WORDS by LILY LADY
The epigraph of Big Money Porno Mommy—a new poetry collection by Catherine Weiss—reads: “I know writers who use subtext and they’re all cowards.”
The line comes from the series Garth Marenghi’s Darkplace. To cite a British horror parody TV show as the opening gambit of one’s poetry collection feels like a playful challenge. It asks the reader to expand their potentially high fault in expectations for capital-P Poetry, and the quote itself reads as a provocation.
Turning the first page, one feels compelled to think, okay, this author is going to tell it to me straight.
An immediate next thought (one that I had, at least) is: do I even want that from a poetry collection?
The answer is, I’m not so sure.
This tension—between appreciating candidness and yearning for a less direct approach—undergirds an easy read of Big Money Porno Mommy. The argumentation inherent in the epigraph is an admirable stance, yet tramples upon the potential superpower of subtext by creating a false binary: subtext=cowardly / directness=bravery.
So where does a good poem land in all of this?
In Weiss’s collection, the answer is: all over the place. Big Money Porno Mommy is strewn with poems that will make you laugh and others that will take your breath away. Some of the strongest poems are, in fact, the most direct.
Others are so direct that they lose any subtlety. A few lines in “Menace” read “now i know not to walk into the woods/with drunk men who hate me. but i knew then, too.” A few lines from “Bully” read “there is no story of us. i know you/loved to hurt me. i can see you’re still trying.” These are sentiments universal enough to be relatable to many readers scorned by past lovers/abusers, but generic to the point of losing any oomph.
Conversely, “I Thought You Were Giving Me Flowers,” is framed by an interaction “you are a lightly supervised child/planted directly in the path to my table” with whom the narrator thinks is handing them a fistful of bluets. Instead, the child is prodding the narrator’s belly “and demanding ‘what’s that.’” The piece takes the reader on an elliptical journey through time. It uses—dare I say it—subtext to suggest that the narrator’s decision not to have children is directly intertwined not only with their body, but also the lasting impact of the aforementioned challenging relationship.
Weiss’s strong suit is delivering a sucker punch to the heart even in poems packed with levity and humor. “I Bet I’m Going To Complete My Life-Cycle At A Denny’s” builds to a crescendo of “...I traded my motherness for a lifetime/of restaurant food. Why is it so hard to keep choosing/my life?” The line breaks here and elsewhere evidence a distinct agility and comfort inside the poetic form.
Indeed, Weiss’s work harmonizes vocabularic accessibility with a skillful mastery of form. Containing pantoum, contrapuntal, and a piece that visually represents a dissociative fugue, Weiss displays major poetic chops without ever coming across as flashy, stuffy or (worst of all) overly academic.
At the end of the day, maybe that’s what the epigraph is trying to convey. Maybe I’m reading too much into it. Maybe I’m bristling too hard at an epigraph as a framing device for a collection that doesn’t need such overt framing, since the poems are doing the work themselves. Whatever the case, Big Money Porno Mommy is a collection worth reading before you complete your next lifecycle, whether at a Denny’s or elsewhere.