On Lynn Melnick’s Landscape with Sex and Violence
— Andrew Sargus Klein
There’s been an on-again, off-again conversation in the literary world (you know, Twitter) about poetry reviews—do we need more of them, do we need more critical appraisals, why are we writing them in the first place, etc. It’s a good conversation, one without a clear conclusion.
From my small corner of the world, what resonates for me are values of generosity, inquiry, and respect. That might seem a little mushy, but the stakes are not. How we talk about the art we make might not be as important as the art itself, but it comes pretty damn close. The responsibilities that inform one’s basic humanity don’t disappear in critique and analysis because there is no vacuum for art; as such, there is no vacuum for talking about art.
Rosebud Ben-Oni's two-part review of Lynn Melnick’s poetry collection Landscape with Sex and Violence takes on the duel-role of looking inside the work in question and looking outside at a certain response to it. Ben-Oni found an egregiously ungenerous (in other words, shitty and sexist) review of Landscape with Sex and Violence and wove a response within the review itself.
Case in point: Lynn Melnick takes on the patriarchy within her work, and we then witness how fragile the veneers of the patriarchy. Someone took her book very personally; someone didn’t like it.
Let me explain.
The review in question is short (233 words, including a correction I’ll get to in a minute) and has no byline. We don’t know anything about the author other than their response, and the anonymity has the unfortunate and immediate parallel with the internet’s unceasing flood of nameless misogyny and violence. Accountability has never been so important and so lacking.
What happens when she speaks from such a landscape like rape culture, a landscape she did not create, a landscape to which she never agreed, but nevertheless one that she must confront?
What happens is this: the patriarchy does not listen to her, or seriously consider her point-of-view. The patriarchy figures out a way to make itself heard when she ignores the rules—which are always his rules.
What is so infuriating about the review is how it shrugs off the realities the poems spring from, as if this were a mental exercise, maybe a bit of speculative literature. The critique pointed at the triggering reality, not the poems themselves and found it unconvincing. The correction is particularly cutting:
Correction: This review has been updated so as not to conflate the poet and the speaker of the poems.
That correction speaks to the laziness and unseriousness of the review and the surrounding culture from which it sprang. I’ll save you the rest of my anger, because Ben-Oni brings it much clearer than I—and even in the voicing of my anger I’ve yet to point out what should be the central point: this collection of poetry looks wonderful and important and necessary. That it seems more so because a shit review should be unnecessary. But here we are.