I’ve written before about Hanging Loose Press, and among its new publications is Karen Locascio’s May All My Wounds Be Mortal. She’s the first winner of the Ron Schreiber Memorial Award—Ron was a professor at UMass Boston, where Karen received her MFA, and where I was lucky to have her as my student. I had the gift of watching the germ of her book develop in workshop, then grow into her MFA thesis, and now flourish in print. Along with her personal experience, Locascio has captured part of the zeitgeist in Mortal’s unsparing dissection of a love triangle formed by passion, obsession, and rage.
I was thinking of responses in the New York Times, The New Yorker, and NPR to Jill Soloway’s Amazon series I Love Dick. Soloway toggles the hinge between female desire and creativity among characters projecting their ardor on an aloof artist who becomes both muse and scourge. Anyone fascinated by Soloway’s explorations will find Locascio’s book mesmerizing.
As in I Love Dick—and as with any human behavior—obsession gets reinforced when everybody’s doing it. A section of the long poem addressed to her lover’s other girlfriend, “Letters to Her,” begins, “I used to take the bus past his window…for months…hoping I would find him gone,” and ends, “…when he tells me he sat in his car outside my apartment…it worries me ‘cause I know he used to do this to you.” In the ghazal “He Speaks (He Casts Me in My Own Poem),” Locascio’s object of desire lobs her incendiary images back at her: “I’m fine, don’t worry about me. I’m fire, a matchbook flare, a dare I dare you to take/one more time. I’m fine; fine. I’m the lime at the bottom of the Corona. I’m hunky-dory,” and “I’m a midnight blue sky being full-mooned by life, pocked with stars not scars like yours./Your scars…you’re scars and dive bars and strings of twinkling lights, to me. True story.”
Money and class figure into the “true story” of May All My Wounds Be Mortal as keenly as the dynamics between men and women. Locascio is a renter whose “apartment leans on an angle”; her lover owns a condo. He drives while she takes the T. Locascio’s a student; her older lover has “a job and a mortgage.” The third point of the triangle is a woman with “plastic to burn.” She makes “demands on his wardrobe and behavior,” and has “maddening confidence/in their future together.” It’s hard not to connect one with the other. Certain people are marriage material, “…pocked with stars not scars,” while others are vulnerable, volatile, and ride the bus. May All My Wounds Be Moral scrutinizes class issues along with the psychological and sexual boundaries framing what society calls “love.”