Sundress Reads: Review of Love as Invasive Species

In her poetry collection, Love as Invasive Species (Cornerstone Press 2024), Ellen Kombiyil explores the nature of love, as well as what it means to continue from a foundation of familial dysfunction and corrupted affections. Her characterization of love as a parasite hones in on the uneasy greediness of affection and the instrumentalization inherent to it as one person uses another to feel good. This contrasts sharply with visions of the Poet’s grandmother, who the Poet takes as a perfect example of gratitude and a genial outlook on the world. Through accounts of the unnamed “Poet,” a speaker separated from Kombiyil herself, Kombiyil makes readers simultaneously wary of and grateful for love (Side B 1-2).

In her descriptions of domestic and sexual assault, Kombiyil employs rogue parentheses, slashes, and other unorthodox punctuation in the middle of lines in order to convey urgency while still recognizing the flow of time in which those traumas take place. After the Poet’s first (non-consensual) kiss during a game of Seven Minutes in Heaven, Kombiyil describes her as “laughing/collapsing/unable to stand” (Side A 22). Without breaking the adolescent magic of the moment the Poet gets swept up in, Kombiyil also recognizes the dread and disorientation present in the scene. Kombiyil’s descriptions of various types of abuse are compelling and detailed, lending complex emotion to events which could otherwise be oversimplified.

Kombiyil’s work creates a timeline of the young Poet’s life, effectively tracking her from young childhood through her own motherhood. This allows isolated events (featured in poems like “Days of 1985”) to string together into a larger story. Kombiyil doesn’t provide the Poet’s age in crucial moments like her non-consensual first kiss or during her father’s abuse, but the reader can look back and see it in retrospect. As such, the reader must assume the Poet’s age through context clues like exciting moments with friends or relying on her mother, making these poems snapshots of different periods of life rather than mere portraits of one girl at one age. While the book flips upside down halfway through the collection (Side B is printed upside down; the page numbers count back toward one), the timeline works continuously from the narrator’s early life through her motherhood.

Looking at the relationship between the Poet’s childhood and her mother’s, Kombiyil asks whether something like domestic trauma or looking for love in the wrong places are hereditary. The Poet wonders about “Ma who also fled a house with famine / of love” and the ways that both she and Ma had to flee domestic assault (Kombiyil 18). Kombiyil never directly says whether we’re all doomed to repeat our family’s mistakes, although she does depict the Poet with her husband as significantly more peaceful than the Poet’s parents’ marriage (Side B 13). Though the Poet still appears unhappy or bored with said union, much like her mother, it is a form of progress.

This inheritance feeds directly into the question Kombiyil raises in the title of this collection about the nature of love. Parasites and bugs pop up all through this collection, from slugs to mealworms and even tarantulas. They proliferate in spoiled food that the Poet and her poor family hope to save a bit longer, stalking throughout the house; banana slugs converge from all angles on the Poet’s house and she and her sister have to sprinkle them with salt. The title, Love as Invasive Species, points us to consider how these bugs might represent love, either familial or romantic. While there are a couple of stanzas in the first half of the book (her grandmother writhing in a hospital bed much like salted banana slugs), the flipped half is far more precise on the question (Kombiyil Side A 33). While bug-like images all but disappear in the second half of the collection, parasitic love, which becomes abusive at times, blooms. Farmers harvest bull semen using a restrained cow, for instance, using and manipulating the cow who trusts them. The Poet’s grandmother, sprawled on her deathbed, begs the Poet to “Help me / love you less,” suggesting that the love she feels from her granddaughter brings her a form of pain (Kombiyil Side A 28). Whether through circumstance or personal choice, the love that the cow and the grandmother feel bring them great sorrow.

Despite all this messiness, Kombiyil does describe positive, transformative love through the image of the Poet’s grandmother. Despite the fact she’s only mentioned in a few poems before her death, this grandmother’s love for the world makes her childlike and completely full of wonder. In “The Last Joyride,”

Gramma sings “starfish prints in the sand, […] washed away like my own hands,” praising the natural world in spite of its impermanence (Kombiyil Side A 26). She “fluttered in her johnny gown” despite being confined to a walker, the strength of her joy enough to liberate her from an ailing body (Kombiyil Side A 26). Kombiyil suggests that although much love is parasitic or undesirable in some sense, this sort of admiration for the world can liberate one from that struggle. If trauma can be inherited, so, perhaps, can this sort of love. Gramma reappears through the rest of the collection as an example of what love can be.

In Love as Invasive Species, Kombiyil is frank about the downsides of love but also painfully hopeful of what it can be. If we live well, we don’t have to spend so much time loving the wrong people or fretting on our deathbeds. We can sit on the beach and watch the starfish, letting their prints dissolve slowly into the sand.

Love as Invasive Species is available from Cornerstone 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.