Elaine Kahn's Women in Public Reviewed at Entropy

At Entropy Alexandra Wuest reviews Elaine Kahn's Women in Public, the most recent installment in City Lights's Spotlight Series. Wuest dives in from the outset, sticking the brass tacks to the reader: "Elaine Kahn’s Women In Public is about moms, peaches, bodies, and garbage, among other things. Things that decay. Things that are often undervalued. Where one poem leaves off, the next begins, hardly giving us time to digest the barrage of images so dexterously strung together. There’s a velocity to Kahn’s words: a body plummeting through space in a fog of language." Wuest spends much time thinking about the way Kahn presents the body in her work, and the way Kahn meditates on how the body of women are present(ed) in public, as she recalls watching the video for Blink-182's "What’s My Age Again" as a child, then riffing on Adorno:

Adorno, of the Frankfurt School of critical theory, wrote extensively about the role of the private sphere versus the public sphere in his essays on capitalism and the culture industry. Along with peers such as Max Horkheimer and Jürgen Habermas, Adorno studied the ways in which the private sphere operates differently than the public sphere and its constant struggle to assert itself. While Blink-182 was free to literally expose themselves to the public without shame or consequence–for humor!–the female form is too often confined to a sexualized realm, one in which even nipples cannot appear on Instagram. Going off Adorno then, the female form gets cloistered away in the private sphere and is only allowed to be visible when it satisfies the male gaze—like the red-bra-wearing nurse in the “What’s My Age Again” video—while the male form is allowed to parade uninhibited through the public sphere, pixilated genitalia and all.

A favorite quote of mine (one I stumbled upon in Dana Drori’s excellent essay “Penis Rising” for Adult Magazine) is John Ashbery’s “When is a nude not a nude? When it is male.”

An equally compelling question (although this one comes without an immediate answer): “What does the world hate more/than women/in public?” This is the question Elaine Kahn posits in the titular poem of her collection and the resounding heartbeat that pulsates beneath each page of the book. It’s a fair question. A woman wears shorts in ninety-degree weather and is suddenly reduced to an exhibitionist who is “asking for it.” A female artist gets naked for art and is accused of being a narcissist trying to seduce a male audience. A woman writes about her feelings and is condemned for “over sharing.” One of the most controversial actions a woman can undertake is to merely exist in public.

In the poem “You Don’t Know How to Make Love,” Kahn writes:

It stuns my stupid head
still ringing with the deluge
of having a body

There's much much more in this rich review, including a thinking through of the work and career of Hannah Wilke whose S.O.S. Starification Object Series (1974) is featured at top. Head to Entropy for it all!