It's clear what Newport Beach native/San Clemente resident Stephanie Brown is risking in her first book, Allegory of the Supermarket: being thought an asshole. There's a streak of mean running through these poems as wide as the 405 freeway. Compared to the risks of being thought obscure, sentimental, archaic, sensationalistic or too formal, her path arguably requires the most courage. If other poets fail in taking these risks, we fault the poems; if Brown fails, we fault the person.
But with such extraordinary risk comes the potential for extraordinary reward, and in this book, Brown succeeds much more than she fails, rewarding the reader with a sizzling sensibility that eviscerates hypocrisy and all things cloyingly warm and fuzzy. And along the way, it provides poems, stanzas and lines that lyrically transcend satire and social criticism.
The title poem is a list of items in a supermarket as seen through the eyes of someone achingly aware of the delusions and fetishes beneath the bright displays and waxed surfaces—the modern supermarket as a cornucopia of toxic plenty, “Day-Glo death,/Potato death,/Death of strawberry./Death strapped into a handi-six-pack,/Death in vodka, scotch, the vitamin-fortified cigarette cough. . . . Darling: the non-world-yellow cheese.” The last line is a weary apocalyptic apostrophe: “No dignity, my darling,/in these last three hours of the world.”
The darling in the poem might be the speaker's lover, spouse or child, but it could just as well be an invitation to the reader to join this sensibility as an exclusive member. It's a rare note of affection in a book that is hard on everything it elicits. Indeed, in these poems, hatefulness almost attains the status of an aesthetic. For anyone who wanted to vaporize someone with a phrase, this book is a put-downer's field guide. The targets include hippies, drug hype (prescription and nonprescription) and body vanity: “But she is there every day, at every gym,/At every yoga studio, at every YMCA,/Gazing at the shelves inside the Vitamin place/Walking slowly walking forever down the bicycle path,/A gargoyle for the Age of the Physically Fit” (from “A Gargoyle”). She also addresses pop culture—”what's the next fad in publishing after Co-Dependency?/It was a category of men who don't want to be success objects/we decided” (from “Chapter One”)—as well as the questionable quest for alternative realities, poor taste, commercialism, modern living, consumerism and sentimentality.
I'm tempted to sum them all up in a word: California—or more specifically, Southern California. But the more you read these poems, the more you realize the extent to which Southern California reflects the national sensibility as well as contributes to it, and there is in these poems, among the thorns and barbs, a sickness unto death with it all.
The poem in this volume that comes closest to expressing the sickness is “Reading True Crime Stories,” which traces the sad and idiotic trajectory of typical American teenage boys as revealed in newspaper stories:
“I'm driving a fast car out of control./Frustrating, how they lose./Their life was one big dunno./Failure. Failure. A drum roll./They raise rabbits or live with a girl or get a career in electronics./The clock ticks./They had a friend until the friend split./Their parents loved them, the books gather./The clock ticks./The child must drive his car too fast from this disaster, to a ditch./Must overdrive the police into the orchard, where the body's hit./Must fall from the dance marathon into the gutter./Those dreams where you run and run and run and run and run/and run.”
At first, the poem seems all mean-spirited exaggeration, like a few of the others. But then it occurred to me that almost every guy I knew growing up either wrecked a car or landed in jail—or both—and it is disturbingly predictable that around prom time, every newspaper in the country features a story about a fatal accident involving a carload of teenagers, each with documented promise, wherein the only drunk person was the teenage boy at the wheel.
The note that Brown most often sounds in this book is a weariness with reflexive living and all the icons and hype that encourage this dumb national trance, the “one big dunno.” The thrust of many of these poems, particularly those in the “Gargoyles” section, follows the line of “Don't you hate people who . . ?” Brown never attacks specific people or groups, which is both a virtue and a weakness in many of the poems. If you've never experienced or been especially irritated by the behaviors she savages, you might want to know how she came to feel this way. The poem “Warm, Fuzzy,” for example, takes on the “Soft, furry, cuddly people,/People who cry,/People who cry at the end of everything.” As the poem develops, it delves into the motives for this behavior: “Crying, do-gooding, freaked-out fuzzy people/Are not gentle, don't get me wrong./They want your life, your swordlike decision making,/Your ability to move on,/And fuzzy-wuzzy tearful eyes can see things, after all./They covet your health, and they steal your dreams,/Replicate your floor-plans, your DNA, your recipe-with-sour/cream.”
Much as I admire the wit and lyrical discoveries that frequently rise out of these diatribes, I nevertheless wonder what happened to the speaker to warrant such viciousness. Many of these poems gamble that the sharpness of the language and lyrical outrageousness will force the reader to suspend doubt about such motives, and for the most part, it's a good bet. In her poem “Schadenfreude,” which refers to a sadistic joy in the mishaps of others, the speaker fantasizes elaborate and cinematic ways the subject of the poem might come to harm: “a knife thuds into your back, let's say,/or an arrow is shot into your ribs/or a razor is pulled across your face/or you trip on a roller skate near the open cellar stairs/or you walk into a sliding glass door/or you are hung from the shower curtain in a plastic white/shower/or you are stabbed with pinking shears/or demoralized with an axe handle.”
The only clue we get about the offense that unleashes this torrent of ill wishes is summed up—summed up in such a vague way that it's humorous—in the parenthetical “(It's the way you've locked your lies up in the closet/that's made me hate you.).”
But the force and accumulation of these curses compel a strange psychic allegiance, perhaps because we all have our own leftover rage, and the reason for it makes no difference. The poem just taps into our own toxic currents and allows them to dissipate harmlessly. In fact, the observations and humor in most of these poems are so extraordinarily wicked that you might be more relieved by them—despite your better self—than alarmed.
The last poem in the book, “Commencement Address,” is a graduation poem in more than one sense: as a reader, you have earned this ritual moment of coming of age within the sensibility that shaped this book. It begins, “I have no more to say about throwing up or causing myself to/get diarrhea there's nothing heroic about it though the movies on/TV want us to endure quietly and cry appropriately.” These poems most certainly do not “endure quietly and cry appropriately.” They adjure readers to shake off this fuzzy reflexive living and command them to do anything but suffer fools—which is not a bad message, darling.
Allegory of the Supermarket: Poems by Stephanie Brown, University of Georgia Press. 91 pages. $15.95 softcover.
