96 pages
Published 2024
Read June 13
Rating: 4 out of 5
This collection of poetry examines gender, queerness, and the boot of the patriarchy planted in the Garden of Eden. That particular God’s pathological need for hierarchy and control clenched tight around its creations, yet Eve slipped out of its grasp. “If you think about it, / we were the first / domestic animals,” Eve confides in Book II of “The Queerness of Eve,” before adding in Book III, “Who became my nickname / for God.”
“The Queerness of Eve” is a stunning achievement all on its own, a twenty page doctrine of defiance and desire. The rest of Nonbinary Bird weaves between mythology and the 2020s, threading desires and defiance into our own quotidian reality of technological alienation, pandemic isolation, for-profit education, changing climate, and the violence of patriarchal control. “There are many / gods,” Phillips writes in “Daphne, Felled,” “to whom one should / never pray. Women especially, / hear me.”
Not to make this review about me (as I do, all too often), but this collection made me frantic to write. I feel that Phillips’ poetic voice is close to what mine aspires to be, especially in poems like “Magical Realism,” “My Gender,” “Pangaea,” and of course “The Queerness of Eve.” I want to write a response to “My Gender” to include in my own forthcoming full-length.
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