Morocco by Kendra Grant Malone & Matthew Savoca (A Review by Gina Myers)

Dark Sky Books

116 pages/$10

Inappropriate relationships and illicit affairs have long been the stuff of literature. Morocco, a new collection of poetry from Dark Sky Books, contributes to this tradition but strips away the romance, showing things for what they are: sometimes tender, but often manipulative, cruel, and downright ugly.

Written jointly by Kendra Grant Malone and Matthew Savoca, the narrative begins with two would-be lovers who each already have a significant other, one a boyfriend, the other a wife. At some point during the collection, the speakers cross the boundary they had previously established for themselves, but by the end they seem no less tortured by each other and no happier than they were at the beginning. While some moments are tender and even humorous, the book shows how obsessive and unhealthy relationships can be as the two speakers look to each other for escape but then discover that escaping into each other’s bodies does not fix anything.

While written together, this isn’t a book of collaborations, rather a collection of poems written in conversation with one another. The writers share a similar style, which employs plain-spoken/direct, stripped-down language, uses all lower case letters and short lines, and lacks all end-punctuation marks. At the outset of the book, it isn’t always entirely clear (without referring to the index at the end) who the author of an individual piece is, especially since there is not a clear back-and-forth pattern between the poems. But as the book progresses, each poet’s voice emerges, and it becomes unnecessary to refer to the index.

Places often take on mythological importance, and the idea of Morocco is no different here. It is introduced early in the collection in “i don’t want us to care about anything,” written by Savoca:

 

            let’s go to india tomorrow

no, let’s go to morocco

we’ll just be there

and we’ll be us

 

For the two friends/lovers, Morocco captures the idea of escape—it’s a place free of their current troubles, where they can go to just be together. In “morocco II,” Malone writes:

 

            today i could really

use morocco

some sun and bored

faces, but I’m here

in new york where

everyone i know

is just high and

terrible

 

However, by the end of the collection, Morocco loses its allure:

 

            all i ever wanted

was a reason to

run away from

just about anything

for a while you

gave me that

but now we’ve

lost it

and morocco

is just a place

across the ocean

existing, that

i don’t understand

 

(from “morocco III” by Malone)

 

Early on there is a sort of innocence between the two speakers and the writers capture that feeling of distractedness and excitement that comes along with getting to know someone new. However, the book isn’t all puppy love and visions of beaches. There’s also drug abuse, emotional abuse, and sadomasochism. Throughout the collection, the male persona comes across as weak and easily manipulated. In the opening poem, “it’s dark out,” Savoca writes, “i want to do what i want / but not until you tell me what that is.” Meanwhile, the female persona seems more than willing to fulfill this desire of control, and her cruelty shows up in a number of the poems, like “not being your wife (and some useless assertions),” “morocco,” and “your ugly face.” In “can i be king?”, she asks, “how much can / i emasculate you / before you stop / coming back?” Despite this, he seems to become obsessed or addicted to her. The end takes an especially disturbing turn where the male persona bemoans his inability to love her how she needs to be loved and concludes, “it would be a pity if i ended up / murdering you in your sleep.”

 

When writing about poetry, I am always wary of conflating the author of the piece with the speaker of the poem. However, in this collection, with poems so intimate, and with some even directly addressed to each other (“for matthew, after a movie,” “for kendra, after breakfast,” and “for kendra, again”), it is difficult not to read the collection any other way, which adds a sordid, voyeuristic element to the act of reading it. The reader senses these are real lives, real feelings, and real situations. And that they are written about so openly and honestly only adds to the intensity of the collection. If this is in fact the authors baring it all, sharing their intimate experiences, there is a real braveness to publishing this, a braveness in admitting to friends, family, exes, and strangers, one’s desires, one’s ugliness and cruelty, one’s neediness and frailty.

 

At 116 pages, Morocco is slightly larger than the average poetry collection, but it makes for a quick read—the narrative that develops over the course of the poems propels the book forward, which makes it easily read in a single setting. However, these are poems that will stick with you long after you’ve closed the book.

 

*

 

Gina Myers is the author of A Model Year (Coconut Books) and several chapbooks, including False Spring (forthcoming from Spooky Girlfriend). Recent reviews have appeared or are forthcoming at The Rumpus, Coldfront Magazine, NewPages, Frontier Psychiatrist, and Denver Quarterly. She lives in Atlanta where she makes books for Lame House Press (http://lamehouse.blogspot.com).