Review: Vultures, by Jenny Rockwell

Jenny Rockwell’s debut collection, Vultures, published by Dead Bird Books, is centred around rage. There are moments of tenderness and poems about joy (‘My Dad Asks Me What Queer Joy Is’), but in gothic style, rage against men, against the church and those in it who would deny queer rights, beats at the heart of this. The poems ask stringent, pertinent questions: ‘How come the most holy women in it are recognised for miracles involving their bodies?’ (Questions to the God They Taught Me About / on Conversion Therapy’)

‘after all, is there anything more cannibalistic than holy communion?’ (‘Body of Christ Stuffed in Bras’)

Rockwell’s dark imagery creates a sense of heaviness within the text, which belies some of the simpler repetition used for effect. ‘Love is an 80s Horror’ evokes this with aplomb: ‘they are not glow worms in the dark, wet soil, only yellow droplets of light, pooling in from the wet suburban lamppost. do you want to see my fishhook palms?’ The rage is fierce, tender, lamenting, incandescent and at times loathing, especially toward men. Queer rage spills throughout the collection. But there is a sensibility and forgiveness toward family which is appealing and more nuanced, especially when it looks back on the narrator’s childhood.

‘My mother is just a girl. I am reminded of it as I grow older. I see it, in the way she looks over at us kids laughing about something she does not understand.’ (‘Für meine Mama’)

But the largest, outward message that pours through this book is encapsulated in the last line of the last poem, ‘A Limp-necked Blackbird’: ‘I AM NOT SORRY’. For Nat sitting in the bath legs prickly, bellies rolled laughing into the orange light (we have known each other before) not only a hot wet city intersection glance but a fully fleshed-out, life-together love story we have tended a garden with our dirty hands have washed them clean together in the fountain (at night) have sat together many, many nights as the sky turned slowly pink crickets humming in the dark have held each other’s sticky palms i have soaked your wounds in salt (and you mine) intertwined our bodies in every possible way one leg here, one arm over noses pressed together sharing our breath in the cool, soupy night.