Home in this Black Hole: On Maxe Crandall’s “The Nancy Reagan Collection”

Maxe Crandall | The Nancy Reagan Collection | Futurepoem | 2020 | 184 Pages

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Maxe Crandall’s The Nancy Reagan Collection is “an otherworldly way… of remembering.” It is body-snatching theater and immersive obloquy. It is a multiplayer video game playing in the middle of a memorial. It is, undoubtedly, an archive of insurmountable evil, narrated by a limping pastiche of voices that have been ravaged to porousness—and “every pore feels like a tiny wound or window.” The setting is “a black hole,” a timeline where denial is fatal. Nancy Reagan is the antagonist masquerading as heroine, red-clad and gloved against infection; she is the great disseminator, introducing the collection’s narrator, who is not one single figure but a collection of personae disfigured by the AIDS crisis. Nancy tells us, “Your existence depends on my denial.”

The Reagans’ silence on the AIDS epidemic is the black hole that “hushes all around.” Crandall’s multi-voiced speaker is comprised of the persistent echoes still dancing around the fleshed-out caves of a post-diseased world. Nancy smirks down on these fallen idols. Their voices cry out from the operating theater: Michael Jackson, Diana Ross, Nancy Sinatra, and Princess Diana wriggle like bioluminescent worms under her red, red shadow. Jackson (one of many narratorial personae) “slip[s] into [the black hole] like a cat suit.” He seeks a home in this anti-space, a nation of negation: “the comfort of another dimension growing out behind this one starts to soothe pains, suggest lovers to me.” Lost names are carved out of blackness, with the names and birth/death dates of AIDS victims studding and interrupting every poem. The grieving speaker proclaims, “I RE-AWAKENED… covered head-to-toe in my own grime, / phantoms or pheromones cluttering my head.” Because Nancy is the great ravager of reality and identity, he questions whether his idol-lovers existed at all. Nancy is a “denim-clad show cow” who teaches queerness how to hide. Her image dilates, forcing invisibility. He laments:

There’s nothing left for you to feed on, I try to say 
inside the mirror 
nothing comes out
a sparkling disco ball 
strands of fake hair in the dust

While the ravaged become “mere shadows of themselves,” Nancy floats above everything. She is everything. Nancy is “our drowned mannequin / washed to shore / prostrate in pointy shoes.” Nancy is the 1982 Poltergeist, “a vision received.” Nancy is unchanging: “a size 4 her whole life.” Nancy “can move between cells.” She is the “high queen of Sacramento,” fleeing her reputation as “the blow job queen of Hollywood.” But she “won’t be crucified.” She debates whether to “choose the opal brooch / or the pearl and diamond ear clips…” Affluence and glamor clash violently with fatality, creating ruptures on the page. “How can I remember after so much violence?” asks another grieving protagonist. In Irresistible Forces, the reader must zigzag through an interactive game-maze of concrete poetry, only to be confronted with facts: “During the Reagan administration, 116,000 people are diagnosed with AIDS and 70,000 die,” and: “the Reagan administration’s support of the Contras was funded through the illegal smuggling of crack cocaine from Nicaragua to Los Angeles.”

And you, the reader, are complicit in this fatal game. Push X on your controller: you are scrolling down the list of laws passed during the Reagan administration, including the 1986 HIV Criminalization act. Turn the console (page) upside down! You are faced with harrowing statistics of African American incarceration during the Reagan years. But there is no escape: “…everywhere [you look] for AIDS you’ll find Nancy Reagan in any of her elegant gowns.” The “excess belongs symbolically to Nancy.” And so, the great You of the collection is left to hover between life and death, body and air. You refers to victims and survivors, characters and citizens, and all in between. You is never singular. The Collection overflows with doubles and twins, like Janet and Michael Jackson in “Janet Speaks”—“ALL WE ARE is ONE TWIN SOUL / ONE SOUL WITH TWINS IN IT”—or Diana Ros and Princess Diana in the poem-play, “America’s Brain”:

DIANA ROSS

…

Now, Evan, baby, I WILL NOT have you smoking on screen, no matter

how dying-of-AIDS this character is.

Can you feel this? I’m pressing into your spleen right now.

BABY ROSS

But why??

DIANA ROSS

Because that’s where actors keep their acting juice!

BABY ROSS

Mom. Where in the world did you get that idea?

DIANA ROSS

From Nancy Reagan, the Hollywood High Queen!

BABY ROSS

Who’s that?

In the next scene, Nancy Reagan enters the casting call for Queen Latifah’s film Life Support; she is referred to as VOLUNTEER from then on, and Nancy continually reminds everyone that it is she who has saved Baby Ross from the dreaded virus, thanks to her connections. Nancy Reagan is impressed when Diana Ross transforms to Princess Diana before her eyes, and Nancy advises the princess to come to America and reinvent herself as an actress: “no one fears or hates strong women like us,” Nancy says. “They need us for life support.” 

There are endless questions and no answers: “What self is saved? What self wants to save?” Which will be suffocated? Is this doubling a form of purgatory or a means of survival? The many-named speaker-narrator persona gives no answer, only admits to the futility of being located between forms and realities:

The costume had become my body
I moved through the world either girl or ghoul but seriously
Not Death but definitely Close

Each self becomes “a kind of Zen koan… [his] own private paradox.” And despite Nancy’s irate disapproval, he “swaggers to the bus stop… as if [his mermaid] tail were a thousand yards long.” He sacrifices his own body to locate his dying selves, crawling out of his skin “to find out what was killing them.” The narrator is “offered again and again,” leaving nothing. “At very emotional moments in my life it’s as if I’m in a daze,” he says between flashes of red darkness. It is too grotesque not to look through dazed eyes. “What year is it?” he begs, because this genocide warps time. But The Collection does not permit the reader to squint. They must play the game, or wear the gown. There is no escape from Nancy, leaving the reader either “against [or] within.” We are living in Nancy’s reality. We have no other path but through bloodshed. Ronald Reagan says, “If it takes a bloodbath, let’s get it over with.” But in The Nancy Reagan Collection, there is no such end, or anything else for that matter. Instead, there is endlessness… endless elegance, endless red gowns, endless audacity, endless violence and sickness and glitter, endless “villages founded in endings,” endless skin—with no people remaining, only personae, only bodies, only names speaking without bodies or souls to wear them.