In the Palace of Tenderness: A Review and Cento of Lisa Summe’s Say It Hurts
by Madeleine Wattenberg
In The Cultural Politics of Emotion, specifically a chapter called “Queer Feelings,” Sara Ahmed writes that heteronormative scripts “shape bodies and lives, including those that follow and depart from such narratives in the ways in which they love and live, in the decisions that they make and take within the intimate spheres of home and work.”
Lisa Summe’s debut poetry collection Say It Hurts (YesYes Books, 2021) is a striking examination of the queer intimacy that powerfully reshapes normative scripts. From the outset Summe denies her readers what Ahmed would call the comfort of “sinking” into a heteronormative narrative. She concludes the opening poem about adolescent lesbian desire and subsequent vulnerability to violence with the statement, “When a lesbian writes a poem / it’s a lesbian poem”. Throughout Say It Hurts, each poem presses against and consequently alters the normative scripts that assert their definitions and narrate the shape of family, of loss, and, of course, of love. Summe’s poems solder searing critique to tenderness and wit—the result is a collection that simultaneously offers essential social analysis and an immensely pleasurable reading experience.
I kept returning to one specific poem to map my thinking about Summe’s collection. In “Our Dream Wedding,” the speaker draws a wedding scene onto a sheet of graphing paper: “The church & the cross on top of the church were very easy to draw with all the squares & since I was a kid when I planned our dream wedding I still believed in church. That church was where everyone got married.” The poem’s child-speaker has been instructed that only men can marry women and therefore finds a logical solution: she draws herself as a boy in order to properly orient herself toward the subject of her affection. The church and the cross easily “fit” into the straight (and straight) lines of the graph paper—the predetermined shapes permitted by heteronormativity, the institutions of church and marriage united.
But the speaker finds that other elements of the dream fit less easily: “You had these beautiful curls in real life that I unfortunately had to straighten in our dream wedding because of the straight lines on the paper & because I’m a perfectionist.” The paper’s lines and right angles require the poem’s speaker to alter her subjects to better fit the rigidity of the heteronormative wedding script. In a later poem, the speaker considers a different form of “fit” as she shops in the kids’ section of The Gap:
It’s awkward. Me, a grown woman,
flipping quickly through the boys’ shirts
at Gap Kids, fearing any interaction
with any employee, like the blonde woman
behind the counter, hair pulled back in a tight bun,
who I imagine is uncomfortably aware
that I am not a kid, not a boy,
though definitely too young &/or dykish
to be shopping for her own sons, which is all true
The speaker’s presence challenges the comfort of the employee who works in a retail space that affirms gender norms through its merchandise designs and a heteronormative vision of family through the categories of its offerings. Yet as Ahmed would note, this discomfort reveals the presence of norms when they would otherwise remain invisible—it demands that they make themselves known.
The poem “Our Dream Wedding” concludes with a description of the wedding limo: “The wheels were square like everything else which was just one of the reasons why it never went anywhere.” In this poem, Summe simultaneously illustrates the pressures of compulsory heterosexuality and subverts them. She also demonstrates that attempts to map queer narratives onto heteronormative structures can never be perfect, that the queer redrawing will expose the limitations of a heteronormative world. Ahmed writes, “Queer feelings are ‘affected’ by the repetition of the scripts that they fail to reproduce, and this ‘affect’ is also a sign of what queer can do, of how it can work by working on the (hetero)normative.” Even as it is pressured to reshape itself to “fit,” queerness reshapes the fit.
One of Summe’s great strengths is her ability to craft intimacy in the images of small moments. I was particularly drawn to the reoccurring images of discarded strands of hair, such as when in a car’s “backseat sanctuary . . . I could find your hair there” or “in the shower curtain liner, where my darkest hairs might be / your lightest” or when “We remind each other where we put our microscopes / & have seen almost everything up close— / holes we never spackled, hair thick in the drain.” The declaration “I have kept you / permanent on purpose, your poems // in my backpack, your hair, not in my drain / but when I clean it, I think of the way / your hair sat in ours, intimacy up-close” seems to succinctly offer a thesis for the function of these images—intimacy up-close. In the poem “Barter,” Summe writes, “Last summer, on the porch, mid-haircut, / you told me that buzzing my head // was the gayest you’d ever felt.”
Despite a largely chronological arrangement, Summe’s poems speak to one another in a way that invites return to earlier poems. For example, the descriptions of intimacy and hair call back to the poem entitled “poem in which i imagine my dad agrees to shave my head.” In this poem, the speaker imagines her father willingly giving her a buzzcut, a hair style that also signifies a refusal to adhere to gendered norms: “when I imagine my dad / agrees to shave my head / he doesn’t ask if / it’s a lesbian thing / doesn’t tell me / what is ‘natural’ / how I should be / sorry / instead / he understands this haircut from / an economic perspective.” The father appears in many poems as the speaker works to reconcile childhood memories of his love with his deeply entrenched homophobia—he advances into poems uninvited until “you realize here is another // poem about your father, his mouth / unable to say the word daughter.”
Summe’s titles call to one another through the book. Four poems in the collection’s first section entitled “Coming Out” illuminate that the act of coming out is not a singular event but one of variation, repetition, and continued self-definition; they also echo two poems in the third section entitled “On Coming Home,” thus suggesting that the reader link the acts of coming out and coming home, their convergences and departures. “I finally fit in with the women in your family” begins one of these poems, though it quickly destabilizes the relief teased by the opening language: “can’t be counted on can’t keep a promise.” This is just one example of the ways Summe’s voice is willing to turn its critique inward, to examine both the pressures of the exterior world and the impulses of the individual self.
“I will build you a palace made of 100% tenderness,” Summe writes. Say It Hurts is a palace of tenderness. “When we tell the truth / the light changes. When we tell the truth we don’t worry / about what we are looking for, what we might find,” she writes. To read Say It Hurts is to witness this change of light.
I already discussed the poem in which Summe’s speaker enters Gap Kids and thinks about the way the clothing she wants to wear won’t fit her alongside the ways fit (literal and figurative), comfort, and discomfort are used to police norms in public spaces. For the creative portion of this review, I decided to imagine a new kind of store through Summe’s lines. To create my store, I used Douglas Luman’s website www.appliedpoetics.org and ran the full text of Say It Hurts through his sartorial algorithm, which retains only the sentences that reference clothing and dress. I call this store NoGap because everything in it fits you perfectly and you fit everything perfectly too.
NoGap: A Cento
Taking this green plaid shirt or that navy blazer into the fitting room,
a button down & bow tie in broad daylight.
Returned pajamas we picked out, the dress shirts.
A freshly-ironed button-down kissed my cheek like I was home.
The coat rack,
the red & white collar creeping up her candy throat.
A dyke is standing in front of your mirror,
you were wearing that black & white polka-dotted dress & I was wearing that black & white polka-dotted bow tie.
Lace everything: sleeves of your dress: lingerie
I wore a top hat,
a pair of mint colored pants,
the right kind of running shoes.
I put on my pajamas in the bathroom,
the collar of your Dracula cape jabbing my jawline,
small space necessitating our touching,
the clothes from the washer to the dryer.
Me in my plaid pajama pants & you in no pants.
No extra socks.
I can see down your shirt a little, even after dark.
The first time I took off your shirt,
I am in my little apartment still wearing my plaid pajama pants.
My bow ties will hang side by side in the darkness across the back bar of my closet, little stars set against nothing, no sky to be noticed in, nothing else for me to wish for.
Madeleine Wattenberg's lifelong dream of writing a review entirely in emojis feels closer than ever. Her poems have recently appeared in journals such as Best New Poets 2017, cream city review, The Seattle Review, DIAGRAM, Fairy Tale Review, Ninth Letter, and Mid-American Review. She is currently a PhD student in poetry at the University of Cincinnati.