A Guardian to Others’ Solitude: Review of Jenny Johnson’s In Full Velvet

by roy guzmán, guest book reviewer

In the introduction to his book, Cruising Utopia, the late José Esteban Muñoz remarks on the relationship between queerness and time: “We have never been queer, yet queerness exists for us as an ideality that can be distilled from the past and used to imagine a future,” adding, “The future is queerness’s domain.” Employing James Schuyler’s poem “A photograph” to justify this claim, Muñoz focuses on this section:

I really do believe

future generations can

live without the in-

tervals of anxious

fear we know between our

bouts and strolls of

ecstasy.

For Muñoz, “These future generations are…not an identitarian formulation but, instead, the invocation of a future collectivity, a queerness that registers as the illumination of a horizon of existence.” Given this framework, queerness becomes an ecstatic possibility, an affair with a future capable of giving rise to a utopian collective.

These concerns are also at the heart of poet Jenny Johnson’s debut collection. In Full Velvet is a restless exploration of how queerness manifests itself in shifting contexts, in the political forces that seek to suppress queer spaces, in the “nameless forms” that can’t be categorized (“Dappled Things”), for the “half tomboy, / half centaur” (“Tail”) that strives for survival, and for the entities that “alter / nothing…[yet] alter everything” (“Pine Street Barbershop”). Queerness in Johnson’s book is the Deleuzian “becoming-animal,” the thing that—echoing Gerard Manley Hopkins—is “counter, original, spare, and strange” (“Dappled Things”)—a celebration of the misfits, the in-betweenness, and what remains forever in transition without—here I’m thinking of Elizabeth Bishop—a home.

One of the moments in In Full Velvet where Johnson articulates one of the book’s main anxieties occurs in the title poem:

Love, we are more than utility, I think.

Some phantasms about our bodies in relationship to gender and sexuality

are idealized, some degrading, some compulsory, some transgressive.

The addressee, I suspect, is a “you” that reappears in other poems (perhaps, an ideal you). An unspeakable trepidation falls heavy on these poems, a preoccupation with ghosts that both originate from within our bodies and from external pressures and misconceptions about queerness. In this poem—a tour de force in seven sections—Johnson begins by mentioning dissection, taxidermy, evolution, form, and the future. “O Love, how precise is any vision?” it asks. Several negations set up the poem’s rhetoric of destabilization: “he mistook the spinal cord for the heart,” “and were held prisoners until puberty,” “how precise is any vision”; “gut a body and we’re nothing left but pipes whistling in the breeze,” “there’s nothing in her casque but soft tissue,” “because it makes me want to turn away”; “I had to cover my eyes when they severed the ancestral wing,” “but we can’t do that when it’s in full velvet,” and “atypical,…ghosts, raggedy-horn freaks.” What mistakes are made and irresponsibly overlooked in the narratives and structures that aim to (mis)define us? If the future is an imprecise vision of the present, how can we make certain the present remains honest to that vision?

“Where’s Hope?” Johnson asks in “Dappled Things,” following that stanza with a kind of sonnetic volta: “Will all things return—if I so choose to burp— / in nameless forms?” For a poem—and a book—that explores queer identity urgently and as an imperative, the word “burp” comes off as too colloquial, almost ungainly. However, that informality is exactly how this project draws its subversive geist. Another high point in this collection where the vernacular packs a great deal of wisdom is “In the Dream”:

I was alone in a dyke bar we’d traversed before

or maybe it was in a way all out dives

merging together suddenly as one intergalactic composite,

one glitter-spritzed black hole,

one cue stick burnished down to a soft blue nub.

Picture an open cluster of stars

managing to forever stabilize in space

without a landlord scheming to shut the place down.

In a time when the notion of sanctuaries is relentlessly adulterated by people who arguably have never had to seek refuge to protect and secure their basic needs, Johnson’s In Full Velvet is a reminder that massacres against our bodies, such as the one in Orlando, occur because the basic right to be queer and alive are two realities our government can’t reconcile. The dyke dive bar in “In the Dream” is the casual intimation of the queer in the unapologetic penumbra: the future. In Full Velvet is performative debauchery at its most informed, inclusive, political, loud, generous, and committed.

When Johnson writes at the end of this poem, “And with one finger I called our family forth / and out of the strobe lights, they came,” we are reminded of the power of chosen families, of intentional fuckeries, and of the crowd that “will bridge this choir” (“Aria”). By the end, the ghosts come in to order their beers. The tips they leave behind are in the very “traces” of our battle cries.

#royguzmán #jennyjohnson #infullvelvet #bookreview