Book Reviews
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"The Hot Garment of Love is Insecure" by Elizabeth Reddin
by Laura Polley
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Open Elizabeth Reddin’s first book and discover immediately that, in fact, this book opens you—like a papercut, slashing from within. To read it is to find yourself complicit in anguished dreams, carved and quartered by the eerie harmonics of a jagged, many-edged voice.
Composed in three sections, Hot Garment combines two short works, “Red War” and “Verdia,” with a new, longer piece called “(Why) Won’t You Hold Me?” Taken together, the reading experience is surprisingly continuous, thanks to Reddin’s consistent paragraphed formatting and relentless recurring themes.
“Red War,” the opening poem, serves as an overture to the rest of Hot Garment, laying out conceptual and verbal effects which return throughout the book. Here, and elsewhere, Reddin combines surrealism with violent imagery—“Under a grindstone you have your teeth removed”—to provoke an effect that is simultaneously visceral and opaque: “You can’t shoot your car in the head.”
Such revelations only begin to capture the essence of Reddin’s work. During her live “talking thoughts” performances, audiences experience dimensional sound, enhanced by Reddin’s interactions with her own tape-recorded voice. It is apt—and amazing—that her written work achieves a similar stereophonic richness. Hers is a poetry made up of flashes, glinting at times with urgency, at times with despair. War, paranoia, frustrated love and murderous fantasies dominate the nearly-impenetrable personal narrative:
[…]if I had
that microscope maybe I could smash it against your face
tonight, then pick the miniscule shards from your softest
sweet smelling flawless more beautiful than mine skin […]
Nihilism lurks like a prodigious shadow: “I put you up so high it made me want to stir my eyeballs with/ needles.” These seemingly destructive lasers are simply facets of Reddin’s searching light—a blacklight if you will—which is just as likely to illuminate searing moments of love and hope. “I want to say yes to something!” Reddin’s speaker exclaims, rejecting doubt while mired in its midst.
Hot Garment of Love has the intimacy of a dictated diary—and the lashing desperation of a cornered animal. It startles and unsettles. It jabs and snarls. Yet beneath its “electric shock thoughts” lies a steady impulse aiming for connection. If, as Reddin declares, “there must be a million people this instant confused on a/ corner wishing for an invitation,” then this book is the pick that shatters the ice. “Someone said talking is a ritual to ward off helplessness,” Reddin writes—and demonstrates.
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