deciding what she keeps and what she throws away.”

Unlike Bush she is decisive and definitive about how to reach the treasures of life and defines them quite in the opposite manner, begging the question, what is treasure, what is the measure of value in a nation of such social control?