Unmasking Monstrosity

As I see it, faith is an allegiance, a sort of duty to someone, or something, while religion is a personal or an organized system of belief. This distinction has been something I’ve paid close attention to, and results from the distance between myself and faith and religion. The distance from these elements of my life stems from anger, and my anger stems from fear, and my fear stems from childhood. 

I was raised Roman Catholic. A couple blocks from my childhood home is the Catholic grade school where I went from preschool until I transferred after my sixth-grade year. I was the only one of my three siblings to not graduate from said school. My transfer was mostly my choice, but I’m sure if you ask my parents, they’d say I was needing more structure and discipline. I began acting out a lot during my last two years of my Catholic grade school days because I often wrestled with the beast known more commonly as grief. 

Unmonstrous by John Allen Taylor. YesYes Books, 2019. 46 pages. $12.

The formative identity of being a Catholic played a prominent role in my life because I went to church, often prayed before bed, and was told time and time again God is always watching over me and directing me, if I maintained an open heart to his love. I battled then, and now, with the idea that if you love and respect God, there is an element of fear involved. Rationally, I understand this fear stems from respect, but irrationally, I often feel I have enough fear as it is. I still have all these things I just didn’t understand about faith, specifically Catholicism. 

I didn’t understand how the priest could change a variety of liquids to Jesus’ blood. 

And the body of Christ from simple bread, too? 

I didn’t understand why God would send his son only to have him killed.

I didn’t understand why women weren’t allowed to be priests.

I didn’t understand how forgiveness seemed like the most beautiful thing in the world. 

And also the most unobtainable. 

***

In my formative years, I often read the story of my saint, St. Stephen. How he was one of the seven deacons. Had an angelic face. Even though the idea of possessing a saint bewildered me as a child, I read about him as much as I could, until finding out something that troubled me deeply: he was a martyr, the first martyr of Christianity in fact. He was violently stoned to death. I even learned Paul, the venerable apostle Paul, had a hand in it as his previous self, known as Saul. Even though I was terrified of this information, I again learned of the power of forgiveness because Stephen forgave his attackers before he fell asleep.

It’s been difficult for me to separate fear and faith in my life. One can’t exist without the other. Making movement toward the book review, I’d like to offer a content warning: the chosen book speaks to childhood trauma. It is also, without questions or doubts, one of the best books I’ve ever read; it provides comfort like an old friend at a park bench.

***

John Allen Taylor’s Unmonstrous (YesYes Books, 2019) is a chapbook I’ve had in my backpack for the last year and a half. The only time I didn’t have the book in my backpack was when my copy of the book took a trip to Michigan in hopes of securing a signature, which came back successfully. Taylor currently serves as the Writing Center Director at the University of Michigan-Dearborn, in addition to co-directing the Adroit Summer Mentor Program and reading poems for a little magazine named Ploughshares. Unmonstrous is Taylor’s first book and, in his own words, the book tracks an interest “in defining what is unmonstrous or not monstrous, what paths do we have through and then after monstrosity, or in light of monstrosity, or in carrying monstrosity” (“Not Monstrous: A Conversation with John Allen Taylor,” The Adroit Journal). Going further in the same interview, Taylor mentioned something that struck me:

But when you ask about what it is like to write these poems, is it cathartic? No, it is not cathartic. Is it painful? Yes, oftentimes. But I work to protect myself and center this idea of writing, not necessarily for a cause, but writing because I do want to effect change, which can help insulate the writer from the subject matter.

The concept of insulation, the act of protecting oneself from something harmful, felt (and still feels) deeply personal. Taylor is a writer, and a human, who puts his heart into everything he does, whether it’s caring for plants, bread-making, human-ing, or writing poems. It’s scary enough having a book out in the world, but one that details trauma and the rawness of life during the recovery stages, can be frighteningly isolating. Taylor’s work makes me want to be a better, more aware person. That betterness and awareness comes from the tiredness of vigilance oft-paired with the roughness of trauma. To that point, I begin with a section of Taylor’s first poem of the chapbook, “Monster”:

…Death is a blue burglar
but I am vigilant.

I address the monster inside me, which is animal
& male: Do you remember

guiding my hand over the quail’s nest?
The stick and the squelching.

You were there at the birth of my terror— 

The opening poem in Unmonstrous serves almost like a spell for the rest of the book, and as Taylor described earlier, speaks to the before and the after of Monstrosity. 

***

I stated earlier this book makes me want to be gentle; it also swells inside of me the anger I still have in my bones for being a victim of such a violating act. In the same interview with The Adroit Journal, Taylor describes one of the more complicated aspects of recovery: the right to be angry. Presently, I’m thinking about the scene from The Dark Knight Rises (2012) when Officer John Blake (as portrayed by Joseph Gordon-Levitt) speaks to this, saying: 

Not a lot of people know what it feels like to be angry, in your bones…Everybody understands, for a while. Then they want the angry little kid to do something he knows he can’t do: move on…You gotta learn to hide the anger, practice smiling in the mirror. It’s like putting on a mask.

My brain goes back to The Dark Knight Rises because it’s a classic film in the vein of the witches in Macbeth who famously stated fair is foul and foul is fair. There’s the obvious hidden duality of self between Batman and Bruce Wayne, but also Catwoman and Selina Kyle, Talia al Ghul, and Commissioner Gordon. Even Alfred got into the act as far as doing something unanticipated with his character; it’s a Yeatsian idea, these masks and selves, these fictional characters and personas. But Taylor explores these concepts of anger and masks both as it connects with a dutiful, faithful young person and a deeply scarred, angry, boy. 

To this point, early in the book, the poem “Come Sunday” speaks to the complication of faith and anger. Masks and traumas. The poem opens:

You said Jesus would come into me,
into my heart. I remember your words,
Come back if you don’t feel it—
we will try again. I came back. I came back. 

The poem details the haunting authority and power of a perpetrator’s lure, through the reason to return. The line breaks indicate the power of language entering the speaker and staying, as well as the return and the return of the young speaker. It’s a devastatingly powerful poem, and near the middle, the speaker asks a dagger of a question in the seventh and eighth lines: “What use was flesh if not my own / to give away—what use was your gentleness?” 

The poem doesn’t let up after this question, as it continues to the poem’s close:

…Jesus was a bulge
when you held me on your lap. I remember
the jealousy of those days, the come-thous,
the founts, your incarnation, the flesh-chain
reaching me through all these years.

In the religious sense, incarnation refers to the concept God assuming human nature by becoming Jesus Christ, becoming both wholly God and wholly man. Growing up, I was told priests were divine vessels; a sort of go-between when considering God and laypeople. This adds complexity to the trauma rendered in the poem. And the trauma exists, still, especially considering the next poem of the book, “Johhny,” which requires the reader to open the book vertically, which serves as one of the most breath-taking moments of the book. 

The poem relies heavily on the articulation of sound – starting from the very first line – with its description of “the eight-year-old body, cream-skinned, cat-boned, silent,” followed by intensely haunting lines:

Call the body Johnny.

Bend the body—it will not break.

Bend forward, Johnny.

The poem continues, the lines bleed across the page, and they hit hard—time and time again. 

***

As the chapbook moves forward, it proves movement toward recovery can (and does) happen, which leads me to discuss the poem “After My Therapist Tells Me to Rewrite the Nightmare.” Broken into four parts, the poem speaks to the power and authority memory commands from individuals who have endured trauma. Originally appearing in Split Lip Magazine, the poem opens with a tired resignation: 

My gardening poems
turn into kidney stone poems & each time
I feign surprise.

The purposeful white space in the poem’s first line requires the reader to take an audible breath before beginning, and along with the white spacing throughout, indicates the expansion of tiredness. The second section shows the speaker’s resolve:

In the dream, I am the man
watching me in a group of boys.

I take my hand & lead me somewhere dark—     No.

Make it light.

The sun is out & I am gripping my small hand.
The bed creaks beneath—    No.

I love the power of the speaker of this poem employed as a means to dive into the destiny of both volatile imaginations and brutal realities. As the poem continues, a bit of magic happens in the third section, with a tender question in line twenty-two: “Remember the Little Debbie Pecan Spinwheels?”

Gosh. Even writing that down now, I can feel my heart racing a bit more, and a bit more still. The poem continues, and ends with the gift of a Little Debbie Pecan Spinwheel. 

The first time I read this poem I burst into tears. And, even now, it’s difficult for me to find the words to describe how important this poem is for the book, but also the speaker’s processing of trauma. It’s complicated because trauma is messy and violates every understanding and definition a young person thinks they know—but this poem serves as proof love did exist, love does exist, love will exist. And, for that, I am eternally grateful.

The tenderness of “After My Therapist…” continues in poems like “Love Poem for Marie” and “How,” but also the devastation of “Come Sunday” rears its head with poems like “On the Anniversary of a Failed Suicide” and “Unmonstrous.” But, here’s the thing, Taylor provides the fusion of trauma and love, heartbreak and heart-filling, in one single space. And to do such a thing is a gift. John Allen Taylor is a gift.

***

As I turn to close this review, I am thinking again about a jurisprudence piece from Slate written nearly a decade ago this November. The article is written by Mark P. McKenna, a law professor from the University of Notre Dame, and details the Jerry Sandusky scandal that rocked Penn State University. I’d like to share a vital distinction he shares in his article:

… it is a mistake to characterize Jerry Sandusky as some kind of subhuman monster. The inclination to do so is entirely understandable, for his behavior was unequivocally monstrous. But to describe him as a monster shields us from the reality that human beings have the capacity for tremendous evil. This recognition is critically important. Predators do not look like monsters; they look like your neighborhood basketball coach or the guy running a children’s charity. They look like people you know, because they are.

Predators do not look like monsters —

They look like people you know, because they are.

I will just let that sit with you as it has sat with me for all these years.