Squiriming
By Monika Ostrowska
Coffee House Press
You can see why an alien race would be perplexed by sex. Humans blow up their lives over and over in pursuit of some friction and fluid. Monika Ostrowska’s debut volume of poetry, Squirming, luxuriates in the strangeness of sex. These poems overflow with awkwardness, disconnection, ill-advised lust, and disappointment—all ramped up to the point of absurdity.
As the title promises, Ostrowska really makes you squirm.
This won’t be a surprise to anyone who’s familiar with the weirder circles of American poetry. Ostrowska is the publisher of Triangle House, an influential literary review that publishes what’s been dubbed—both affectionately and petulantly—as weird girl lit.
There’s a certain cool irony that flows through Squirming, located in the way Ostrowska resists romanticizing even the most intimate of moments. I found it compelling. Her poems are funny the way Nabokov is funny. It’s not quite gallows humor, but it’s getting there. Take the opening lines of “A Retraction”:
I feel so lucky that nothing
About a woman
Can shrivel
The way a cock can
Sure, it gets bigger too
But then it must retract
And that feels sad to me
This blunt, disarming assessment of male anatomy reminded me of the works of Chelsey Minnis and Donna Masini. I love when poems can use plain language to disturb and delight. Many poems in Squirming feel like the too-honest question of a child, the kind that astonishes with its asocial candor.
Ostrowska captures the humiliating feeling of crushing on someone who barely thinks of you at all (AKA, the dreaded “situationship”). She plays with the dissonant layers of intimacy often found in casual relationships, where deep physical vulnerability is paired with emotional remove, as seen in this excerpt from “Punishment > Regret”:
I want to text you, what the fuck
I want to text you, wow
You know how to make a girl regret meeting you
Was I not transparent
I did tell you
Why does opening yourself to a new person,
Allowing a new person inside you,
Have to mean this feeling too?
This feeling of, I was wrong
This feeling of, fuck you!
Ostrowska’s works can feel like a wood-ax, a blunt instrument with a sharp edge. Their plain language and thumping rhythms make the ordinary feel absurd, like a pre-scripted farce. Though there are moments where her blunt verse veers into the awkward. A simple, insistent rhythm in poetry is still a rhythm, and when that’s lost, the resulting poem can feel disjointed, like in “The Tunnel” and “Oh No.”
Overall, however, Ostrowska wildly succeeds at the title’s promise: This book will make you squirm, cringe, and unblock your ex so you can creep on their Instagram. Part of this is due to Ostrowska’s careful ordering of poems in the collection. The book is interspersed with a series of poems titled “O” and “X” (titles that presumably represent, respectively, sex and her ex-partner, with whom she shares a young son). By ordering the poems this way, she enables the dissonance between pleasure and heartbreak to become striking. Her decision to group the poems into pairs makes the collection more surprising and intriguing than if the poems were separated out into discrete sections.
I also admire that Ostrowska successfully plays with the gap between what’s expected of her as a mother and her masochistic sexual desires, along with the contradiction that she both desires pain (at least in the bedroom) while also carrying too much pain in the wake of her breakup. This is illustrated well in “Downward Dog,” my favorite poem in Squirming. It goes, in part, like this:
I did have agency I just didn’t understand it
What I wanted was to listen
What I wanted was to ask for more
of something that felt good
Nicely
From someone who understood that my passivity was
there, just for them, my gift, my love
I got a lot of enjoyment out of this book, even though it also made me cringe half to death. It’s highly cathartic. As such, I recommend it for anyone who is going through a breakup, is dating as a single parent, or is so sick of dating apps they want to throw their phone out the window. Squirming is long for a poetry collection, but not a page of it is wasted.
