[REVIEW] And God Created Women by Connie Voisine

REVIEW BY GABINO IGLESIAS

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The reasons a lot of literary critics opt not to write about poetry is that doing so is often to trying to explain the ineffable. Trying to come up with a few lines to describe Connie Voisine’s And God Created Women is like witnessing a religious ceremony from an unknown culture conducted in a language you don’t understand and then trying to explain exactly what was happening. The poems here are beautiful and Voisine is an I that keeps popping up, so at least we have some coordinates for navigation. However, besides those two things, the poems in this collection are about everyday things becoming elevated into something more via language.

And God Created Women contains known elements shaped into new things. There are babies and horses here, for example. People ride the bus and watch the news. Someone is angry and a wedding takes places after a murder. We know the world Voisine writes about, but we encounter a different version of it here. For example, we know the story of God creating Eve, but here we see it differently, and the retelling calls her womb a 3-D printer and includes Cheetos.

“Woman printed out two sons

in pain she bore them, and later,

much later, that fratricide, another

management fail. God gave her

other wonders, like the flaming

swords barring her from the garden,

a nice set of earrings, and the recent

regional victory of basketball team.

Much later, God’s son was very kind

to her, though she had slipped a bit,

what with the poverty and prostitution.

And God Created Women might be a guide to find beauty in everyday things. Or maybe it’s an exploration of how we can inhabit different spaces and how those spaces either shape us or adapt to who we are. Maybe it’s both. Maybe it’s neither. The only thing that’s clear here is that Voisine is a gifted writer with a knack for unveiling things using a unique lens that reveals them as new and makes us wonder about the details we might be missing.

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Gabino Iglesias is a writer, editor, literary critic, and professor living in Austin, TX. He is the author of ZERO SAINTS and COYOTE SONGS. You can find him on Twitter at @Gabino_Iglesias.