Sundress Reads: Review of In Our Now

In her chapbook, In Our Now (Finishing Line Press 2022), Valyntina Grenier explores the destructive human impact on the environment as well as society’s inhibiting effect on natural human freedoms. Drawing on current events and creating deep environmental allegories for our world, Grenier simultaneously chastises our ways of life while espousing a deep sense of hope for the future.

The strange, disjointed structure of Grenier’s poetry allows for a free-flowing structure, one in which the tone and feelings of the words carry just as much weight as the narrative they tell. As she notes in the introduction, Grenier dictated much of In Our Now into the Notes app of her phone, creating typos and unexpected meanings that led her to favor “sound over sense” (vi). Grenier’s poetry breaks spontaneously in the middle of lines, attaching slashes to the ends of words in order to equate many things at once without breaking stride. When she discusses police violence, Grenier notes:

This structure allows her to put emphasis on every word without breaking up the thought, allowing everything to flow together. In other places, she uses made-up words like “unself-conscious” to illuminate her points, despite their occasional lack of grammatical sense (Grenier 3). Finally, she writes the word “with” by putting the shorthand “w/,” which creates a sense of urgency throughout and emphasizes the currentness of the issues she discusses (Grenier 6).

Throughout In Our Now, Grenier harkens back to historical events and criticizes modernization as throwing a false blanket over the past’s natural truths. In “Important Classes,” for example, Grenier notes that “precious history paddles a canoe” while “corporate engineers are reinventing love” (2). While the past floats along at its own pace, Grenier demonstrates that modern day invention and manufacturing (through corporate means) are eager to place their own visions on the world. This modern vision, she notes, creates a new sense of order in life. It kills off the “strong desire to / live to / lounge in queerness / with no address,” a luxury of previous times (Grenier 9). While Grenier is also a LGBTQ+ rights advocate, she uses “queerness” here to more broadly regard non-conformity as a whole (9). Queerness becomes her counterpoint to a world “sweetened beyond recognition[,] a blemish free plastic dimension” (Grenier 9). Modern advances in everything from manufacturing to social norms only obscure the messy, strange business of authentically living.

In her collection, Grenier highlights the inherent sexuality in nature as something which we’ve obscured in our drive for progress. In “The Flower’s I,” she refers to the pitcher plant’s “arc of corseted breasts / crowned w/ clitoria,” turning a solitary flower into a veritable factory of sex and life (Grenier 12). Grenier urges us to “call the flower sex-worker,” pointing out the shameless counterparts to stigmatized positions in our own society (13). In the garden of life, nature’s sex drive “match[es] the / symbiosis of desire / in the garden on fire” as it was long ago (Grenier 13). Modern day prudishness, then, stands in stark contrast to nature, where sex is not only destigmatized, but glorified.

Grenier goes on to speak on the selfishness of human nature, mentioning the way that flowers take part in every creation around them and yet humans seem trapped in helping only themselves (Grenier 7). As she notes, “cost and taste make us mortals risk covid for a burger and fries,” which are trivial and short-sighted compared to the “trial and error” and boundless joy of haphazard creation which the rest of nature seems engaged in (Grenier 7). Once again, we see human selfishness contrasted with the creative impulses of the natural world. Grenier points out that human drives for success actually lead us further into error than following our natural selves. Much as she mentions Covid, Grenier discusses a variety of current events, from climate change to race riots. Speaking on American civil unrest after George Floyd’s murder, Grenier reflects that “we make disasters,” humans harming one another more than disordered nature ever could (5). Thus our order becomes not only artificial, but actively malignant.

While she explores current events, though, Grenier never loses sight of human ties to nature. Equating pollution directly to race riots, she notes that “people see nature’s peaceful stirring as a riot of spring cities” (5). Questioning her own complicity in such issues through white privilege, Grenier calls on us to “protest / Harvest/ raze/ torch / the garden” and “plant again,” recreating nature anew (6-7). This of course has something to do with nature, but it also says something about what we as humans must do to our society if we wish it to recover. The artificial structures we’ve built up, she argues, will only stand as long as we are unwilling to create structural change. Just as we must turn back to nature to find the good in life as a whole, we must remake racist structures in order to find the good in ourselves.

This is Grenier’s central point in her chapbook: that we can always make things better. We can absolutely burn down unwieldy structures, destigmatize sex, and bring back the gorgeous disorder of life that nature promises us. Our modern lives don’t need to be handicaps to our happiness, but we have allowed them to be. In In Our Now, Grenier masterfully renders the fact that we can shake off all our artificially-constructed woes, but we have to take up the shovels ourselves.

In Our Now is available from Finishing Line Press

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Scott Sorensen is a junior at Dartmouth College studying English while performing standup, writing for the Dartmouth Jack-O-Lantern satire magazine, and helping edit the Stonefence Review. Scott dreams of becoming the first Latvian man to win an MMA championship, which is pretty unlikely given the fact that he is not Latvian and has no idea how to fight.