Like Wine or Like Pain by Francesca Leader
Bottlecap Press, 2024
Francesca Leader’s first chapbook of poetry turns on the notion of duality: nature and artifice; organic and inorganic; love, and love’s many opposites. It is shot through with such deep oppositions, even as its three sections (The Red, The White, and The Rose) suggest shaded development, almost a blending of themes.
In the third poem, for instance, “My Body Wants to Feed You,” Leader plays with the idea of emptiness/fullness in sexual desire: “What richness / your hunger unleashes.” Each of the lover’s empty, unfilled senses bring about corresponding bodily offerings from the poet, concluding in this extraordinary image:
I was made for this,
A mother octopus
Joyfully emptying
Her life
Into a hundred thousand eggs.
The theme of the organic and inorganic delivers a string of similar firecrackers: in the title poem, “the gold-disc of [a] nail-head” is accidentally driven into a heel, “the / long metal spike on the obverse, bu / ried in me, fitting my flesh as if / it had always been there”; in the dappled light and shade of “Komorebi,” “the interplay…with the varicose veins on her blue-white calves” shines disturbingly; and in “The Softest Kind” comes stark contrast between a man caring only for his own pleasure, and one who doesn’t:
Feels like being the softest kind of tofu—
Hot broth boiling, silky & shivering
Steeped plump with root and
Meat and fungus—
The poet’s lines are always on point, but not always visceral—Leader deploys a dry, achieved wit to underline her themes as well as these startling (and earthy) images. In “When we Meet Again,” a poem tying together nine almost haiku-like meditations on the tectonics of love, she introduces a sly gesture at the flow of permission/consent which runs through the collection:
The kind
Where
One plateOverrides
The
Other—Subduction,
I think
It’s called,Which
Sounds
LikeSomething
You’d
Do to me,If I let
You.
Similarly, the wonderfully-titled “Treat My Body Like an International House of Pancakes” draws on memories of college enthusiasm to rouse her lover to new life:
Flip me.
Bite me.
Soak me in syrup, baby—
Leader is also unafraid to experiment, even in the limited space of a chapbook. A six-line poem, included here in its entirety—”If I’m too Hungry For the Shelter of Your Flesh, Please Understand”—condenses a life’s worth of anxiety into a hinged lament strongly reminiscent of tanka:
How many years
I spent alone
In the storm,
Waiting only
To be struck
Or not struck.
“Unwelcome Solitude,” a whole-page concrete poem, does the opposite, spreading out angst about unwelcome distance into a huge, branching diagram of woe—vast as a tree, or a rising mushroom cloud.
This, then, is a work with heft and resonance far beyond its length. Like Wine or Like Pain leaves the reader disentangling its knotty dualities long after the last page is turned.
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James Roderick Burns is the author of one flash fiction collection, To Say Nothing of the Dog, and five collections of short-form poetry, most recently Crows at Dusk (Red Moon Press, 2023). His stories have twice been nominated for the Pushcart Prize, and he serves as Staff Reader in Poetry for Ploughshares.