What do you do to think about sex? Do you move in your seat? Do you text? One time I saw a guy at my gym taking a picture of his genitals. I’m going to assume he was thinking about sex. Do you remember that song by Salt n Peppa, where everyone in the band wants to talk about sex. Caroline Rayner was there. She was writing her own song. Yes, it was about sex. Wanting it when the other person really wants it. Thinking about how much you want it, and being stuck right there, wanting it. BAD!! Rayner’s song involves an anaphora that curves around the phrase, “Bend over.” Then the anaphora when that one’s finished: “Come right back.”
In a poem, these are very rhetorical gestures. Which means they work in many situations. Desiring and sating the desire and being a little iffy about whether the desire is going to work out this time, but you’re still burning. And it leads you right back to the phrase, “Come right back.” The book is so much rhetoric, and it really works for me. Because Rayner uses rhetoric to make the language you need so reading is a state of mind. The state of mind being desire, especially sexual desire. Perhaps you’ve gathered there’s a lot of sex happening in the context of the book. Maybe not as much explicitly happening on the page (though if you’re hoping for some of that, you won’t be disappointed). Sometimes the explicit involves saying the word “magnolia,” and a reader going, “I think she’s referring to a woman’s genitals when she says that.” If you consider that sexual, then you can look forward to a lot of sexual in this book. “Magnolia” is like an activity. Or it’s like that guy at the company happy hour who thinks he’s being sly with his innuendo. But his references are all sharp and spiky and terrifyingly obvious. Rayner is obvious in the way “bend over” is, I’m just going to say it. Obvious. But her innuendo is a smooth talk. How do you sound a rhetoric so you’re telling someone you’re interested in, “Hey, you’re sexy.” In Rayner’s book, you make everything an opportunity about sexualizing your desire.
I mean, Rayner really wants this woman. Especially for that magnolia she has in her underpants. And Rayner is like an overworked machine breathing out hot exhaust. Like if the machine were her thinking about sex, and the poem were the exhaust, you would visualize this hot pink aura while you’re reading the book. That might be because the poem often refers to pink. if you know what I mean. Everything’s hot. Like sexy hot. Sweaty sex hot. And just regular hot. Because her thoughts about this woman are truly unrelenting. And it’s definitely risky to lock in so hard on this feeling. And, sad for Rayner, the book isn’t having 114 pages of sex, even if that’s what she’s thinking about. There are contours to the relationship. Absences, and she would rather they weren’t absent. And she’s thinking about that other person not being absent.
Really, the struggle here is the persistent context that desire makes. And the book is kind of a fantasy fulfillment, where the poet lets herself think and think and think about sex and desire for this woman. But putting all the pieces together for a poem, it’s not so much a stream of consciousness based around “where is she” and “what I would do with her (or to her).” It’s somewhere between the context building in Patty Nash’s Walden Pond (seemicro-REVIEW: Walden Pond (Thirdhand Books, 2024)) and the ongoing account Cody Rose-Clevidence keeps giving in Listen My Friend, This Is the Dream I Dreamed Last Night. There are many titles doing this kind of work in the last five years. Or, put another way, there’s great poetry I keep reading and discovering in this poetic mode. And I just want to occupy that language that occupies my mind.
Like being with Caroline Rayner when she runs into her room because a certain magnolia will be making an appearance. Rayner locks the rhetoric on the you of her poems so it’s the you in her fantasy-dreams. There’s so many bright lights in those dreams. All about whatever it is that’s satisfying about sex simultaneously experienced with fulfillment of fantasy. The you for Rayner makes a beautiful sky the equivalent of smoked meats in Texas. The hot smoker making the meats hot, like hot sex is hot, and hot like that makes it where you’re not thinking about hot weather.
The following tags are a purely subjective approach I’ve used for reading this book. Tagging, for me, acknowledges that slotting a book into hard categories or “schools” can be elusive when it comes to 21st Century poetry. In response, I’ve developed tags whose lenses operate from subject matter, identity poetics, and stylistics.