In mid-2022, an extraordinary book of poetry came out—(Vice) Viscera by Willow Loveday Little. This is the kind of book that must be written about and remembered, and I am grateful to The Miramichi Reader for giving space to this review essay, even though Cactus Press released the collection in 2022.
There is much to say about this book—and it is difficult to know where to begin. To follow the often-given advice, I am going to start at the beginning—with the title, as it provides much insight into this most original collection. Wordplay is important to Loveday Little, and that is already clear in the title—and a prescient indication of what is to come. In this volume, the vices of the body, often entwined with the vices of the mind, are played off the viscera, the organs in the main cavities, especially the abdomen. We’re talking about intestines here. And Willow Loveday Little is all about clamping a hand on your guts and making it visceral, whether it’s ascribing words to the indescribable or developing modes of expression for things we either don’t want to see or refuse to see. But once seen, they cannot be unseen—Loveday Little makes sure of that.
“In so many ways, (Vice) Viscera is about the body: how we write our pain on our bodies, through expression, body language, movement.”
In so many ways, (Vice) Viscera is about the body: how we write our pain on our bodies, through expression, body language, movement. And how our bodies, in turn, write pain, loss, destruction through illness, through disability, through diminished well-being. Loveday Little explores both phenomena, writing about what bodies do, how they go wrong, and how the wrong words are used to describe them. While stripping the body, she also husks and shells language, using words we are unaccustomed to, words that break convention, words that question. And while she is husking, shelling and stripping down, she reminds us that structures are not all that matter: there is also the soul. How does it stand up to this process of paring? Does it remain intact? Was it ever? Loveday Little also considers the morphologies imposed by society on the body and ultimately questions their validity. In the end, (Vice) Viscera is a witness to survival, offering guideposts along the way.
The table of contents confirms that the body is on the menu; dominating the poem titles, we find such words as extispicy (divination through inspecting the entrails of sacrificed animals), consumption, amygdala, vena cava, autopsies, scar tissue, hematopoiesis and habeas corpus, literally, “you should have the body”—which Loveday Little unequivocally serves up.
In her opening poem, “On Prefaces,” Loveday Little starts at the beginning, “[B]ut my language is my body/ and my flesh, a morbid intrusion.” The speaker in this poem explores how the restrictions of the body lead to creativity, to eroticism—so that ultimately, “Language fails” and “The body gives up/ what it cannot hold.” Many of Loveday Little’s subsequent poems take this idea of the body giving up what it cannot hold further—and how the poet and her speakers play with language to give the body strength, to make it good.
In her process, Loveday Little also strips and reverses the language of others: “The Diagrammatic and Artistic Representation of Cannibalism and Psychopomps” is a play on the title of an essay by John Venn, “On the Diagrammatic and Mechanical Representation of Propositions and Reasonings.” In this piece, she plays with Venn’s invention of a diagram style that shows the logical relation between sets, and RGB, referring to “red, green and blue” and how they are combined to make different colours. In this poem, language is a kind of foreplay that debunks set theory because, in the speaker’s terms, the soul is part of the equation. In this ten-verse poem, the speaker not only moves beyond being classified as part of schematics, she rejects it outright.
In the prose poem, “Physical Examination,” the poem’s speaker examines her behaviours: cutting teeth, folding guts, smoothing wrinkles, experiencing dropsy, encumbering slumber, and draining fluid and water. Ultimately, through all of this, the speaker wants to make it through: “I just want to be good. [Is that too much to ask?]… I want to be good.” Maybe that is the soul poking through: you can be part of all kinds of physicality and succeed—but being good is a “mise à part,” something to aspire to, no matter what you are physically capable of.
In “On Habeas Corpus,” Loveday Little brings yet more life to the struggling body. “Try,” she says, to move beyond the “insane darkness,” for this is the only way to get out of the navel-gazing, to break the circle and the cycle of nature vs. nurture—to ultimately arrive at being good.
Loveday Little considers acts on the body in a series of exploration poems, the titles of which all begin with “On…. Among them, in “On Extispicy,” she considers the sacrifices the body makes in love, and how close we might come to divination in the process. In “On Consumption,” she looks at the justices and injustices of consumption: who is consumed by whom, by what merit. In “On Phlebotomy,” she considers the moral cost of the advancement of medical science, and when morality hinders that advancement. In “On Autopsies,” Loveday Little examines the passage from life to death and the body’s power in the process of hosting life and giving it up. She clarifies that nothing on the journey is by chance: “When you have been slain, the body remembers” and “Rigor-mortis is the body’s last defence against surrendering its secrets.” In a constant state of questioning, Loveday Little asks us to re-evaluate the state of the body and how we take for granted our interpretation of it.
In her epic 12-sequence poem, “MRI Cerebrum Suite,” Loveday Little explores the hemispherical geography of the brain, cleverly invoking physical geography as part of the stories she tells. She divides the poem according to the brain’s four lobes, and the corpus callosum, the amygdala, the Golgi apparatus, the pineal gland, the mirror neurons and Wernicke’s area. In a stroke of brilliance, Loveday Little relates each of the brain’s functions to the specific stories she tells, astutely illustrating responses based on the science behind them. But here again, she shows that even when science makes room for emotion, the depth and detail of response are individual; no blanket theory can be applied to the specific details. The best example of this is in the masterful “VIII. Amygdala,” a decidedly modern situation in which the subject’s fear responses are elicited by rejection from her lover through text messages when she’s been left on “seen.”
This notion of hemispherical travel can also be applied to the collection as a whole: Loveday Little is an explorer, considering body and mind, travelling across horizons and eras. The body is not only the physical body—but the body of work that is (Vice) Viscera, the book as body, the body as poetry. Through dissection of the poetic form, Loveday Little offers her answer to Flemish anatomist Andreas Vesalius’s advancements in medical science over Galen’s earlier progress. She proposes a new and different structure in which body and mind—and soul—survive: “Fuck the vertical,” she says of structure. With her “degrees in the interior arts,” she “rolls with medieval queens/ cloaked in furs that umbrella inner dragons.” These are Loveday Little’s guideposts for survival. Indeed, let them win.
Willow Loveday Little is a British-Canadian writer. She lives in Montreal, where she works as a freelance editor and English teacher. (Vice) Viscera is her first full-length poetry collection. Additionally, she is the author of the chapbook, Xenia (2021), also published by Cactus Press.
- Publisher: Cactus Press, 2022
- Language: English
- Paperback: 146 pages
- ISBN:978-1234567897
Carolyne Van Der Meer is a Montreal journalist, public relations professional and university lecturer. Her articles, essays, short stories and poems have been published internationally. Her five published books are: Motherlode: A Mosaic of Dutch Wartime Experience(WLUP, 2014);Journeywoman(Inanna, 2017);Heart of Goodness: The Life of Marguerite Bourgeoys in 30 Poems | Du Coeur à l’âme : La vie de Marguerite Bourgeoys en 30 poèmes (Guernica Editions, 2020); Sensorial (Inanna, 2022) and All This As I Stand By(Ekstasis Editions, 2023). Chapbook publications include One Week’s Worth but a Lifetime More(Local Gems Press, 2022) and Broken Pieces: Hospital Experiences, co-written with Michael Farry (2023); Communing with Sparrows is forthcoming from Cactus Press in 2024.
