Abigail Ardelle Zammit

At a time when writing as an art form is flourishing and first collections bear the self-assurance of many a talent wrought within the smithy of creative writing labs, it is not difficult for readers to find room for praise and admiration.  For the reluctant consumer who puts language before the good old themes of our current narratives, however, the casualty is often the self, a cyborg condemned to generate words out of experiential conflations, commodified to feed a voracious industry, generating more of the same fabula, often at risk of developing a slight penchant for exhibitionism, a thinly-veiled shadow-self. 

That the struggle against the stereotyping of self-as-plot, as fodder, is of massive proportions, is increasingly apparent with every re-reading of Dominus, Tiffany Troy’s richly allusive, first full-length collection, and one that indeed merits much time for slow assessments and cross-readings.  That she has brilliantly forged her eclectic knowledge of literature, art, pop culture, Ovidian and Homeric myth, with her situatedness as budding New Yorker and attorney for the debased and downtrodden, not merely to illustrate her coming-of-age story, with its inherent migration histories, but to engage with social justice and a civic conscience, is a gesture of incredible magnanimity and astounding maturity.  Unblinded by the American dream, always watchful of her own yearnings for an unblemished past and an idealized future, she trudges against the forces, not of evil, in its reductive, most villainous forms, but of the bureaucratic and capitalist mystifications which threaten to destroy the human spirit: ‘evil always justifies itself through mundaneness / and bureaucracy’ (‘At My Trial’).  As a reader, the compulsion to turn the page is buoyed by the speaker’s honest assessment of the risks at hand, her unique humor, and the courage to brandish language – in its many forms – in defense of the exploited masses:

For Ilium is condemned to burn,

and this Sisyphean struggle is the walk of a true

professional who sues the world

          into a better place with bravado. (‘Hymn to My Fair Lady Boss’)

Organized into four sections, with poems in the first one – When Ilium Burns – having made an appearance in a chapbook of the same name, the tale of a burning Troy – its Latin appellative, a veiled reference to the author’s surname and her hypercapitalist reality – is told from the point of view of a speaker who has many alter egos, and whose plurality is itself an act of resistance against the market value that is put on selfhood.  She is a ‘baby lawyer’, mastering the skills of litigation and legalese, as well as a YouTube cartoon character – Baby Tiger – but also Nurse, the young Catholic saint Maria Goretti, and Master – a beautifully ambivalent unifying character and the Dominus of this collection.  Master’s lively presence is always filtered by the narrative consciousness that controls him, which is why he has many faces: God, teacher, tyrant, slave-master, father-figure in all its macho incarnations – for Papa is also ‘the fat worm in my intestines’ – and the self, engaged in a tag match against itself; ‘having torn off all my hair in the flight / against myself’, she says in the title poem of the first section, inserting Chinese script in order to represent her internal conflict. 

Much can be made of Master’s macho violence and brutality, the way that like a ‘myopic god’, he is capable of ‘cultivat[ing]’ ‘self-hate’ (‘This’), but perhaps it is easy to forget that he is also an extension of what keeps Baby Tiger afloat, through perseverance and a relentless work ethic.  What Master’s appearances make manifest is the self’s entanglement in the familiar and social realities of her existence; it is no coincidence that the very first poem, ‘Pretext’, allows ‘“relevance” and “space”’ to feature in its second verse at that self-same moment where she is positioning herself in ‘the double-bind maze’ of Flushing, Queens, and of her own mind.  And so it is that Master mimics the world, ‘expect[ing] delivery,’ telling her she ‘should go lay down and die / if [she does] not have the grit to walk the last mile’ (‘Holy Saturday’), but he also warns her to cast away her naivety and be less trustful (‘At My Trial’), providing her with an apprenticeship, which she would be unwise to dismiss:  

Master tells me that it is never about falsifying time sheets,

it is about the deep hurt

from rumors that reverberate in caverns,

stinging the ears of its hearers like bees. (‘Morning Train’)

With mastery and artistic astuteness, Troy balances the tightropes of fictionalization and experiential reality, refusing to languish in sensationalist exposures, or feed the Twinkie-voracious reader.  Instead, she plays along, positioning us straight away into a world that lies mid-way between socio-political reality and the vaster territories of fable, myth, and fairytale.  From the very start, we are told:

All my life I thought myself a princess,

even after I became obsessed with career women

hit by truck-san and reincarnated as princesses adored by all

or rose-throned villainesses with hearts of gold. (‘The Wooden Yamaha’)

Once this fictional topography is established, she can move her characters along in a theatrical anime, where hyperbole can be accepted without question, and where the attentive reader is free to find her way in a playfully serious maze of metaphorical allusions and allegorical incarnations.   So it is that the various characters in this drama – Papa, Mama, Brother, Grandpa Pindar, Friend – are closer to the world of story-telling and fiction-making, with poems standing like chapters that instead of having a master-plot, engage in a cumulative, episodic narrative.   As a reader, I could not help becoming attached to the characters, Grandpa Pindar, for instance, who sends the protagonist a picture of ‘his canal, the Gowanus, claiming that ‘the coal tar sitting at its bottom calls outs to him / like a Siren to a sick dog’ (Morning Train), and who is perfectly aligned with the reader when he confesses that ‘what he loves is that [she] want[s] life to matter, no matter what’  (‘Before the Sea Stirs’).  The hurt, shame, humiliation, and anger that the protagonists feel can thus be witnessed within the vivid kaleidoscope of this world, a literary device that is essential in representing the obscene ways in which the system torments individuals who attempt to break free of its lies:

When I asked Master if I was going to die soon

and be free of pain, he said I should never have given up

pieces of myself for this futile cause, which could only

bring me back to where I was […]

Shepherd girl, Master’s right-hand kid, who never

made a vain deal with the devil. I wonder

if I ever made trouble because I wanted to,

asking the questions that needed to be asked

even when I heard their footsteps approaching.  (‘Shepherd of Troy’)

If anything, there is much sympathy for a protagonist who is up-front about rage and degradation, and who is not averse to visceral, even gross descriptions of the body, in order to bring home the indignity that individuals are subjected to on a daily basis.  Depicted as a Maria Goretti who has outlived her raped and murdered other, the I of the collection’s final sequence posits itself against the grand symbols of American freedom and self-expression, so that the ‘leaf sharp as a blade’, slips from Whitman to ‘the swell of my nipples, that yellow muck / of bacteria, the crust of my skin crispy’, and to the telling signs of ravenous hunger, depression and menstrual pain (‘Squirrel on an October Late Afternoon’).

I love the way food acts as a driving force within the poem’s episodic structure, not merely as a source for humor, but as a genre-bender, bringing in elements of the absurd and of the mock epic.  The protagonist feeds voraciously on fast food in a bravado of Americanness, declaring that she is ‘a decent Rubenesque rotundity for a super-sized nation’ (‘Morning Train’), making light of the relentless perfectionism that makes her binge for comfort.  Food also becomes a tool for social satire, as in ‘The Gold Crown,’ where the history of a place is inextricably bound to its most mundane of images, each morning ‘mixed with the solemnity of Heinz ketchup’, which the protagonist can obtain by ‘speaking good English.’  Later, at the office, she tears open ‘the solid American pragmatism / that was red, was vinegar, was eternal, was vouchsafed.’  As Troy herself has made clear in an interview with Mary Jo Bang which appeared in The Poetry Society of America, the sweet delight which features throughout the collection, and is the subject of ‘A Twinkie’s Love Song’, to which the second section of the book is dedicated, is not unlike ‘the albatross in the sea of the speaker’s mind’:

My mouth opens wide for Twinkie-

everlasting, a Twin, a Wink,

a Key to our repressed psyche,

in its sweet cream […]

Will you relieve me of my pain

and bring me visions of Shangri-la

where you’ll hide me from the mighty cane

before the sugar high is gone?

O Twinkie, won’t you tell me

when I wake up and only my dream remains

just who am I,

sheared of my golden name?

Despite the lyricism of the proem which introduces Dominus, Troy’s is a poetic consciousness that will not bend to the dictates of the ‘Lyrical I’, but plays with form in order to expand the reader’s understanding of what a poem might start to be.  Couplets, quatrains and longer stanzas are balanced out by poems like ‘Cardiogram’, which spread out across the white space of the page, enacting the anxiety that results from trying to keep afloat in a world where ‘they push me hard / forget I am human’, even as the speaker engages in life-enhancing talk: ‘I have my goddess           enshrined            in memory / like a Twinkie’.  The text’s wavering towards the margins and its final conflation at the center, represents a paradoxical attempt to become ‘ruthless’ in order to safeguard what it is that she values about human life, just as Aeneas, having lost his Troy, managed to survive within another world: ‘I / will be reborn         from the flames.’  

Prose poems like ‘Crocodile State’ are powerfully realized, bringing the hunger/food metaphor to its full realization, with a delightful paragraph dedicated to ‘Wendy’s Asiago combo after two back-to-back tomato mozzarella paninis from Starbucks’, and ‘Hilton’s breakfast waffle soaked with syrup’, then culminating in a more serious pronouncement: ‘I swallowed to not be swallowed.’ 

This symbolic act of self-destructiveness, where the crocodile-baby-lawyer swallows her Master ‘with his clear bag of urine’ echoes the literal and allegorical suicide references within the whole collection, especially in the painfully incisive ‘Morning Train’ where commuters are delayed because ‘there is a man / struck at Fifth Avenue’.  Here, the ominous voice of the conductor keeps intruding on the narrator’s stream of consciousness: ‘Let this train go, so the next can come in’, the poem rushing to its next pronouncement, just like the merciless world of ‘Corporate America’, more ‘omnipotent’ than the Omicron virus, and indifferent to the plight of ‘the huddled masses’.  In this kind of world, Anna Karenina’s tragic fate, referenced at the start of this long poem, is inextricably tied with that of immigrants who are in pursuit of the American dream; if no longer condemned to ‘[d]eposit and spend money in takeout places where [they] die[]’, they have not yet escaped the shackles of a system which is bent on burning them alive.  It is not surprising that the narrator, whose faith in redemption keeps plummeting and ascending in equal measure, cannot help but declare: ‘I wonder where God went’.

Incidentally, the Christian salvation metaphor – more clearly identified with hope than any particular brand of religious belief, and the Herculean struggle to keep it alive – is a major theme that provides meaning in a senselessly mercenary world.  Dominus is a powerful feat of the imagination exactly because it is held together by many intricately-woven strands, not unlike those of Philomela’s tapestry of truth (see ‘At My Trial’), its text, like the author’s, exposing treachery and violation.  Perhaps, the most significant of these is the deftness and subtlety with which the the lexicon keeps resurfacing across different poems in order to expand on the preoccupations with corruption, deceit, injustice, resilience, and survival.  The memorable ‘Notes on the Word Impossible’ makes use of repetition to emphasize the plight of ‘never belonging’.  Other poems utilize legalese to turn it on its head, with the words ‘judge’, ‘Criminal Duty’, ‘deponent’, ‘deposition’, ‘law’, ‘complaint’, ‘sue’, ‘trial’, featuring profusely.  ‘Who’s teaching you to speak the major disconnect of corporate professional?’ asks the narrative persona in a poem that is as much a rhetorical question as it is self-interrogation (‘Heart’s Exile’). The binding leitmotif of being ‘chained to the bottom of the sea’, is borrowed from the film Philadelphia to unite the narrative voice with that of the lonely and the oppressed.

In ‘Imagine the Sky Without Twilight’, there is a whole genealogy of words that also feature in many other poems, but they are made to shine differently every time they appear in a new context.  Apart from the references to mythological characters like Odysseus, Circe, and Penelope, the words ‘egg’, ‘golden’, ‘blame’, ‘light’, ‘heart’ and ‘soul’ reveal the protagonist at her most vulnerable and downtrodden.  They are inseparable from that recurring and ambivalent symbol – ‘the sun’ – often seen indirectly as a reflection (‘Pretext’ and ‘The Valley of Ashes’), or depicted as ‘insufferable and hard to bear’ (‘Metamorphosis as Cassandra’), yet prevailing as a symbol of hope, of a soul that will not relinquish its gold:

the frowning sunflowers burdened

by the weight of their golden mane

cannot help

but peek up and beam.   (‘Squirrel on an October Late Afternoon’)

Ultimately, the protagonist’s tenderness is reserved for her clients, and it is here that the text erupts in a genuine pronouncement which rips away at the layers separating the pulsating, ordinary self, from the poetic consciousness that creates with purpose and political intent.  ‘I love you just the way you are,’ she tells them in ‘An Elegy for the Foolish and Undignified’.  And in the final Blakean verses, where she has shed the skeins of innocence: ‘I care for these men who talked /over me, the way I desire to touch the sky’ (‘The Sky’).