Louisville, KY: Sarabande Books, 2019. 80 pages. $15.95.
The title of Ann Townsend’s playful, melancholic third collection, Dear Delinquent, is taken from the pet name Edna St. Vincent Millay deployed when writing to one of her many lovers, in this case Salomón de Selva. Perhaps “pet name” seems too playful a term for a sobriquet as sobering as “delinquent,” but Townsend’s collection, like much of Millay’s, is rife with tension between levity and destruction. Townsend’s speakers suffer the same spring fever as many of Millay’s, the same lust that is somehow insatiable and simultaneously disposable. Truly exploring the contradictions of the term sweet-nothing, the address delinquent and its many synonyms recur throughout these pages, helping to construct a delicious sense of misbehavior. Our speaker meets lovers in cars, houses, and a string of hotel rooms. But, as with any rule-breaking, consequence lurks loudly in the corners. In the titular poem, the lover—the delinquent—even refers back to the speaker as disaster:
Dear disaster, he said to me,
tossing my shirt across the roomwhere the doorknob deftly
caught it.
Many of the poems hover in these prelude-to-lovemaking moments, musing on the pleasures of pre-pleasure. Hotel rooms are “dimmed / and softened. Illicit.” Straps are “eased” from shoulders, satin “aslide” against the torso while the lover watches from a chair, his “legs asprawl.” The speaker is herself a lover with an air of self-assurance, fully in possession of her sexual powers—at one point she reminds the reader that these encounters are “[m]emorable for him.” Only occasionally do we see the speaker falter, or worry the pleasures she has to offer are not enough. Millay often evoked a similar attitude, a throaty lust followed by a tinkling and uncertain dismissal of the object of lust. We sense, in this uncertainty, the speaker’s worry that her desire owns her more than it owns the object of her desire. Sex is both gathering and undoing.
The silken whispers of illicit moments stolen in cars and hotel rooms give way to the panic of deceit. In “Pitch Standard,” the lover hangs up on the speaker to return to his wife, the dial tone announcing “the dark business of failed // connection. Busy, it said / being married to someone else.” Townsend is constantly meditating on the ways we connect to each other, and how we can sometimes imitate connection without actually achieving it. The excitement of banter, of secrets, of kissification (according to the epigraph, Catullus’s word for “an utterly unreasonable number of kisses”), gives way to the realities of separation. Once the lover leaves the hotel room, we are once again alone. It is no mistake that Townsend often ends her poems with this departure, such that we as readers are also left longing to return to the full sensation of the lust, the lover, the betrayal. The speaker’s lover leaves the speaker as the speaker leaves us.
This is not to say that the speakers in Dear Delinquent lament their solitude so much as observe it with curiosity. Life is pain, yes, but life is also a romp, a sex comedy set to the tune of female poets who have come before. Millay’s is not the only voice Townsend invokes here, opening the collection with a poem inspired by medieval poet Beatriz de Dia, later including lines from French poet Louise Labé. Townsend is inviting her reader into a long and polyvocal history of devotion and excess, a sensual advance and retreat. It seems undecided, at times, if these voices keep the speaker company during her perceived solitude, or if she is tracing their shared restlessness, working to reveal that hers is not the only—or even the most—reckless heart.
The poems are mostly formally tight and controlled, the predominantly short-lined couplets and tercets rarely extending beyond a page. One of Townsend’s great talents, though, is that despite these corseted formal choices, the overall effect of the book is a kind of plunging. We are submerged in longing. This longing is not always romantic, either, but it is always sensual. While avoiding formal expansiveness, Townsend explores the desire not to have a child, the ambivalence of ending a pregnancy, and the intricate intersections of eroticism and violence. For example, in the staccato and dynamic “A Unified Berlin,” a Junior Minister tells the speaker “When you are the victim . . . // it doesn’t matter who is killing you.” On the very next page, a speaker meditates on a bruised foot as the only connection to having been injured, lamenting “how bored I am / without pain as proof.” Townsend is deepening the shade of the book here, taking us beyond the love-affair-romp and into questions about kinds of violence and their consequences. Like the best poets, she does not offer answers so much as inquiries. A delinquent lover, a felonious heart—what good can come of these? What is the cost of pleasure? Whom are we harming when we seek to thrill ourselves? As readers, we become obsessed with stimulation alongside the speaker, who is forever seeking out her next illicit fix.
While Millay’s voice rings loudest in these poems, there are also hints of Anne Carson, of Sappho, and even a line that directly recalls Anne Sexton. Townsend is a poet who is able to identify—and even thrive within—the liminal space between erotic praise and despair. In one of the book’s final poems, “June Bug,” Townsend writes of being hung up on by a lover when his wife arrives home. The speaker stares at a picture of herself with the lover as a way of self-soothing, imagining him still speaking to her:
It’s okay, I’m back: his voice,
at last, its warm enclosure.No, that’s a lie.
There is no photograph.
Not of us. Not together.
This ending is emblematic of the quiet wrenching Townsend so often performs as her poems come to a close. She seems to be reminding the reader that when we enter into love, whether it be delinquent or not, we enter with the dual acceptance of heartache. No one gets out alive, as they say. Though Townsend’s book is rife with longing, infidelity, deaths large and small, the reader still comes away with a sense of pleasure—ease, even. Springtime blooms in Townsend’s stanzas, and she invites us to lie in the grass with her for a while, to favor the scent of honeysuckle over the faint whiff of rot that always comes with it.