Sundress Reads: Review of The Jolt: Twenty-One Love Poems in Homage to Adrienne Rich

Julie Weiss draws inspiration from renowned love poetry in her collection The Jolt: Twenty-One Love Poems in Homage to Adrienne Rich (Bottlecap Press, 2023). Rich’s 1977 work, Twenty-One Love Poems, is a stunning portrayal of love–cutting and vulnerable and breaking at the seams with its want. Weiss brings the magic of Rich’s collection to the present with poems that echo its desire. The poems in The Jolt are devoted and pleading, singing to their beloved but laying clear the difficulties in their pursuits. Weiss paints the process of a queer love story through consistent structure that represents real-world barriers, and still her vibrant language shines past formal constraints.  

Weiss’s Twenty-One Love Poems are one poem shy of Rich’s twenty-two. In The Jolt, there are twenty numbered poems, and then one in the middle between the tenth and eleventh called the “Floating Poem.” Each poem consists of six couplets. Weiss’ adherence to line structure reflects the careful diplomacy of marginalized love in public: characters are imagined artfully tucking constellations of feelings into social practice and rehearsed dispositions. In Weiss’ poem, “XV”, the speaker recounts: “More bird than human, I’ve crossed waters to reach a land that didn’t wither / under the gaze of my desires” (16). The lines suggest having to cross or even overtake humanness in order to love in the way the speaker does. The sheer expression of the speaker’s persistence and longing reminds readers of the barriers faced by queer people in unsafe environments, where love may be caged. Still, Weiss proves that the love shines in resistance past structures that would try to suppress it. She teases real vulnerability, the peace and rawness of “pretense after pretense, falling” (10). The dance around constricted line structure suggests disdain for systems that would inhibit the intimate display of person present in the poems’ confessions. The speaker admits,

The power of intimacy is proven to rise above any systemic imposition or expectation of custom. In Weiss’ poems, I hear Rich’s proclamation of “our life” revisited: “this still unexcavated hole / called civilization, this act of translation, this half-world” (Rich V). Weiss is continuing to build the half-world into wholeness through art. And her act of fighting through creation seems to me the strongest act of translation we have: to show ourselves and our possibilities by putting life into words. 

Such unveiled intimacy in the poems suggests a powerful secret world of love whose importance is exacerbated through language and artistic tools. In the second poem in the collection, the speaker recalls that, “bursting / I watch you eat, smile for a lack of language” (2). Accepting that there are not words here, in turn, expresses the most. The speaker believes that there is a layer of reality sparkling beyond what can be said, that hangs between the smile of one and the eyes of another and lacks language but is full by itself; perhaps this is a world the speaker and recipient share. This theme of layered realities is strengthened by the intermittent use of Spanish words in the poems. Lines like “te quiero, you say, and mean it” (21) remind readers of something hidden and shared just between speaker and lover. The value of their relationship repeatedly outshines any restriction, societal or systemic; this is proven by the persistence of love in parts of the poem that break past convention, like the poem’s language. In fact, in her line, “who needs translation when our bodies / speak a thousand different languages, / all of them born of the same tongue?” (2), Weiss suggests the superiority of feeling over even the whole project of its translation, hers and Adrienne’s, of poetry and expression themselves.  

That tension between the written project and the life it captures is resolved somewhat in the last line of the last poem, which grounds the whole collection. “How our children will continue this poem,” Weiss concludes (21). Because perhaps the poem is life, and so the poet is the wisher and dreamer and maker of all its wonders. Children must be poets, then, too. And there will be children — the speaker and lover’s children or someone else’s children — but there will be children who carry love forward. Weiss balances the collection in its ending. She holds that art has a valued place as the necessary vessel for feeling, but hints at the victory of passion and experience. 

Julie Weiss’s The Jolt: Twenty-One Love Poems in Homage to Adrienne Rich is available from Bottlecap Press

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Isabelle Whittall is pursuing a Bachelor of Arts in combined Philosophy and Political Science at the University of British Columbia (UBC). She co-hosts the radio show Hail! Discordia! on CITR 101.9fm, and is an Editorial Board Member of UBC’s Journal of Philosophical Enquiries.