Little Bomb of Pleasure: On Conor Bracken's "The Enemy of My Enemy Is Me"
Conor Bracken | The Enemy of My Enemy Is Me | Diode Editions | 2021 | 77 Pages
“A man can dwell inside a city,” writes Conor Bracken in “Shock & Awe,” “and leave untouched / but what man is there can dwell // within the chambers of another man / and stay himself?” Tending to bodies both divided and damaged, as sites of macro- and micro-cartography, from these lines Bracken’s debut collection takes its cue. It dwells deep within those chambers, and this, as the lines suggest, is dangerous business. There is no telling the amount of shrapnel we carry from other bodies, other lives. Take, as an example, “Douchebag Chorale,” a poem that finds comic pleasure in the collective persona of an inner, sometimes outer, sleazy white guy: “they bulge / and jostle against each other, dropping // their little riff on the central theme // like a ball-bearing into a pipe-bomb - / he who has chained himself to a bull // dozer so it won’t raze the country club.” Even the collection’s more playful send-ups, such as “Song of Myselves” and the excellent “Spring in Space City,” leave the metallic taste of violence on the tongue; a pipe-bomb, a “Gnarled Vine of White Male Grapes,” a “vengeful glee.”
This voice of irreverence and aggression finds its equilibrium in Bracken’s cycle of Henry Kissinger poems. Originally published in the pamphlet Henry Kissinger, Mon Amour, these pieces broach two particular chambers of the body that so often twist and merge: desire and guilt. Our speaker goes without a name but is certainly what we might call Henry Kissinger’s (and his ilk’s) dance partner: the modern American white man, for whom countries and cultures have been exploded so that they might go on feeding “each other delicacies with dirty hands - / dulce de leche under our nails.” A synecdoche of the U.S. expansionist dream, Bracken’s Kissinger is as authoritative and attractive as he needs to be, full of gifts and lust for the speaker he routinely manipulates and abuses; a speaker who, like so many in such a relationship, endures the bad because the good could always be around the corner. “He threshes you to make you naked,” Kahlil Gibran wrote of love, “He grinds you to whiteness.” “I am // striving towards a whiteness that’s translucent,” writes Bracken, “and Henry says he can already see through me.”
What The Enemy traces is what happens to the body during this dangerous historic dance, the manifold corporeal results of that desire, that guilt. There are Bracken’s cantor poems; a quieter, yet more uncomfortable parallel to those concerning Henry. If the latter play out on an international stage, jet-setting and glittery, then the former take place in the living room of a local town, or the seclusion of a choir loft. The cantor is a presence in Bracken’s work even when unnamed, as in the poem “Genesis:” “Something touches you / when you do not want to be touched / and it doesn’t burn / but there it is – a wick. // The body a little bomb / that pleasure sometimes lights.” The poems themselves almost become bodies, words their stimuli. On occasion, when Bracken steers from touch and sensation, that crucial physical quality is lost; the body falls into the abstract, particularly in an extended image of a man disfigured into a boat, which turns up twice in the collection. The metaphor begins to outrun itself and the poem threatens, as Woolf would say, to come apart.
More often, though, Bracken’s metaphors reach deep into the complexities of desire in a manner reminiscent of Anne Carson’s The Autobiography of Red, as in “The Worst Thing You Can Do To A Man Is Pity Him:”
I feel bad for you
is all I’d have to mutter
to crack him open so
the song inside the song
he sings could breathe
but I can’t, not
even when I think of the god
his parents stoked in him
like a flame incinerating each
desire he thought it would anneal.
The dance of desire and guilt bears forth the direct and domestic violence of America, the private disaster made public tragedy. This is where The Enemy enters the body on surgical terms, where a chamber is both an excavation and a component of a firearm. Bracken returns repeatedly to “viscera,” not with the drive of a news anchor but that of a poet, gumming up syllables with digestive tracts, exposed bone and bloodletting. It is a resolution not of the history of violence, but in the lyric reconstruction; the capacity to find the words. In “Reassembling the Shooter,” Bracken makes the poem-as-body literal: “I don’t trust myself with this body,” he begins, the lines rolling down the page like something intestinal, “Inside this poem are its / gallons of blood and vitreous humors, / its bile.” As the longest piece in the collection (seven pages of graphic reassembly) the poem has a rambling quality that veers between the vividly concrete and the overly verbose; between “an infant ‘dashed’ against the raw stub of a log / at the corner of a cabin,” and “pilfering its motion from / the self-effacing flexion of the currents.”
But this comes with the ambition of such a poem, and such a collection. A landscape as broad and hostile as The Enemy of My Enemy Is Me, which Bracken attempts to map in a satiric address to whiteness, American exceptionalism, religious guilt, and the nature of shame—all while dwelling inside that little bomb of pleasure called the body—will always contain a few rough-edged metaphors and cul-de-sac digressions. It is the willingness to risk this that proves a writer is doing exactly the kind of work they ought to be.