How might the speakers of Shakespeare’s poems have dealt with the advent of antidepressants amidst their romantic tribulations? What planes of desire and yearning might Twitter or dating apps supplant for John Keats? For the author, a poetic form “forgot by all not taking English Lit” becomes a 21st century catharsis, diary, and confession. In these sonnets, Achilles records a year of emotional turbulence stemming from a romantic and sexual attachment to her physical therapist that ended poorly. Her style blends the antiquated language readers associate with sonnets (“’Twould be too pat:—prepost’rous! Yet, genteel”) with contemporary phrases and crassness (“One more request:—will you please cum in me?”), lending the speaker a degree of levity even as she bemoans her therapist’s family and her own crumbling marriage. Like her predecessors, the author places the object of her affection on a pedestal (“stainless as a god”) while lamenting her own shortcomings, describing herself as a “fretful, pummeled emu” or “mad hen.” But as their relationship metastasizes, the speaker begins to take stock of the would-be couple’s interpersonal shortcomings and lack of compatibility (and, thankfully, to focus on the pursuit of goals beyond sex and love, like querying agents about her novel). Yet, even as she begins making literary progress and dating new men, she can’t quite relinquish this first flame. While the sonnet form may not be to every reader’s taste or always synchronize with some of Achilles’ more blunt confessions, these verses vividly illustrate the familiar figure of a person tragically in love. The sonnets feel most human when Achilles drops the affected veneer in favor of colloquial terms of our time; for all the high-brow ways of describing rejection and heartbreak, what sums it up better than “this sucks”?
THE BODY ALONE
July 3, 2024