“Lady Smith”: No Prince Charmings Here https://ift.tt/fBi7Nl2
There are few literary takedowns of the straight American man as scathing as Texas Tech University Professor Jess Smith’s poetry collection, Lady Smith. The amorphous co-stars in each one of her poetic scenes never fail to disappoint in Smith’s writing about bedding and observing and fleeing men.
This isn’t a screed against one man: “is a man named Matthew, a man named Andrew, a man named James,” she writes in “Two Truths & a Lie.” It is almost a tragic comedy in free verse, each scene foiling the intensity of her erotic pleasures or childish tenderness with the absurdity of a man she loves. “At least I was a good horse,” Smith writes in the poem “The Natural World” about one lover’s penchant for outdoor sex near smelly animals.
There’s the deadbeat judging teenage girls at the tennis club, although he himself has never been a champion; the wanton old men at the high-end steak house flirting with waitresses; the fathers that abandon their wives but can’t outrun self-sabotage; the youthful bucks who are all teeth and tears. There is no Prince Charming in this book about romance.
At best, her poems are a heart-wrenching whirlwind, like “Gather,” or sardonic and self-effacing, like “Dental Office Erotica” or “Ode to Stairmaster”:
Thank you for making me hotter
in the loneliest way […]
If T-Pain
could see me, he’d be into it […]
I owe it all to you, Stairmaster. Don’t
give up on me now. I’m not even close.
In contrast, “Gather” is more rhythmic than narrative, the timeline swirling in reverse from the moment a probation officer calls about an abusive ex, through memories of a vagabond romance across the United States, then landing back at the first moment the troubled lovers meet like Dorothy crash-landing in the land of Oz. The short, staccato phrases and fragments flow effortlessly with a perfect ratio of visceral imagery and sensations.
There is a lot of pain in this collection, describing broken relationships and alcoholic parents, abusive lovers and solitude, poverty and sickness. You may get the sense that writing these poems was the author’s ladder out of a dark pit. Her sarcastic explorations of lust and desire echo with the wisdom of an older sister who has been around the block. You may oscillate between relating to her experiences and marveling at them, depending on your own history. Few poets are so skillful at describing the cognitive dissonance of living inside an objectified female body.
“You have an ass like a sunrise,” a lecherous customer tells her in “Bells Will Ring.”
“Abscess, slapped cheek, cherry bomb, wine. Queen Victoria was the first to wear white” — she continues contrasting images of being a waitress in Washington D.C. with legends of knights and royalty: “Silk satin thicker than bone, a tiara with tips like teeth.”
It’s not only the poor or middle-class men from coast to coast who fall short of deserving women’s solar posterior, but also the ruling class of the capital.
Femininity becomes a double-edged sword without a hilt in these scenes. However, as she panders to men for tips or kisses or validation or excitement, the poet also lambasts herself with the same blade. After all, who is more foolish? The fool or the woman who knowingly follows him? “I liked my tight little costume,” she brags.
The fact that the poet dedicated this book to her mother offers yet another twist of the knife. These poems are both an exhumation of generational trauma and a declaration of self-love, an insistence on being horny and hopeful and vivacious instead of weeping, no matter what happened. There is no golden triumph, but there is self-awareness at the base of that evocative, verbose rainbow, an acknowledgment of “what I was willing to do to feel safe.”
In the final poem, “On Earth,” Smith explores the feelings associated with giving birth to her son. The pregnancy coincides with her father’s demise, an emotionally complicated passing. Wishing to hold her father close, instead the poet pressed a hand to her own swelling belly, “which was also a way of holding myself,” she writes. Her son’s future is unpredictable; his character unknown. Will the next generation of men have more virtue? Hope twinkles on the horizon. The all-consuming love she feels for her baby boy is the “answer,” rather than the open question so many other passions left her nursing like a tender wound. She finds gravity and faith in anchoring herself to the wish that her son will remember her after her own death, infusing every bit of her inspiration into each motherly touch. The poet’s final words remind us all that love is fleeting, so we must soak up every drop of it and close our eyes to savor each moment, even when it hurts.
Lady Smith
Jess Smith
The University of Akron Press
Published April 8, 2025
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