Review by Jon Lemay
Big Lucks Press / June, 2020 / 108 pp
Rachelle Toarmino’s debut full-length poetry collection That Ex comes less than a year after her chapbook Feel Royal, a series of found poems composed of text from clothing worn by celebrities in paparazzi photos. When I read Feel Royal, I was captivated by how Toarmino captured the essence of each of her celebrity-speakers in poems that felt equally informed by tabloids and haiku. The poems in both Feel Royal and That Ex tap into Toarmino’s preoccupation with how our identities are read by the world around us—an idea encapsulated in the following lines from “Rebound (One More Time),” the 15-page poem that concludes That Ex:
I enjoy getting reduced to parts
how else would you be able to see yourself
from as many points of view as possible
at the same time?
Feel Royal grants reverence and grace to the celebrity caught in the spotlight against her will, and the poems in That Ex grant those same qualities to the figure of the ex. In this deftly sequenced and luminously focused book, Toarmino showcases an irresistible poetic voice while distilling the complicated dynamics at the heart of contemporary love and heartache.
Toarmino’s talent becomes evident in the way she weaves together various conceptual threads early on in the collection. Perhaps nowhere is this technique on better display than in the collection’s second poem, “You Animal”—which wisely teaches us how to engage with the poet’s work. In “You Animal,” Toarmino invites us to reconsider how we view the figure of the ex, pushing against the tendency to view him or her or them with disdain or disregard. When thinking of her boyfriend’s past lovers, the speaker opts for gratitude instead of resentment or jealousy:
anytime you start
dating a new man
you should have to
thank all his exes
for the moisturizer
he uses how he
dresses himself how
he goes down
Elsewhere in the poem—perhaps as a callback to Feel Royal—Toarmino nudges us to rethink the tabloid exploits of Britney Spears, whom Toarmino argues “went high & shaved her / head for our sins.” In the context of That Ex, a meltdown in the public eye is merely one way the turmoil of heartache manifests itself—merely one way of being That Ex—thereby illustrating Toarmino’s earlier proclamation that “there are so many / ways to love.”
But perhaps the most important element introduced in “You Animal” is the fusion of romance and technology, which forms one of the more conspicuous (and refreshing) motifs in the collection. After conceptualizing the creation of Adam as God taking a selfie (packaged in a charming allusion to the “felt cute, might delete later” meme), Toarmino establishes the terms of a new kind of romance for the uninitiated:
whenever a girl
changes a contact
in her phone to
DON’T ANSWER
that’s the kind of
love I’d write about
not the trying-to-
decode-the-emoji-
on-your-ex’s-
recent-Venmo-
transaction kind
Toarmino allows and encourages us to read this moment through the lenses of both irony and sincerity. We can recognize some absurdity in trying to distinguish between whatever drives us to type over a phone contact and whatever drives us to decode the social media interactions of an ex. At the same time, the speaker inhabits a world in which these two different actions bespeak two very different kinds of love—and, by extension, two different kinds of exes.
Considering that That Ex is an exploration of romance as experienced by a generation that came of age with MySpace and navigated “real romance” with Tinder, Toarmino’s choice to embrace the ways social media and technology are intertwined with our every emotional experience invites us to suspend any doubts about whether such things “belong” in the poetic tradition in the first place. That these choices always read as true, rather than gimmicky, testifies to how authentic and precisely rendered these details feel, how effectively Toarmino terraforms this type of poetic sequence to her world.
While “You Animal” primes the reader for the motif of technology and social media, such a strong opening means little if what follows is weak. However, Toarmino never fails to deliver on her early promises. The speaker’s iPhone does all the heavy lifting of Shakespeare’s summer day and Donne’s drafting compass. Naturally, technology figures into expressions of love: “We have each other // and unlimited data” (“Rascal Heart”), “I want to / trace an excel sheet over your body and / share it with you on Google Drive” (“You Up?”). For Toarmino, technology is not just a means to communicate with one another. It embeds itself into what we express to each other. In “What Kind of Love Is That” (I Know What I’m Doing),” the photos we send as acts of intimacy become both measurements of time and memorials to bygone selves: “though I’ve loved / I haven’t been her / since two nudes ago.” In “Being on the Phone with You,” Toarmino recounts:
you called me to tell me that when
we are both online it is like a
staring contest
that you associate my voice
with the sound of WhatsApp
notifications more than with my
own voice now
Although this poem is tender, rather than ironic, Toarmino leaves room for nuance in how we read these interactions and what they suggest about the substance of the relationship. In the same poem, she ventures the following diagnosis:
we are as much our
phone lives as we are our
physical lives
maybe even more so
Toarmino invites us to consider the ways we lose control of how we understand each other and ourselves—though she elects to stop short of prescriptively casting this phenomenon in too dystopian a light.
What’s most remarkable about That Ex is just how much of a joy it is to read in sequence, as a chronicle of romantic interactions and reflections, divorced from any larger commentary. Toarmino is a compelling and charming speaker, mixing the confessional vitality of Sharon Olds with the infectious idiosyncrasy of Frank O’Hara. Right away, Toarmino places herself—the titular ex—at the center of the narrative, rejecting any erasure or dismissal that might come with the term. She ends the collection’s opening poem with the declaration “there isn’t any space here for him or him either” (“Week of Waking Thoughts”). Taking ownership of her narrative and asserting control over how others read her doesn’t render invisible the insecurity, misjudgment, and helplessness that coalesce between relationship, break-up, and next relationship. A less capable poet might worry that letting us in to doubt or weakness might undercut agency while expressing anger at “what men get away with” (“I Said Okay”), but Toarmino effortlessly strikes the balance. “Did We Want Too Much,” one of the collection’s standout poems, features one such expression of vulnerability:
Everything’s a picture.
I love it until I don’t,
go home with whoever
says my name right.
Life becomes a series
I feel obligated to finish,
and I loved it.
I loved everything.
This beautiful moment comes in the middle of an immensely satisfying seven-poem stretch that begins with “Memories Moving Backward” (“Still it was strange / to watch your face turn to thunder in mine”) and ends with “Nudes,” an homage to Anne Carson’s “The Glass Essay.” (Toarmino also references “The Glass Essay” in the poem “Bases” as something she makes a lover read before turning their attention to an Instagram account called @SheRatesDogs.) Most of these poems feature similarly measured and sustained meditations, as well as more formal trappings such as proper capitalization and punctuation, regular stanzaic structures, and rhetorical scaffolding. Where these poems fall in the collection—and what follows them—is yet another testament to Toarmino’s ability to frame and sequence her work. The control she exhibits in the septet gives way to fragmentary and associative poems that showcase her more contemporary preoccupations.
Throughout That Ex, this stylistic multiplicity never reads as anything but intentional and shrewd. I enjoyed wrestling with how these shifts figured into the larger exploration of how we exist in different spaces and states, particularly when there exists a constant tension between our private and increasingly public selves.
Jon Lemay is an MFA candidate at Syracuse University, where he is a Poetry Editor for Salt Hill Journal. His poetry has previously appeared or is forthcoming in Juked, DIALOGIST, apt, Gravel, and elsewhere. Jon has taught high school English at various independent schools throughout New Jersey, Tennessee, and his home state of New Hampshire. Jon also hosts and produces Welcome to the Teachers’ Lounge, a conversational podcast dedicated to the professional and personal lives of educators, and co-hosts Pat & Jon on Their Best Behavior, a pop culture podcast. You can find him on Twitter @yawnlemay and on Instagram @jonlemay.