haloing the republic of desire

Why God is a Woman

By Nin Andrews

Boa Editions ($16.00)

Nin Andrews’ latest collection of interlocking prose poems reads like a novella, held in place by anaphora, detailing the life and culture of a matriarchal banana republic, where several millennia of western misogyny is turned on its head. With a magical realist touch that conjures an island nation—part Macondo, part Lilliput, entirely the-kingdom-of-this-world—Andrews rollickingly describes a place where “women rule. They run the country, control the wealth, and decide who will do what, why, and when.” In this hedonistic paradise, tortillas, beer, marijuana, and mulberries are consumed freely. Men earn seventy cents for every dollar made by women. Boys play with Boberto dolls, dream of the moment on their wedding day when they might kiss their bride, and know “that this kiss is the pinnacle of every man’s existence, and everything that follows is but a shadow or afterthought.” Why God is a Woman whimsically inverts antiquated gender norms in order to examine the ways in which sex and body image are commodified and distorted in the contemporary American consumer culture.

The unnamed narrator of these poems, an old man living in exile and reflecting on mostly unpleasant memories of his island home, has been permanently maimed by a culture built upon the objectification of men. On this island, Julio Vega, beauty king and unsuccessful presidential candidate, announces:

A man’s place is at the feet of his woman…A man is meant to do physical labor and menial

jobs like paving roads, sweeping floors, and cleaning latrines, for this is the work God

designed for Island men. If God wanted men to do office work, he would have made them

less muscular, less angry, less beautiful, less eager for sex.

Males and females on this island nation are equally culpable in the continued emasculation of Island men; similarly, gender inequality in the contemporary United States is perpetuated by all people. Although miraculously, ninety percent of her island men sprout wings at adolescence and are judged by their plumage, Andrews is less interested in creating a fantastical Balmoral kleptocracy than she is in leveling a pointed and timely critique about how our limited understanding of gender difference ends up haloing the republic of desire. In other words, Andrews wants her readers to think of human sexuality and gender in less binary terms than those epitomized by either the newest incarnation of James Bond or the latest copy of Glamour.

Not since Aristophanes’ Lysistrata has gender difference been explored with such bluntness and élan. Even in a post-Caitlyn Jenner world, we need someone to remind us that gender comprises a fluidity; it does not fall neatly into a category. Ultimately, however, this collection is about more than mere biology and social equity; Why God is a Woman echoes on every page the warning of one of the island’s school teachers: “A country that celebrates greed is a country that celebrates death…not only of people and faith and ethics, but also of our world’s oceans, forests, and animals.” Any monolithic celebration of either the male or the female, any blind apotheosis of either the masculine or the feminine, manifests a corporeal greed that ends in death. Nin Andrew reminds us that those who merely praise the anatomical without recourse to the spiritual are those who blot out love in a nimbus of lust. What better form than the prose poem to let an ordinary slant of sunlight illuminate and reaffirm the divine beauty of the natural, un-commodified, human body? Andrews proves, once again, her mastery of the prose poem, a mastery unsurpassed since the death of Russell Edson. This collection transforms the most prosaic elements of sexism into angelic lampoon. What’s more, these poems are downright fun.

Dante Di Stefano's poetry and essays have appeared recently in The Writer's Chronicle, Obsidian: Literature in the African Diaspora, Shenandoah, Brilliant Corners, The Southern California Review, and elsewhere. He was the winner of the Thayer Fellowship in the Arts, the Allen Ginsberg Poetry Award, The Ruth Stone Poetry Prize, The Phyllis Smart-Young Prize in Poetry, The Bea Gonzalez Prize in Poetry, and an Academy of American Poets College Prize. He works as a high school English teacher in Endicott, New York.

For more work by Dante Di Stefano, check out his page at our Online Sundries site.