No Confession, No Mass by Jennifer Perrine
This poetry book is a combination of powerful imagery, evocation, and language. I particularly love the poems because of the way the author juxtaposes gender, issues of everyday living, gender-based violence, and morality. Readers cannot but go to the dark places the author wants to take them. The thin lines between sin/the immoral and virtue/the moral is vividly visible in the poems that deal with virtue and vice. Also, the author employs religion to bring to the forefront issues religious houses or bodies are reluctant to discuss. From experience, more often than not, those who indulge in the vices preached against in churches are the churchgoers. It is interesting that the practice of temperance …show more content…
It is ironic in these poems that the victims are the confessors. I interpret this to mean a forced confession for the victimizers or the sinners especially in the poems titled “A Theory of Violence” and “The Divorcee’s Fable” – the victims, (being victims of sexual assault) by unearthing what had been done and buried, make a confession for their victimizers, which in turn exposes the realities of sexual abuse or sex slavery. The speaker uses a powerful imagery to show readers the psychological effect of sexual slavery when she says, “…I’d been bred to be docile, to allow hands to touch, to feed…so when a stranger unlocked my cage, I did not bite, I did not flee” (22). This poem can easily be connected to the one on page 14, “After My Mother’s Death, I feel Nothing” because both speakers have lost something, and sometimes excessive pain of loss can make an individual unfeeling.
The Poem “For the Lone Man at the Violence Prevention Center” presents a powerful gender issue that is currently causing ripples in mainstream America – dealing with identity, difference and acceptance. This speaker has one explanation to give for his action: “It’s not that I wanted to be a girl, No, I am not gay.” However, it is an explanation many people cannot make sense of being a society where the different is unacceptable and the victim is blamed for whatever
This poetry book is a combination of powerful imagery, evocation, and language. I particularly love the poems because of the way the author juxtaposes gender, issues of everyday living, gender-based violence, and morality. Readers cannot but go to the dark places the author wants to take them. The thin lines between sin/the immoral and virtue/the moral is vividly visible in the poems that deal with virtue and vice. Also, the author employs religion to bring to the forefront issues religious houses or bodies are reluctant to discuss. From experience, more often than not, those who indulge in the vices preached against in churches are the churchgoers. It is interesting that the practice of temperance …show more content…
It is ironic in these poems that the victims are the confessors. I interpret this to mean a forced confession for the victimizers or the sinners especially in the poems titled “A Theory of Violence” and “The Divorcee’s Fable” – the victims, (being victims of sexual assault) by unearthing what had been done and buried, make a confession for their victimizers, which in turn exposes the realities of sexual abuse or sex slavery. The speaker uses a powerful imagery to show readers the psychological effect of sexual slavery when she says, “…I’d been bred to be docile, to allow hands to touch, to feed…so when a stranger unlocked my cage, I did not bite, I did not flee” (22). This poem can easily be connected to the one on page 14, “After My Mother’s Death, I feel Nothing” because both speakers have lost something, and sometimes excessive pain of loss can make an individual unfeeling.
The Poem “For the Lone Man at the Violence Prevention Center” presents a powerful gender issue that is currently causing ripples in mainstream America – dealing with identity, difference and acceptance. This speaker has one explanation to give for his action: “It’s not that I wanted to be a girl, No, I am not gay.” However, it is an explanation many people cannot make sense of being a society where the different is unacceptable and the victim is blamed for whatever