Natalie Adler Reviews Gala Mukomolova's Without Protection

At BOMB, Natalie Adler reviews Gala Mukomolova's new book, Without Protection (Coffee House Press, 2019), calling it "fresh and vulnerable and brave, born from the beauty and violence of early spring." From the review:

Poetry has long found and folded beauty in violence. What sets Mukomolova’s poems apart is her appreciation of dyke beauty, an erotic beauty that is as gorgeous and gruesome as a whole hand unfurling inside a body like a tulip. “I’m interested in the queer lineage of failure,” Mukomolova tells me in an interview, “of seeking out a queer eros in spite of tradition.” She explains that her motivation in writing these poems was to “investigate a core sense of self outside of grief.”

After the death of her father, whom she calls her “good enough parent,” and a difficult break-up, she tasked herself with two writing projects. The first was to take on the Russian fairy tales of Vasilyssa the Beautiful and the crone witch, Baba Yaga. The second was the creation of an “erotic archive,” a daily writing prompt to recall a memory that could help her understand and embody her sexed self. 

Both tasks, she notes, “interrogated the danger” behind seeking out truth, whether it be the truth of one’s own desire or truths violently handed down from generations of women. “Vasilyssa, a maiden undone by the world, braves Baba Yaga’s forest,” the poems begin, a sort of thesis statement for the collection. Mukomolova tells me she was curious about “how a body marked as female becomes a sexual self, and how fraught and violent that can be in this world. So many memories of myself as a sexed self are not of a relation to pleasure, but a relation to danger.”

Danger runs through her poems as a constant, a force that exists not to punish but to initiate...

Read on at BOMB.