Review: Sex Depression Animals by Mag Gabbert
I started reading Sex Depression Animals the same night I took my first ever dose of Lexapro. It occurred to me as I picked up the book that I’d intended to read this collection months ago (according to Goodreads, I marked it as ‘want to read’ on April 17th, a little over a month after it was published). Why had I waited so long? I could point to any number of easy excuses—rent, work, school—but I knew these were cop-outs. I put off reading for the same reason I put off consuming so many other things I know I will like but find myself avoiding: the stakes are too high.
When my loved ones recommend things to me, I feel a sense of panic, as the prospect of engaging with something unknown and potentially relatable (quelle horreur!) brings with it the likelihood of learning something about myself. It’s like being given the choice between two mirrors, one normal and one funhouse. The funhouse mirror is good for cheap entertainment, and you can rest easy knowing what you see is distorted. In the normal mirror, however, nothing is funny; it’s just you looking back, unflinchingly real.
Mag Gabbert, on the other hand, seemingly has little trouble doing so. Smart, blunt, and vulnerable, Sex Depression Animals opens with an epigraph from Ovid’s Metamorphoses: “My mind now turns to speaking of bodies / that turn into new bodies.” Echoes of this can be found throughout the collection, starting with its first poem, “Steam,” which mimics Book I of the Metamorphoses. Where Ovid raises questions of divine intervention and primordial chaos, Gabbert muses on a scientist “with the surname ‘He’ / who had altered a set / of babies’ genes / I kept thinking He / was a deified pronoun” and goes on to say she’d also “been thinking / that transcendence must / require water and heat”. It is clear from the start that nothing is fixed in Gabbert’s universe, that everything has the potential for change.
Gabbert celebrates the mutability of language in a number of ways, from the usage of borrowed lines (she sources from the Bible and Shakespeare among others) to etymological investigations. In a poem about her late uncle’s tattoo of the ocean, Gabbert plays with nautical-themed homophones, resulting in lines like “Grief / involve trades: sorry I’m tide up. I’m knot okay. I still / curl over my bent legs like a seashell when I think about / my dead uncle” (“Tattoo”). These moments avoid being punny and instead reinforce the poem’s grief-stricken line of questioning: what if everything is not as it seems? Furthermore, what if everything is? Here, Gabbert dares to assume that words are fungible; instead of lamenting what is absent or out of reach, the speaker uses what is available, and still manages to articulate what is necessary. In crisis, we are desperate for things to be otherwise, but Gabbert shows us that need not be the case, providing instead a testament to radical acceptance and resourcefulness.
Some of Gabbert’s most exciting experiments with language come in the third section of the collection, entitled “The Breakup.” The entire section is made up of just six lines, each subjected to a series of erasures:
The effect of these erasures is exhilarating as Gabbert maximizes both phonological and morphological possibilities in a Russian nesting doll of linguistic play. And while we may recognize language as having inherent potential, it is ultimately Gabbert’s magpie eye that must be celebrated, for it is she who undertook the role of creator, curator, and excavator.
Beyond its preoccupation with language, Sex Depression Animals is exactly what it says on the tin. The title of the collection mirrors, to an extent, its ordering, with the three subjects corresponding to sections I, II, and IV, respectively. Sections III (“The Breakup”) and V (“Recipe for Quiet Ferocity”) stand apart. Despite the division between the sections, sex and depression act as through-lines and are present in almost every poem, often overlapping, and Gabbert excels in these moments of blurriness. Her poems recognize the potential for depression to be sexy, for sex to be depressing, seeking out the sensuality in all facets of life. Gabbert has a deft hand when it comes to sensuality, having mastered both overt eroticism – “[You] could have been … an empty plate for me to lick, / tracing the veined marble / with my tongue” (“David”) – and feelings more ineffable – “the first time a boy told me / he loved me I was kneeling / in the shower / then it felt like it was raining” (“Rhinoceros”).
The collection frequently returns to the dichotomy of pain and pleasure, allowing for the possibility of them occurring simultaneously. Take the poem “Oyster”:
I like the pleasure
of deprivation
once someone satisfies it
for example by releasing
their hand from around my neck
I once read that oysters
are shaped by their beds
they form around
whatever they attach to
it goes without saying
that I do not
enjoy giving blowjobs
and yet I do
wear a lip-gloss called “venom”
that makes my lips swell and sting
as if someone just hit me
As shown in this excerpt, Gabbert does not flinch from sexual truth. The result is a confession with no guilt or shame, but rather, a wink. At times, Gabbert’s delivery is like that of a deadpan comedian, often shocking me into hesitant laughter.
This frankness extends beyond the sexual, too. I am personally familiar with the ways emotional pain makes words catch in the throat; add in a healthy dose of shame, and it becomes impossible to articulate one’s own suffering, much less poeticize it. Gabbert triumphs anyway. Some of the most bracing moments in the collection feature personal trauma rendered simply and brutally, as in the poem “Figment”:
once I was sick but no one wanted
to hear it until the hospital’s nurses
said they couldn’t find my veins
they kept digging as I felt myself float
above the table and faces I didn’t know
whispered softly “don’t look it’s nothing”
Here, Gabbert wields run-on sentences to great, dissociative effect. It is the plain-spoken nature of these lines that renders suffering so tangible. I am reminded of how, in Ancient Greek, one verb (pásko, from which we get pathos) is used for living, feeling, and suffering. In her poems, Gabbert treats pain and pleasure equally, for they occupy two ends of a spectrum, two sides of a coin. In “Bat” Gabbert writes “I couldn’t / tell the difference between desire and rage,” and perhaps there isn’t one. While every feeling occurs cerebrally to some extent, it is the body that remains central to it all.
One of my favorite poems of the collection (“Fever”) begins:
I cannot make lunch today
I need a tissue
I cannot go to the store
I cannot walk the dogs
I am drained
look at me
I am bloodless
I am silver
I need a tissue …
The poem is defined by lack, strengthened by the repetition of the negative statement. The effect of “I cannot” and “I need” is similar to that of the alpha privative, a linguistic feature in which an prefix on words (such as atypical or anemic) expresses negation or absence of the thing described by the word. As a result, despite the body not being described, we are made hyper-aware of its previous abilities and characteristics, now gone.
While “Fever” in particular alludes to bodily sickness, I find this method of negation apt for writing about suffering in general. The articulation of one’s suffering is clarified when held in contrast to one’s pre-suffering past. It might seem obvious, then, that identifying what has been changed or obliterated by suffering might be easier than articulating the suffering itself. However, at least for me, this was not obvious before reading this collection; therein lies the genius of Gabbert, whose poetry is so deceptively straightforward, it is not until one realizes the magnitude of the subjects she’s writing about that her innovation is revealed.
If I was scared of introspection before reading, Sex Depression Animals showed me I was merely unprepared. I am reminded of a concept frequently taught for anxiety management: that of witness consciousness. The idea is to cultivate a neutral observer within oneself, witnessing thoughts, feelings, and events without judgment or opinion, ultimately allowing for self-acceptance. I would argue that the role of the impartial witness is taken up by the speaker in Sex Depression Animals. This is perhaps exemplified by the final image of the collection’s first poem (“Steam”):
a room made of glass
at the base of a mountain
and I stood inside it
naked
wiping cloud from my cheeks
Every poem in the collection might be dictated from within this glass room, where the sympathetic witness watches.
Sex Depression Animals is a meditation on the self in all its complex, uncensored glory. Not only does Gabbert grant space to the self as it slides along this spectrum of sex and depression, she allows for the possibility of change—expects it, even. Anything is possible, yes, but little is guaranteed. The only thing we can account for is change. I myself have changed a great deal since starting this review; not only has the literal chemistry of my brain been altered after a few months of medication, but I’ve made some drastic mindset changes as well. Most anxiety, I’ve learned, stems from an intolerance of uncertainty. We are comfort-loving creatures who thrive on familiarity, and for some of us uncertainty is scary, threatening, even painful. This does not have to be the case, however.
