A Delicious Pandemonium: On Shelley Feller's "Dream Boat"

Shelley Feller | Dream Boat | Cleveland State University Poetry Center | October 2020 | 76 Pages

Dream Boat, Shelley Feller’s debut collection of poetry, unchains, disengenders, and metamorphizes language. “Outer boroughs” becomes “ouroboros.” God becomes a “dormant organ.” Emojis and pop song lyrics serve as hieroglyphs for queer desire. These linguistic transformations lead to conversations across time, as in “Atlantis” and “ship of fools”, which use erasure to draw out repressed queer trauma from poems by Hart Crane. The resulting fragments pulse and sear, so that the “gay ich of death / mount[s] the living lack.” But Feller doesn’t just erase: in “butch mercutio first time in drag at capulet ball”, they inject contemporary queer vernacular into a Shakespearean scene (“scruff ye slush-drunk leaky sleazed his cakey pissoir swagger / all haloed rotting lordship”). In repurposing classical canon, Feller is self-aware and self-referential. In “all gay ethic, eh?”, they question if lust itself may be infected by literary tropes and affectation: “if fucking is a form of thinking is desire / susceptible to irony & diseases / of camp?” The next line shows that such awareness can birth absurdity: “e.g. yer gaze doth run me thru / sooooooey! / sooooey!” This language marks a shift from animal to deity to “humanimal”; throughout Dream Boat, Feller presents the evolution of this kind of “hyperself” that “speaks in spells.”

Given these ambitions, Dream Boat must not be treated as a traditional book of poetry. Rather, its language is creaturely: “stinking of seamen,” “goony w/ dongs.” It’s also multi-personaed and collective, an “immaculate suite of vast & sensate citizenry.” Feller more than campifies classical language—they turn it inside out: “i gorgonize! ensorcel-unselved, i havoc haute-horrif.” In “SISSY SESTINA 69”, the reader must flip and adjust the page continually to read, as if solving a Rubik’s cube. Plato, Catherine Wagner, the B-52’s, Jean Genet, drag queens, Twitter, Walt Whitman, maritime signal flags, Susan Sontag, and of course, Hart Crane—all are synthesized, regurgitated, and stitched madly together into a homo homo-sapien and Frankensteinian masterpiece. What holds everything together is the narrator’s desperate desire to perform the needed persona of the moment, as in “on our first date he says he’s poz & asks if i’m scared, if i still wanna”:

in the frightened zones 
of my theater—meat-slung
selves carried off
in shards—all false heads
of beauty’s cooing orphic
anesthetized 
a langue lost i

In linguistics, a “langue” refers to an abstract language system, as opposed to how actual language behavior works in the real world. In this sense, Feller highlights the difference between the text and subtext of conversations in the canon, and the mutations we bear today as result of a history of being muted.

Through this uninhibited reclaiming of suppressed queer desires, Dream Boat pulls the queer thread from straight-laced quotations, proving we have always been here. Feller takes us on a voyage through a “gl/itchy-injured planet / not of space as it is but of space as we made it.” They show us how heteronormative history has used LGBTQ+ voices and infiltrated their spaces—in the world and in the arts and literature. But Feller reclaims the page. Or, in poems such as “amateur drag night / a fucking didactic”, Feller seems to transcend the page altogether: the poem performatively thrusts the reader into the delicious pandemonium of a gay club. Emoji dancer girls and dollar signs dance like a light-searing vision on the eye, and many wigs are thrown. Feller also ruptures the idea of what queer spaces should be, declaring “i got BIG HOLE ENERGY” and “danc[ing] this mess around.” These poems not only gender-bend the Western canon but drench it in psycho-sexual fluid, “flood[ing] historic residuals.” In this “manorama” of queer sex, god himself is dragged, becoming a figurehead of the trauma of heteronormative history and canon. They are “hostile to [his] harp & altar,” putting “the anal back in bacchanal.” In one mock-Biblical evocation, Feller declares: “i make sissssy on ye / i spake sissy on ye / satyr krater, contam!” In response, God is speechless, disempowered, as the unsexed narrator is “dabbing oils of ordinary form,” which their “death absorbs.” They are “mmmmashing in perpetuity.” 

And so lust is coated in the sticky cyberplasm of self-worth/self-disgust. The narrator takes self-disgust—in all its “ich icky thicc physic, suck-o”—and exorcises their trauma in another Biblical mockery: “i defibrillate mine ymage. repulsa! repulsa! disgust my cyber betchy. ye spread, ye sunder, anon / all godless body.” Motifs of “ack” stickily scatter across the pages. The self cannot be escaped. In this case, that self is multimodal, multitudinous and always transient. They “traverse the squirm hole / inducing it, scoping it.” The page becomes a mirror; for all the narrator’s multiple lives and sex organs, they feel to be “a cum-sad animus.” They “fester with [their] sex.” Dysphoria is the greatest burden—and freedom—of performing personae (“can pass alright” and “ersatz aureole”). They persist with a seething vulnerability—“i was dysphoric, odorous, & howl’d / mwah!” Even in their trauma, there is a struggle to perform their persona. In “Cold Song”, the narrator has finally wearied from this perilous personae parade: 

this is the fantasy— 
in the damp & handsome muscle of earth, i let him
bury me. seed-bag. any hole can be a faggot 
hole, I sing, la la. any ditch can be a faggot
ditch, he sings, da dee.

Dream Boat is a self-exorcism that surpasses personal insecurity; it is also a book that evokes generational trauma, speaking to the larger failings and violence of cis-gender, heteronormative society. Feller writes: “my whole body is a trouble area / everybody is a trouble area / what marx meant by lumpenproletariat.” A few lines later, this connection of the individual body and the conservationist masses synthesizes into the “fatty fatty boombalatty / [that] clogs class concupiscence.” Their body-identity, like a wormhole (or “gravehole”) interjects itself, in all its “concupiscence,” into capitalist and classist hierarchy—object of lust-disgust and hope-horror. They are beyond person-identity now; they are an ecological event. They become the martyr, “fracking daddy calamity / culls polluted transmuter / shaming me smelly plenty.” They have become the sociopolitical anthropocene, as inflicted upon the queer, transgender body.