Read my latest story, "The All-Nighter", at 52|250.

Amy King‘s Men by the Lips of Women moves from a specific case to men and women in general before it finally brings both situations together with an echo of a title. In the process, the poem evokes a sort of possessing love, both harmful and desired, both certain and uncertain. It also implies the presence of duende, perhaps even the man’s identity with it in the lines

He sounds in the brain’s eagled hollows
of a soft guitar from a Spanish café
among the mountain peaks in nightshade.

More importantly, the poem covers the tension between how a single individual may construct or learn to view the world.

The title implies women speaking men into existence, but at the start, it is the man, the specific unnamed man, who has the book and the ink. This hints at an opposition of the oral and written tradition connected to gender. It is, however, not so simple. He sees, however, from the book; he, the specific man sees what someone else has written for him. Which gender wrote the book? “The mother of everyone calls him” suggests the power of women, or at least of a symbol of women, possibly a goddess. The speaker, probably female, has viscerally altered his body into a thing that frightens goat yet seems, when expressed in her words, aesthetically pleasing: “His toxins become a cherry blossom wine.”

These seem to place woman, or women, in an authorial role. Then, however, we come to these lines:

I am that love you light yourself with
and my gender is powerless in this.

She, the individual woman, is being used by the man so that he can see (or construct) himself. Her gender as a whole and as an identity can do nothing to change this.

In the last line, King resolves this tension while resisting the temptation to create a false certainty: “man reading men by the lips of women.” The men he reads includes himself, yet his power to construct identity depends upon the women, though how much power what they say has remains unclear, a highly realistic uncertainty.

Check out this EBay auction of books and manuscript critiques which runs through this weekend. It was organized by Tayari Jones to benefit the survivors of the Dunbar Village rapes. At the moment of writing, prices range from $12.50-$305. It’s also worth keeping in mind as an example of the kind of practical action we writers can take (in addition to working to change the culture through our art).