Sundress Reads: Review of That Ex

The title is set in Visby, but I think it is more apt to fondly call it an Avril Lavigne font. The cover of That Ex by Rachelle Toarmino (Big Lucks, 2020) immediately sets a loud, confident, unapologetically femme tone that I cannot disengage from. Toarmino masterfully layers dozens of clever, understated cultural references to create a cohesive and fun portrait of the life of a 20-something in 2020s America. That Ex, Toarmino explains, is titled as such because every man has a story about a “crazy ex” who, more likely than not, was human, and her poems reflect the human intimacy of sincere self-confidence others may look down upon. Toarmino­­­­’s engagement with form helps the book embody a wholly contemporary experience, immersing her audience in the emotional weight of finding love, family, and yourself while being bombarded by phone notifications and the plight of social media.

Toarmino, Editor-in-Chief of Peach Magazine, swiftly summarizes this experience in 103 weighty pages of poetry. While the collection moves quickly, themes and emotions building between pages, each poem is worth sitting with individually. Holistically, this book reads like tending to a plant stretching up under the neon purple of a grow light—something tender, assisting natural growth and life through artificial means to supplement that which we cannot get otherwise. Individual poems read like lip gloss shimmer catching the light from below in a bar; the light that cracks through pre-installed starter apartment curtain blinds; streetlights smearing onto the wet pavement of an empty parking lot at night. Lines become enjambed and run over each other, interrupting one thought with another, fast callbacks and callouts and calls for attention to the minutiae of daily turmoil. And it is beautiful.

With references from Anne Carson to the Twitter account @SheRatesDogs (which posts anonymous screencaps of male entitlement, often in dating app screenshots or private messages on social media), from Anish Kapoor and Stuart Semple’s color privatization disputes to Marie Kondo’s concept of items sparking joy, Toarmino captures the whirlwind of constant cultural references that comes with living in the digital age. These references come in quick succession, and the reader is expected to keep up. Both of the above sets of references occur within the same line, rocketing us back and forth between flickers of the cultural imagination. Toarmino’s spry connections are not just for immersion, but to lend an anchor point for empathy: understanding the subversions, inversions, and thick vacillations between optimism and pessimism about the situations at hand often feels like staring at someone else’s life through a thick pane of glass. In “People You May Know,” the speaker calls interpersonal interactions “looking at each other / through the wrong end / of binoculars” and comments that “it is so gaudy / and gruesome.” Toarmino is right, and That Ex consolidates this experience, tracing the move from putting yourself together to falling back apart to putting yourself back together but for real this time, I promise.

That Ex uses physical forms, in all its shifts and breaks and shapes, to its advantage throughout the book. For example, “If You Love Attention Make Some Noise,” is composed only of one phrase—“I am easy to love,”—that is repeated 104 times. The final line cuts off the phrase partway through: “I am easy.” The repetition creates a perfect block of text, a rectangle easy enough to skim through like a mantra you have to tell yourself even when you don’t believe it, followed by an interjection, or perhaps an intrusion, of what you really do believe, or what others tell you that you should believe.  

“I Said Okay” is the first of two poems where single lines and stanzas stand on their own, spread across eighteen pages, a handful of words and images swimming in blank space. The last image, “okay / I said okay / I will Okay” uses capitalization for emphasis, as though we’re hearing one side of a phone conversation with a disgruntled mother. These fragments feel like reading texts pop up on someone else’s phone screen—stripped of context, yet deeply intimate and emotional. You cannot know what that context is without intruding, and Toarmino doesn’t shy away from the bombardment and interference that has become a cornerstone of young contemporary lives. Other shapes, literal images of a ravioli food truck or a computer mouse bringing the speaker’s body to the trash described as bracketed asides in “Week of Waking Thoughts No. 2” or the lightning-bolt zig-zag of alternatingly off-centered lines in “You Up?”, are emotional touchstones without ever feeling self-serving or self-sacrificing. In particular, “[visual of mouse cursor dragging my body to Trash] / mark yourself safe” from “You Up?” highlights the speaker’s feelings of catastrophe by moving herself to the electronic disposal system and, in the very next line, clarifying that she is okay by means of Facebook’s algorithm for updating family and friends after a disaster.  

“there is the first moment / when you realize // that someday you will know this person / very intimately // but it will feel like / returning to something.” That Ex brought me back to shuffling through profiles on Tinder, keeping my fingers crossed for the prospect of finding someone worth my love, and trying to convince myself that I was just as worthy of it as others. Its lyric stirrings brought that purple light overhead, returning me to an intimate corner of myself I’d nearly forgotten about, but never truly could.

That Ex is available at Big Lucks


Lee Anderson is a nonbinary MFA student at Northern Arizona University, where they are the Managing Editor of Thin Air Magazine. They have been published sporadically but with zest, with work appearing or forthcoming in The RumpusColumbia Journal, and Back Patio Press.

The Wardrobe’s Best Dressed: That Ex by Rachelle Toarmino

Fight (I Know You Can Hear Me)

The one that’s made of time.
We took turns naming things,

which is the traditional way
lovers sharpen one another.

Point: Remember when I drove your car
for you so you could dry your nails

out the window?
What do you call that?

Counterpoint: Somewhere in the world
a snake gets lost in an endless

tunnel of its own skin after shedding
doesn’t quite go according to plan.

Nobody knows how to feel
about it. What is prey?

Well, what is plunder?
A stillness goes viral as the room fractures

into danger between us.
Come on, it’s late, you say finally,

and with such sudden gentleness
I mistake you for dawn.


This selection comes from the book, That Ex, available from Big Lucks.  Purchase your copy here! Our curator for this selection is Sarah Clark.

Rachelle Toarmino is a writer and editor from Niagara Falls, New York. She is the author of the poetry collection That Ex (Big Lucks Books, 2020) and the chapbooks Feel Royal (b l u s h, 2019) and Personal & Generic (PressBoardPress, 2016). Her writing has appeared in Cosmonauts AvenueMcSweeney’s Internet Tendency, Metatron Press, Shabby Doll House, and other places online and in print, and has been anthologized in The Cosmonauts Avenue Anthology and My Next Heart: New Buffalo Poetry. She lives in Buffalo, where she works as the editor in chief of Peach Mag, the communications and development manager of Arts Services Inc., and a teaching artist at Just Buffalo Literary Center.

Sarah Clark is Editor-in-Chief and Poetry Editor at Anomaly, Co-Editor of The Queer Movement Anthology (Seagull Books, 2021), a reader at The Atlas Review and Doubleback Books, and an Editorial Board member at Sundress Press. She’s edited folios for publications, including Anomaly‘s GLITTERBRAIN folio and a folio on Indigenous & Decolonial Futures & Futurisms, Drunken Boat’s folios on Sound Art, “Desire & Interaction,” and a collection of global indigenous art and literature, First Peoples, Plural. Sarah freelances, and has worked with a number of literary and arts publications and organizations.

The Wardrobe’s Best Dressed: That Ex by Rachelle Toarmino

BASES

I make you read The Glass Essay

I make you follow @SheRatesDogs

you use words to describe my memories
that I use to describe my memories

you pick a cat hair off my collar

I ask you how work was

we fight

we fight

we work it out or forget we’re fighting

I buy travel sizes for your place

you greet my houseplants one by one

desire replaces wonder
replaces fear
and back again

we agree solar flare
describes the feeling of your body
as it leaves my body

we agree longing
describes the feeling of our bodies
looking for one another

you say the trick is to remember
that worlds orbit heat
and you’re right

you ask if you can make your heat
less your own
and then you do


This selection comes from the book, That Ex, available from Big Lucks.  Purchase your copy here! Our curator for this selection is Sarah Clark.

Rachelle Toarmino is a writer and editor from Niagara Falls, New York. She is the author of the poetry collection That Ex (Big Lucks Books, 2020) and the chapbooks Feel Royal (b l u s h, 2019) and Personal & Generic (PressBoardPress, 2016). Her writing has appeared in Cosmonauts AvenueMcSweeney’s Internet Tendency, Metatron Press, Shabby Doll House, and other places online and in print, and has been anthologized in The Cosmonauts Avenue Anthology and My Next Heart: New Buffalo Poetry. She lives in Buffalo, where she works as the editor in chief of Peach Mag, the communications and development manager of Arts Services Inc., and a teaching artist at Just Buffalo Literary Center.

Sarah Clark is Editor-in-Chief and Poetry Editor at Anomaly, Co-Editor of The Queer Movement Anthology (Seagull Books, 2021), a reader at The Atlas Review and Doubleback Books, and an Editorial Board member at Sundress Press. She’s edited folios for publications, including Anomaly‘s GLITTERBRAIN folio and a folio on Indigenous & Decolonial Futures & Futurisms, Drunken Boat’s folios on Sound Art, “Desire & Interaction,” and a collection of global indigenous art and literature, First Peoples, Plural. Sarah freelances, and has worked with a number of literary and arts publications and organizations.

The Wardrobe’s Best Dressed: That Ex by Rachelle Toarmino

NUDES

after Anne Carson

Nude #1. That one alone
in her living room. Finding another
way to settle an argument. Oil

diffuser on-again, off-again.
Nude #2. That one in the passenger seat,
looking like the last thing you need.

She better be finished. In the end,
the driver says, it won’t be cinematic.
His won’t be the last face you see.

Nude #3. That one with the touch
completely like music. They can’t get inside
that feeling enough. She moves

in her own light.
Kisses into them the question
Is this how you lose her?

Nude #4. Look who’s trying
to prove a point!
a man yells at that one
specifically. She knew where to look.

Sings his name now like a ritual.
Nude #5. That one is a feral
little ruin. Heels off

and running. Quick as thought.
Nude #6. All those ones in the group chat
catching their breath.

I never liked him, one says.
That ancient proverb.
Nude #7. That one thought she was out.

Take everything, she says,
expanding as she speaks. Hit or be hit.
The locks inside her change.

Nude #9. That one winks into the void.
Sings Tell me I’m a problem.
Was born into this world skeptical

and hurt, and look where that got her.
Nude #10. That one got it all wrong.
Got bangs. Got steps in.

Nude #11. That one knows
too much. Watches porn she’s already seen.
She’ll be sorry. Leaves

without closing the door.
Nude #12. For that one, forgiveness is an option
the way luck is an option.

Every regret inside her like another life.
Pain opens like a mouth. All mercy
and teeth.

Nude #13. That one’s new way of killing
needed a new way of speaking.
Like filling silence.

It would be too easy.


This selection comes from the book, That Ex, available from Big Lucks.  Purchase your copy here! Our curator for this selection is Sarah Clark.

Rachelle Toarmino is a writer and editor from Niagara Falls, New York. She is the author of the poetry collection That Ex (Big Lucks Books, 2020) and the chapbooks Feel Royal (b l u s h, 2019) and Personal & Generic (PressBoardPress, 2016). Her writing has appeared in Cosmonauts AvenueMcSweeney’s Internet Tendency, Metatron Press, Shabby Doll House, and other places online and in print, and has been anthologized in The Cosmonauts Avenue Anthology and My Next Heart: New Buffalo Poetry. She lives in Buffalo, where she works as the editor in chief of Peach Mag, the communications and development manager of Arts Services Inc., and a teaching artist at Just Buffalo Literary Center.

Sarah Clark is Editor-in-Chief and Poetry Editor at Anomaly, Co-Editor of The Queer Movement Anthology (Seagull Books, 2021), a reader at The Atlas Review and Doubleback Books, and an Editorial Board member at Sundress Press. She’s edited folios for publications, including Anomaly‘s GLITTERBRAIN folio and a folio on Indigenous & Decolonial Futures & Futurisms, Drunken Boat’s folios on Sound Art, “Desire & Interaction,” and a collection of global indigenous art and literature, First Peoples, Plural. Sarah freelances, and has worked with a number of literary and arts publications and organizations.

The Wardrobe’s Best Dressed: That Ex by Rachelle Toarmino

Beating & Rotting All At Once

I’m learning a lot lately
about the visitation rights of a memory,

and how it feels to have joint custody of yourself
with yourself.


This selection comes from the book, That Ex, available from Big Lucks.  Purchase your copy here! Our curator for this selection is Sarah Clark.

Rachelle Toarmino is a writer and editor from Niagara Falls, New York. She is the author of the poetry collection That Ex (Big Lucks Books, 2020) and the chapbooks Feel Royal (b l u s h, 2019) and Personal & Generic (PressBoardPress, 2016). Her writing has appeared in Cosmonauts AvenueMcSweeney’s Internet Tendency, Metatron Press, Shabby Doll House, and other places online and in print, and has been anthologized in The Cosmonauts Avenue Anthology and My Next Heart: New Buffalo Poetry. She lives in Buffalo, where she works as the editor in chief of Peach Mag, the communications and development manager of Arts Services Inc., and a teaching artist at Just Buffalo Literary Center.

Sarah Clark is Editor-in-Chief and Poetry Editor at Anomaly, Co-Editor of The Queer Movement Anthology (Seagull Books, 2021), a reader at The Atlas Review and Doubleback Books, and an Editorial Board member at Sundress Press. She’s edited folios for publications, including Anomaly‘s GLITTERBRAIN folio and a folio on Indigenous & Decolonial Futures & Futurisms, Drunken Boat’s folios on Sound Art, “Desire & Interaction,” and a collection of global indigenous art and literature, First Peoples, Plural. Sarah freelances, and has worked with a number of literary and arts publications and organizations.

The Wardrobe’s Best Dressed: That Ex by Rachelle Toarmino

Hard Feelings

feeling old when you open a folder of drafts

your hands and where to put them

your legs and how to lean

writing cover letters
and feeling like you’re a product review

thinking your voice sounds unsalted
when you hear it on a recording

feeling lonely inside a furniture store

grief

love

nostalgia

using people as templates
and making them live as characters
or contradictions

getting sad to cope with being bored

wishing you could kill a memory
like hunger

by feeding it


This selection comes from the book, That Ex, available from Big Lucks.  Purchase your copy here! Our curator for this selection is Sarah Clark.

Rachelle Toarmino is a writer and editor from Niagara Falls, New York. She is the author of the poetry collection That Ex (Big Lucks Books, 2020) and the chapbooks Feel Royal (b l u s h, 2019) and Personal & Generic (PressBoardPress, 2016). Her writing has appeared in Cosmonauts AvenueMcSweeney’s Internet Tendency, Metatron Press, Shabby Doll House, and other places online and in print, and has been anthologized in The Cosmonauts Avenue Anthology and My Next Heart: New Buffalo Poetry. She lives in Buffalo, where she works as the editor in chief of Peach Mag, the communications and development manager of Arts Services Inc., and a teaching artist at Just Buffalo Literary Center.

Sarah Clark is Editor-in-Chief and Poetry Editor at Anomaly, Co-Editor of The Queer Movement Anthology (Seagull Books, 2021), a reader at The Atlas Review and Doubleback Books, and an Editorial Board member at Sundress Press. She’s edited folios for publications, including Anomaly‘s GLITTERBRAIN folio and a folio on Indigenous & Decolonial Futures & Futurisms, Drunken Boat’s folios on Sound Art, “Desire & Interaction,” and a collection of global indigenous art and literature, First Peoples, Plural. Sarah freelances, and has worked with a number of literary and arts publications and organizations.