Shame Is an Ocean I Swim Across happens to have been written by Mary Lambert, a musical artist my baby queer self latched onto, so seeing a poetry book by her at the library was really cool. So of course I immediately checked it out.
A lot of Lambert's poems in this book are about her experiences with sexual assault and how she copes with it and the pressure she faces from record labels to write music that's guaranteed to be “a hit” instead of what she Wants to write. I find her poems around the topics to grow repetitive, which is slow to read but relatable as a fellow traumatized poet.
Lambert injects a lot of feeling through imagery and word choice, and there were a few poems that got me crying. I find the line breaks in numerous of her poems to be broken on awkward words. “The” was among those words, and it was one of the most frequent offenders. It felt like the line was being broken just to keep the poem looking small and uniform in physical line length on the page. These breaks broke the flow of the poem and I didn't find keeping the poem a uniform shape to enhance the experience at all.
Below, I'll analyze one of my favorite poems from the book. I flipped to it randomly, knowing I could trust the spirits of chaos to a poem I Needed, and lo and behold,
My Friends and I Were in a Ninety-Mile-an-Hour Collisionand we should have died. it's real what they say, everything flies around you in slow motion, lights blinding, sound as an aftermath, and is that my voice screaming or hers. all i felt was the shooting pain up and down my leg, she stayed with me sitting in the passenger's side and doesn't remember. I cried like I was reborn with blood on my hair, i thought i lost her then, i never lost her and now i cant forget her, she sat on the curb as i tried to make bad jokes we found out she had a concussions but i truly don't know how to explain that when the car hit us i thought i was the crumpled metal too that i was the weight of the engine on our bodies, was the torture of high school all compiled into one really loud scream, i didn't even know my voice made sounds like that
First off, I love how the title of the poem also functions as the first line of a poem. English major nerd comment: Try reading this poem out loud. It hits different compared to reading it silently, especially a fast-paced, visceral poem like this. This poem does line breaks the best out of all of Lambert's work in this book. I chose to read it as a prose poem (as I believe was the intention.) A prose poem means that the poem forgoes line breaks to focus on the other details of the poem. The poem is about a violent car crash, and without line breaks, it reads like a stream of consciousness—the rushing electric thoughts you feel when you're in a near death experience like that (can relate.) This shines especially well in the second half of the poem starting at “she sat on the curb," when Lambert ditches all punctuation and it feels like the panic of recalling events where you and your loved ones almost died.
The tone of the poem encapsulates that feeling of panic as well. It's like Lambert recalled these events as she wrote the poem and rode out the pain until it was written—like the only Artistic Flourish was the line “I cried like I was reborn with blood on my hair,” as noted by the only capitalized “I”s in the whole poem—and then had to step aside to let all the emotion come down, because really things like that Keep Happening and that's why there's no period at the end of the poem. That sentence doesn't end. The car crash didn't stop happening.
Overall, I enjoyed the book. It was really cool to see a poem book written by queer woman so influential to me in my late teens and early twenties. I'd rate her book, uh, 3.5/5 stars. I'm not good at star ratings, so I make my own system, or deal with it, or something. If you see the book at your local library or enjoy Mary Lambert's music, I recommend giving this book a peeksie.
Ok that's enough from me for now. It's like, 4AM lolsob. Amos, Viv, and Gabriel Orev ASHEL out!