{Finding Out about Sex from a 1950’s College Biology Textbook that My Dad’s Friend John Miner Defaced Their Sophomore Year, by Yi-Fen Chou, forthcoming in Sonora Review 55/56.}
He’d added frat boy captions to the vitamin-deficient
rats: I smoke three packs
of Chesterfields a day. Or, fat after an overdose
of riboflavin (or whatever): I don’t get
enough exercise. But the chapter on reproduction
was tamper-proof, the drawings clotted
with implausible anatomy: the man’s snarl
of vas deferens, or the bisected, incomprehensible
woman reduced to strange
declivities and a half dozen crosshatched secrets.
The truth turns up in Chapter One, within a drop
of pond water where
the paramecium suffers
mitosis, dividing down the center unbidden,
alone. Or the way certain flukes and parasitic
worms, within a frantic life span,
can circumnavigate your laboring, infested heart.
Interesting poem. It rather teeters on the brink of bathos, and in fact it might actually fall into the bathos tub. And yet it seems fairly deliberate and lacks the slovenly diction and emotional incontinence that characterizes a lot of contemporary verse. It is a trifle perhaps, but not a complete waste of time. I mean that as a compliment. I’d be interested to see more of her work.
By: Michael Hudson on December 25, 2008
at 12:56 am