Slut Songs Jade Hurter Hyacinth Girl Press, 2017 I sat down to read Slut Songs (Hyacinth Girl Press, 2017), Jade Hurter’s poetry chapbook, in the days between Dr. Christine Blasey Ford’s testimony before the Senate Judiciary Committee and that committee’s vote to move the nomination of Judge Brett Kavanaugh to the Senate floor for confirmation to the United States Supreme Court. Dr. Blasey Ford gave a moving and credible account of sexual assault allegations against Judge Kavanaugh; Judge Kavanaugh issued a vitriolic denial (displaying more vitriol than a female would ever be permitted to engage in in such a setting); and the Republican-led Judiciary Committee seemed poised to push through a vote on Judge Kavanough. The female anger that had been building since news about Harvey Weinstein’s pattern of sexual harassment broke one year ago began to boil over. Two survivors of sexual assault cornered Senator Jeff Flake in an elevator and demanded: “Look at me when I’m talking to you!” This is the moment in which I read Hurter’s lyrical exploration of love, sex, and loss and the complications and risks inherent to living in a sexual body. Slut Songs sings unabashedly about sex. These poems examine the coming apart of a sexually intimate relationship, explore how sex can be used for both intimacy and forgetting, and trace the ways sexual trauma lingers after the fact. They express a woman’s sexual joy (“I liked how you fucked me / with our foreheads touching, // breathing into / each others’ mouths”) and pain (“He hit me and it tore / a sickle-shape into morning // He hit me / and I knew — ”). Hurter allows her speaker to be a complex and complicated sexual being who likes to “suck dick” when it’s a chosen act of intimacy and must “beg for it to stop” when it’s forced on her. That is, she’s a sexual person who wants to express her desires in spite of dangers that face a sexual woman in the world. She’s a speaker I didn’t know I so desperately needed to hear from until I read these poems. Hurter explores many of the complications of love and sex in the title poem “Slut Song” which swings between a “once” and a “now.” “[o]nce” her speaker says “it rained petals in our garden / tea singing in the kitchen / our skin rough with soil”. These lines are romantic, idealized, feminine — the petals, the tea in a cozy kitchen. But that tenderness belongs to a past because “now i grow thorns / and crystallize / you could cut your palms / on my pelvic bone / now i am bleeding meltwater”. The images of growing thorns and crystallizing speaks to a need for protection against physical and emotional intimacy, the way a survivor will protect herself after an assault. This movement between “once” and “now” appears in “Violet” as well: “once I covered you with cattails / and a bittern got caught in my hair. // Now, I dig leaves / from beneath my skin.” These poems demonstrate how the speaker and her relationship to intimacy have been changed. This is the dark truth of sexual assault — it throws its shadow over the survivor’s sexual relationships, both those in the present and those in the future. This is how a woman can carry a trauma for thirty-five years, because the trauma is there in her own body that she cannot get rid of. This lingering is on display in the poem “gift.” It opens in the generosity and trust inherent to mutual sexual pleasure — “i am giving you my body” — but quickly turns to something uglier “like dead egret / like fish carcass like open oyster leaking salt / … / the skin will bloat with water you will turn away”. For the speaker, loss and mistrust have become entwined with sex and the sexual body. The tangled aftermath of sexual assault is beautifully, astonishingly presented in the poem “self-portrait, age nineteen.” Is beautiful a surprising word to use to describe a poem that opens with the lines “with a dick down my throat that is not yours / the boy is pushing me down it is like being drowned”? Perhaps. But it is a beautiful poem; just listen to those repeated sounds of down, down drowned, the perfect beat of with a dick down my throat. This poem isn’t just “brave” or “raw,” it’s crafted and sprinkled with sharp imagery like “your lips bright candy under the streetlight” and “now you’re near me like a specter”. It’s a poem I wish I had written myself — possibly the greatest compliment one poet can give another. “self-portrait, age nineteen” moves from the violence of force to a memory of tenderness, “how you were the only person i trusted to touch my hair / while i went down on you how after sex i liked to suck your dick / until you came again and i would fall asleep between your legs / with the taste of you in my mouth / holding on to both your hands”, and manages to hold both of these moments honestly on the same page. This is Hurter’s extraordinary accomplishment and the central dilemma of surviving sexual assault — how to reclaim that glory and trust in the act of sexual intimacy after it has been shattered through the violence and erasure of sexual assault. Slut Songs is a testament to that journey, to a woman’s desire to reclaim sex, intimacy, trust, and joy in her own body in the aftermath of violation and loss. Slut Songs is accomplished poetry and necessary reading, especially now. It demands, “Look at me when I’m talking to you!” Visit Hyacinth Girl Press' Website

Glass: A Journal of Poetry is published monthly by Glass Poetry Press.
All contents © the author.