Dog-Walking in the Shadow of Pyongyang

by Devon Balwit
(Nixes Mate Books, 2021) 

Reviewed by Alan King  

Imagine watching a city burn. You’re far enough away from the blaze that you don’t hear the sirens. Everything plays out like a silent horror film. Then survivor’s guilt sets in: 

… I know cars clog the roads

like unsaid things clot the throat, words

that would have changed everything.

That I thought them must be enough, 

like a weeping parent who beats her hands

on steering wheels, willing my children,

the cat, the dog beyond the mayhem. 

After the guilt comes denial when the mayhem is drowned out by “Bach spilling from the speakers” (from “Despite the Blaze”). These bizarre twists spill throughout Devon Balwit’s new poetry collection, Dog-Walking in the Shadow of Pyongyang.

The title has its own tale. If you know the history of Pyongyang—how that North Korean city was demolished and rebuilt, then devastated and revived again—you might think of it in two ways: 1) that it’s a city of misfortune or 2) that it’s a lesson in resilience. If we look at each poem through the first lens, one might think the speakers in this book are fools “dog-walking” themselves into one disastrous situation after the next. But I prefer the second view, which is an empowering one. In that sense, the characters populating Devon’s collection show the reader that—as the novelist Jodi Picoult once put it—“the human capacity for burden is like bamboo—far more flexible than you’d ever believe at first glance.” 

You see that bamboo bend of a mother burdened by her son’s question: “Is the U.S. Ready for a Nuclear Threat?”—which is also the poem’s title. In that piece, the mom manages by learning “the poetry of defense, / the naming of the deadly arc—boost, / midcourse, terminal.” She uses humor as another way of coping:

… The first two stages 

sound almost hopeful; who doesn’t

want a boost? Mid-course, like me,

one feels still able to veer. The latter third

is bad, but surely there are therapies,

intercepts to spare us impact.

Balwit’s use of that tone here speaks directly to what the actor/comedian Mel Brooks once said about humor, how it’s “just another defense against the universe.” Balwit’s speaker elaborates on that point:

… The problem is

the threat cloud. We know it well

from life, the way trouble comes

in clusters. 

We see a similar threat cloud in the book’s opening poem, “Demeter of the Ex-Urb.” In this scene, the speaker is a grass flower sprouting where she’s not welcomed. The so-called “mistress of spathe, spikelet, glume / and peduncle” is confronted by Demeter, the goddess of agriculture. A standoff ensues, but the speaker stands her ground:

… my green fuse

stutter-stepping—paling

to near-guttering, barbarian weeds

creeping—before re-flaring, fierce

in a campaign of ripped roots …

The music of those lines intensifies the brawl with the alliteration (“stutter-stepping … flaring, fierce / … ripped roots”), popping like jabs, then the final blow: “me flailing the blunt trowel.” Poems like “Demeter of the Ex-Urb” and “Sarracenia, the Siren Singer” almost feel like trickster tales, where the protagonist uses their wits to survive. “Sarracenia” flips the predator-prey interaction:

… You come to me, all the while thinking it

your own idea.

to stumble on my fluted lips. It’s almost too easy. 

With each conquest, I plump further. Waxing new traps.

What’s striking about this collection is Balwit’s ability to bring the reader into alternate realities, where they gain new insights. She does this in “East Egg,” a nod to F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby. The speaker—a “wide-eyed ingénue”—is in a rendezvous with Tom Buchanan in the East Egg, or old money part of the river:

He invited me here, and I came, already wet,

trailing him like fingers through condensation.

Daisy laughs, knowing what he is beneath skin.

Later, I’ll swear I also knew but didn’t care.

The last line of the second stanza almost reads like regret. This reader could imagine the speaker preparing for the walk of shame. That is until these lines:

Anything to shuck corset and slip

into a flappers’ insouciance, and, top down,

feel the rush of wind. Later, chastened

and headachy, I’ll stack vows like unread novels

by my bedside. Anyone can fetch and obey.

Even briefly, I wanted claws. 

That the speaker slips “into a flapper’s insouciance” makes the reader wonder who played who, who made whom “fetch and obey.” Then it becomes a poem about women’s sexual liberation, the speaker stacking her male conquests “like unread novels” by her bedside. That her lovers are unread novels could mean it’s not worth her time exploring something deeper within them. The speaker’s actions come with another kind of burden, especially in a society still policing women’s sexuality. 

A reader might assume as much from the poem “Sad Night,” where the speaker and possibly-a-lover flee from their “burdens across the causeways of night” until the road disappears, or “has ghosted.” Balwit’s sensory imagery shows a desperate situation: 

… We bring each other down,

then use the twisted limbs to keep above dark water.

If we survive till dawn, it is because we are guilty.

The final lines evoke the Salem witch trials in colonial Massachusetts in the late seventeenth century. During that time, mostly women were accused of practicing witchcraft for acting out of the norm. The speaker in “East Egg” would certainly fit the grand juries’ descriptions of someone acting witch-like for being “stubborn,” “strange,” or exhibiting “forward behavior.” Those characteristics might also apply to the speaker and her partner in “Sad Night.” Witch trial victims were tortured by devices like the ducking stool—what looked like a seesaw with a stool. The accused would sit on the seat that hung over a local pond. Their accuser, on the other end, would dunk them in the water. If the accused survived, they were considered a witch. If they drowned, they were innocent. Hence the lines: “If we survive till dawn, it is because we are guilty.” Other sensory details add to that allusion: “Ravens clack from purple-black hoods, eyes fierce / with knowing” or “newlyweds twisting bright rings about captive fingers.” One can’t help but wonder if the speaker and her partner are not supposed to be together, if their relationship goes against the norms of a city casting them out, where:

… We bruise beneath offal,

gag on the taste of iron. Grudgingly, dawn releases us

from where we sprawl in mud patterned by flailing.

That they love each other despite the consequences shows an attribute that the speakers in this collection have in common. They’re courageous enough to face their disasters head on—bruises and all—and emerge with a hero’s heart. After all, as Khalil Gibran put it, “the most massive characters are seared with scars.” 

The most important lesson that comes out of Dog-Walking in the Shadow of Pyongyang is that we’re measured by our courage, even when we curse the journey. We see that with Devon’s speakers in the poem “What We Are”: 

… We blame our childhood

or the rough journey, but it may just be

the way we were made. A tracery

of brick, a careless daubing. Neither side

matches, but we have learned to celebrate

imbalance, not to care when eyes

peer in between our slipped slats.

Let them look. Even clouds

pause overhead for a glimpse. 

The Unbuttoned Eye
by Robert Carr
(3: A Taos Press, 2019)

Reviewed by Devon Balwit

Back in the mid-eighties, I sometimes accompanied my gay roommate to the bars of West Hollywood. A woman, I was invisible to the patrons and spent my time like an anthropologist, trying to learn the ways of gay bodies—how men signaled desire and acted upon it—so different from what I knew. Robert Carr’s poems flesh out (indeed!) these hows, unabashedly delighting in men’s desire for other men. “We are the timeless fuck in skinless / dark,” “We do not care / for sex with women, hunt // toothsome men.” Bodies and the pleasures they give are lovingly itemized— “thin men measure dark lengths against the lining of a mouth.” Sexual pleasure is taken in bars, in bathrooms, on boardwalks, in tents, in elegant bedrooms, “[c]ock dowsing the center / that sustains space.” Even knowing the threat of what was then called G.R.I.D. (Gay Related Immune Deficiency), candy-colored condoms were left by many sex-club patrons untouched in bowls: “Come into me unsheathed / strand, little death hood / between boy and man.”

These are the beautiful bodies documented by Robert Mapplethorpe—not the least of which was Robert Mapplethorpe’s own. Readers should spend time with Mapplethorpe’s photographs to catch their many echoes throughout the poems—the infamous whip in the anus, the gorgeous calla lilies, men having sex in multiples, leather-clad men, men pissing on one another, Mapplethorpe sporting devil’s horns. The photographs of Robert Carr as a young man echo some of Mapplethorpe’s poses. They are produced using the process of Solarization, which involves re-exposing the photographic paper during the development process to produce an eerie silver image that makes his young, sculptural body look electrified, surrounded by a dark halo, almost as if the fine hairs of the skin have become metal filings drawn by a magnet.

Alas, as we all know, in the 80’s, the hungry body soon became the dying body. Drawing on his long years of witness and serving the infected and the suffering, Carr writes intimately about the ravages of AIDS on his community: Kaposi’s sarcoma, thrush, incontinence, hair loss, vomiting. These bodies that were once sought out to pose in art classes, for photographs, for one another in the heat of passion, soon fail in hospices, hospitals, and on living room couches. Carr’s poems are unsparing: “Release of shit in a death-bed, spread / of blood shaken over birth. Salt of first cry, sugar / of breast milk, black rattle vomit.”

And yet the dying body calls forth compassion, as in this excerpt, from “Font”: “You whisper how he’s lost the strength to walk, so for weeks // you’ve carried him like a child learning a waltz. You tell me how, / lifted from the bed, he places lesioned soles on top of your feet, / how you walk backward toward the bathroom […]” All-night sex morphs into fear and deathbed vigil.

And yet, as the poet’s mother says to him: “Not everyone who dies / is a beautiful boy, amen.” Many of these men do make it through the crisis. Then, they have to accommodate yet another loss—that of aging, the beautiful, sculptural body morphing into the lumpy, dumpy, mottled old body, yet one that celebrates the opportunity to age. “Wrapped in a fist, I grow still—age spotted, / a lichened twist growing out of a night.” “I burrow contented in fattened fur— / learn to love loss // of lank […]” Bars tame into thirty-year marriages, husband and husband, the raising of a child, wills, and funeral arrangements. While good, the poet admits, “Life is flatter now that no one is dying.”

The reader soon notices that The Unbuttoned Eye is full of Roberts. The collection begins with a prelude: “Some names I remember, others I make up […] I am the sum of prints, stacked Roberts […]” At least fifteen poems reference the name: Robert Mapplethorpe, Robert Carr, young Roberts, older Roberts, bedside Roberts, bedded Roberts. How do these many Roberts interact? Robert chides Robert: “Robert, stop moping with the dead.” Robert witnesses Robert: “Robert clings // to castles in reread picture books.” Roberts mourns (with) Robert: “Wordless, / another Robert leaves the neighbor’s house.” Robert reflects: “Robert, even now, we are not lovers. I allow you a bronzed urn on a mantle, nothing more.” Prose poem letters to and from Robert Mapplethorpe serve as section heads. The multiplication of the name, the reappearance of the poet’s younger self in photographs, shifts the reader forward and backwards in time—through avid bodies and ailing ones, wistful and grateful ones. The Roberts challenge one another and call one another to account.

Finally, the poems must stand as poems, and not just as a historical record. These do—artfully and cunningly wrought. Carr has mastered line breaks, startling us with deft shifts in direction, for example: “I sit naked with a small group / of strangers, unusually well / hung.” He plays with layout, adding space at the margins and between stanzas to allow the poems to breathe as in this excerpt from “Someone Else’s Bruise”:
  
    Restless swelter
           —curled paint,
                        a ceiling skin hanging
    in heat. A never-
                       to-do list. Rolling
    onto my back,
    I find imprints
          on a forearm. Twisted cotton
    sheets spiraled on the floor.

Carr’s work is also full of poignant metaphor. He writes of pink magnolia blossoms, birds echoing boys: “Almost to a bird, they fell to earth / and died of fear. Blush gray wings / silent, folded on a walkway […]” Titles unfold layer upon layer. Font evokes tears, holy water, the fluid in lesions as well as the font of the Motel 6 sign. “Chocolate Box” refers to the slab of a dead man’s coffin as well as the narrator’s own anus, hiding the thong of the deceased whose funeral he is attending. Carr has a light touch with his heavy material. Never once does the reader feel that the book was written in the service of a message, and yet it traces the course of an epidemic and of attitudes towards and of those who bore the brunt of it. “Everybody leaves behind something,” Carr writes. We are fortunate that he will have left The Unbuttoned Eye.