Review of Jessie Janeshek's Spanish Donkey/Pear of Anguish

​Review of Jessie Janeshek's Spanish Donkey/Pear of Anguish

Ever wonder what would have happened if Kathy Acker and Flannery O'conner had collaborated on a book of poems? The result may have looked something (although nowhere close) to Jessie Janeshek's latest book 'Spanish Donkey/Pear of Anguish.' Comparisons aren't fair in any case, this is especially true here, as Janeshek is in full control of the place that she wants to take you, a place that once took control from girls is now reclaimed, taken by the throat until the place has pissed its pants, so to speak. These poems will leave their mark on you. Between “A priest wet with piss” and “piss-soaked pages” “we start from an amazing place of decay” Janeshek writes. Not only can “sex be toxic” but the landscape too, the farm animals, dark pigs, deer carcasses, chickens, skulls, foxes, pigpens, jack rabbit, dog, cat, baby, and a “Dark Uncle Thick sits upstairs, ballgame on   our parents spit bullets over bad plumbing.”

The sex is toxic, messy/confusing and made even more difficult-enraging by the  control adults exert, by their hypocrisy and blatant contradictions “you have a wife but you laugh as you lick us” “and we hate ourselves and we hate our body but we love draft beer and the lord.”

“Money's symbolic sex is symbolic.” The holy relics can be replaced “w/ any old skeleton” as these puritanical objects are just a column that the self-righteous use to hide their own mud soaked back yards of misdeeds. Janeshek calls it all out for what it really is: “using the bible to hurt other people” and all of this within the very first poem “we masturbated with a glass eye     one slimy finger     We twisted our wrists    virile tidbits” there is this indestructible lightning quick resistance pulling the rip-cord off the curtain of generational bullshit. “And, yes, we get caught since if not guilt then what?” A profound punch, it leaves its bruise but you better believe its spot was well marked in advance, Janeshek knows exactly where she wants the blow to land, and it is devastatingly quick, biting and to the primal core.

“We validate your subjectivity strive to seem warm but not kittenish pull red poison yarns out of our nipples.” The stifling male dominated expectations of femininity are deconstructed here with brilliantly biting humor, and then the stark-dark realism of this place: “We still have one bad calf's white corpse in the basement. Can you help us bury it.” “We walk abroad in humility shovel fresh shit, rub hands together, servile, Pentecostal. We're tired of sharp badges, high tests, blind pines... no pledge of allegiance. You'd never have treated us this way in the old days” Janeshek writes in “The Clouds of the Father, Part 2” signaling the dark storms that generations of Fathers have been dragging into the future with them, handed down to their kin as if it were a fatal flaw that could not be un-owned, but Janeshek not only refuses to own it, she refuses to let us off the hook for all of the reasons why this is continuing to happen. Why so many damaged-clouds these Fathers keep giving? What is their source?

The political hypocrisy. “Witness humanity fixing our uterus our lagging muffler” as if a womans body can be broken down into car parts, as if the mechanic/politician, as full of shit as the “priest wet with piss” has any authority except that which he has laid claim to through outright coercion and abuse, through inter-generational erasure and shame tactics. “Then science gets interesting     seances in jars” a hard jab at the wind pipes of the religious hijacking of women's bodies. “I think I hear you coming but it's just the sheepdog.” Janeshek once again returns us to that early landscape, even in the heart of the political moment, precisely because it is all connected, and she wants us to know that she knows what we want to pretend not to know, that we are all implicated in this world, that none of our hands are clean. “The medicine's empty, but we drink it anyway     sing to distract.”

“It's not crime if it's habit” the delusions that we all participate in and pass on would almost have us believe. But it is crime. A shared crime. And our habit is here exposed in all of its fleshy messiness.

Spanish Donkey/Pear of Anguish is pure punch-poetry, it never misses a beat and it certainly never misses its mark. Read this book and be changed. Or better yet, read this book and change. 



Spanish Donkey/Pear of Anguish by Jessie Janeshek, published by Grey Book Press, can be purchased here: http://greybookpress.com/index.php/site/titles/