As part of the arc of autobiographical American poetry, Mag Gabbert’s academic-press debut is a chiseled, yet tender self-portrait across lyric poems that skate around finalities and resonate through intersecting images, vignettes, and emotions. In this way, Gabbert’s heartfelt, jagged, and impressive poetry marks a departure from confessionalism’s origins in landed insight: Plath’s epiphanies, Lowell’s exposures, or later, Sharon Olds’ disclosures. Rather, Gabbert’s approach feels in transit and younger, piercing, and curious, accumulating, and in process. Sex Depression Animals leaves you with a strong sense of her fierce yet careful voice, a lived female experience that’s sexy and introspective, with a keen vocabulary playful with the explorative scalpel of language, her craft.
Gabbert’s feminine “I” portrays a difficult growing up, one that leaves scars but also builds toward fractured wisdom. Gabbert’s absent father, in a poem called “Crack,” is revealed as a crackhead. The fact that Gabbert plays with this word, and mines the etymology of “crack” as well as across similar sounding words of “[c]rack’s siblings,” exemplifies her direct yet playful approach to resonance more than telling. In the next two poems in this collection, she shows herself vaguely during lovemaking as absent from that scene, in a way. Then in an elegy for her uncle who died in his early 40s, she says, “I can think about permanence as I turn toward decay.”
Gabbert’s approach to the lyric poem is creative at the level of language even while tragic or harmed at the level of story, and it strikes me as a form of wit. While comparing Gabbert’s wit to John Donne is beyond the scope of this review, Gabbert layers associations in a moving manner that both delves deeper and creates space. So, her wit develops self-knowledge and yet leaves room for escape or play. Her elasticity contains the humor. In this way she compares to Donne’s more tightly controlled analogies, or figures, which elucidate a matter at hand and yet range beyond it. Let us not also forget that Donne too was a salacious love poet. In the end, Gabbert’s wit on the page feels bodily, sensual and physical, much like two of the three words in the book’s title. Her poetic voice often is quite alone, yet the door is open for us to experience.
In terms of Gabbert’s experimentalism, a sequence of short lyrics under the title, “The Breakup,” offer an inventive form. The sequence expresses more the feeling afterward than the specific story. This works because, let’s face it, most of us can relate without the detail. It’s an atmospheric approach to the poem and the topic. “The Breakup” begins with one line, and then pulls downward only parts out of the phrase, to create narrative resonance. So cool! Here’s an excerpt:
remembering the sensation of his hands, my spine shivers
hespins
meinahive
Overall, Gabbert’s Sex Depression Animals offers not a poetry of finalities, but experiences. It’s also a journey toward greater maturity. I enjoyed its bitterness and joy. The poetry is at times feral (animals), lively and sexual (sex), and often solitary even in interactions (depression), and thus enacts the book’s title. If this poet’s solitude is quiet depression, but not desperation, it involves not a looking away from, but a hard looking into, what hurts and what helps and what haunts. Her depression—if that is where some of these emotions began—is a form of self-reflection and realism. Gabbert is no stranger to those who struggle, whether her own father, herself at times, or those in some of the book’s fraught romantic entanglements.
Returning to that elegy for her uncle, “Tattoo,” the poet leaves at the end with a tattoo that reminds the poet of her uncle. No one else of course would know that. So, it hints at the backstory we bring into adulthood. Further, it signals the work required to move from strangers to friendship as adults. Part of Gabbert’s alone voice here involves the large backstory she carries with her. It’s palpable in the vignettes addressing it, and palpable even when not addressed.
Vermont poet Diana Whitney, in Electric Literature, says in her recent review, “Underneath the strange allure of Sex Depression Animals is a fierce rejection of patriarchal structures, a reclamation of bodily autonomy and sexual power.” I agree—especially if referring to a feminine centering of her own story and her own gaze as the controlling and welcoming “I” of this poetry. In fact, Gabbert’s visceral approach to lyric poetry does not reject sexuality, including its reciprocal relations. Several powerful poems in the collection deal with sexual, conventional, and romantic relationships from fumbling adolescence to more choosy adulthood. Like the lyric poet Jack Gilbert’s “I” is certainly a male speaker, so too Gabbert’s “I” is a female speaker. Both poets let us in. Without doubt, I look forward to more Gabbert’s work.
Sex Depression Animals, by Mag Gabbert. Columbus, Ohio: Mad Creek, March 2023. 84 pages. $16.95, paper.
G.H. Mosson is the author of two books and three chapbooks of poetry, including Family Snapshot as a Poem in Time (Finishing Line Press 2019). His poetry has appeared in Tampa Review, Evening Street Review, Smartish Pace, and The Hollins Critic, and been nominated four times for the Pushcart Prize. He has an MA from the Johns Hopkins Writing Seminars and an MFA in poetry from New England College. An attorney and writer, Mosson enjoys raising his children, hiking, and literary endeavors. For more, seek ghmosson.com.
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