Milk & Filth

Populated by female figures from Phaedra to Lolita, Baba Yaga to Joan Rivers, a 16th-century female pirate to Guadalupe, Giménez Smith’s fourth collection can feel like showing up to the raucous and deviant afterparty of Judy Chicago’s “Dinner Party.” While this book’s relationship to history, myth, and narrative is destabilized—determined by a speaker whose “I/eye […] turned out to be the most elusive quality” where “me is a pastiche/ of learned gesture”—and while a postmodern sense of irony, pastiche, and comedy are at the heart Giménez Smith’s aesthetics, the poems demand a return to the material, the bodily, to where “scars are radical exposition.” With her brazen and mordant voice, Giménez Smith generously deploys physical—often violent—imagery to challenge classist, consumerist, and socially polite forms of feminism in the interest of “all the bodies strewn over history and semi-emerging from the earth.” Departing from “a feral/ undergrowth that marks/ me as burial site” Giménez Smith traverses fable, manifesto, and the lyrical to exhume the familial, cultural, intellectual, and artistic inheritances at work in and on the poet. Frequently invoking the work of Ana Mendieta, Giménez Smith also takes the body, takes sex “and put[s] it everywhere,” offers “an illegible surge/ of leaving trace/ of self en route,” and engages “audience/ and documentation/ from every vista, each atom/ as witness and cohort.” (Oct.)