Alli Warren's I Love It Though Reviewed at Social Text

Peter Valente reviews Alli Warren's I Love It Though (Nightboat, 2017), for Social Text. "It’s a real world she’s speaking of even though you can only feel it," writes Valente. "Longing is stronger than control." More:

…Desire and love are complicated by the narrowness of gender, class systems, and problems with control and domination, all of which taint and complicate pleasure: “Where is the net which saves / rather than traps.” The following is from Warren’s interview with Lauren Levin, published on May 25, 2017 in the Los Angeles Review of Books:

I can’t think of a post-capitalist world without considering the relationship of violence and domination to eros and eroticism, to coupling and ownership. I want my poems to hold that complication, to express embodiment, sensuality, and physical desire without simplifying my relationship to sexuality, which feels social, cultural.

It is this desire for an alternate world and the discussions it gives rise to that produces in the speaker and her friends the sustenance and inner strength to deal with the daily pressures of living under the present world-system, where they suffer “in relation to each other because…of the ways class, race, gender, etc., are oppressively organized.” Warren complicates the contemporary discourse while maintaining the resulting tension…

The full review is at Social Text.