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Whore
Sarah Maclay
University of Tampa Press
ISBN Number: 1879852969
Reviewer: Collin Kelley
In 1991, Ken Russell’s film Whore caused such an uproar that newspapers refused to run advertising. This led to the ads being altered by putting a large black box over the offending title, but with a new tag line: “if you’re afraid to say it…just see it."
More than a decade later, there is still something a tad shocking about the word, although movies, television, and media are filled with profanity that make the word whore seem genteel by comparison. Sarah Maclay’s first collection of poetry is simply titled Whore, and my advice is this: if you’re afraid to say it…just read it.
Winner of the Tampa Review Prize for Poetry, Whore is an astonishing first collection. While other critics have compared her play of shadows and light to Frank O’Hara, there is very little in this volume that reminds me of his New York parade of pop culture. Instead, Maclay takes the city of Los Angeles head-on and plunges into its darkest places. With the city of angels as a canvas, she allows herself to re-examine past losses in ways that recall David Lynch’s film Mulholland Drive.
Maclay gives a cinematic approach to almost every line of poetry included in this slim volume. In “Formerly Washington Boulevard," she paints a simple, but haunting image of a mural of two women painted on the side of a building. One of the women covers half her face, but one eye seems to be trained directly on the narrator, piercing her soul. “This is the way to see why it looks to see the thing in front of you./This is way it looks to see what’s coming."
In “Street Without Street Lamps," the writer asks the reader to “reject this moment" when the moon returns and casts its clichéd romantic glow. “Give me, instead, the long twilit sky/that makes the tree line ripple,/branches blackening into a kind of night,/hallucinating a boundary, a name."
Maclay’s poetry dips in and out of surrealism-- confounding you with one line and making you catch your breath in the next. In some work, Maclay seems to be parting a veil to give a deeper glimpse into something that has more forbidding undertones.
In “What ‘I’ Dream To Save ‘Myself’," the writer has come on some kind of trip (although I couldn’t help thinking she was arriving at a poetry workshop) and meets an old friend who wears her new superior attitude as if she’s “come to a costume ball." While trying to decide which room to choose, she picks up on the vibe of former inhabitants: “It is as though a kind of hope has been scorched there" and then “It is an illusion, but I have to admit/it is beautiful/and you are not even here."
In the title poem, Maclay traces the word whore back to the Latin meaning of “dear"; but also charity. “As in loved one, sweetheart precious,/as in rare -- therefore expensive, dear,/ cher, cheri, a luxury,/when given freely/pitting charity against law."
Maclay’s minimalist approach to poetry takes the art form back to its truest practice: using a modicum of words to express love and loss in all its fleeting, and mysterious, beauty.
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