Horrific Confection by Juliet Cook

Reviewed by Cynthia Reeser

BlazeVOX [books], 2008

Even what is sweet becomes menacing in Juliet Cook’s latest work, Horrific Confection. Cook is an Associated Content writer, poet and DIY publisher who runs Blood Pudding Press. Not so much sickly sweet as stringently lovely, Cook’s poems always contain a purposefully-placed granule somewhere within the confection.

“Morning Fragment” may be just the right sweet to open the book with, as it contains many of the basic ingredients used in the works that follow. Cook writes:

Marmalade glistens thickly on the blade,
waiting. Residue of nightmares oozes through
hairline cracks, unspoons me, smears my eye-whites.
The eggs are bloodshot. The bread is dark red and seedy.

What is innocent can be threatening, by its very nature, and there is sometimes a threat within sweetness. Sometimes there is decay and imperfection mixed in with even the delectable bits: this is nature. If sweetness is read as femininity, Cook’s poetry acknowledges that even within beauty, within women on the whole, there is necessarily an occasional bitterness, something less than perfect. In “Adornment,” the female speaker becomes the menacing pastry: “Sour sparks became flames thrashing out of my mouth. / Nipples hardened into spiked lemon drops. / Lemon-glazed clavicles burst from my skin.” It may be no accident that the woman in question undergoes a sweet metamorphosis that forces her body through a painful change.

A special few, however, contain an honesty of voice that is something of a departure from the rest in this delightful collection, which speak from a position of observation or colorful analysis. “Heart Urchin” is striking in its subtlety. Cook’s use of language connects ideas and images to one another seamlessly:

My mother flung living sand dollars
into a bucket filled with bleach
so we could take sterilized pieces of landscape
home with us. I thought vacation meant escape,
but this wildlife was seized and made to meet her
expectations. Brittle doves like broken teeth.
Cilia burned dry. The reek of dying.

In her language, there is an undercurrent of familial strife and the insinuation of the sort of strangulation that occurs when a child is stifled by a parent. When Cook writes later in the poem, “Just pluck the beastie away,” the heartrending image is of a child’s personality being bent against her will. There is the same suffering beauty contained within “She Warns Me,” and an intangible danger lurks unspecified (and is therefore more frightening) behind the words:

Mother rubs my fingers, curling
towards uneasy sleep. Then she starts spinning
her cautionary yarn. Madder-blue and sticky, she warns me
not to talk as the strands batten purplish and hot.

In many other works in the volume, the horrors of childhood are entwined with its requisite innocence, and there again surfaces the vein of nastiness/ugliness/rot/sin right in the thick of the beauty. “Lollipops” provides a good example of this: “You used to save the wrappers from decapitated Dum Dum suckers. / You used to save the eyes from hollow white chocolate bunnies”. There are many other such examples in Horrific Confection, and Cook’s use of language is always unique, original, and lends to the movement of each poem.

Cook’s motivation in writing her poetry can perhaps be summed up in a line from “Before They Gaped, They Were Roses on Fake Cake”: “Nervous squeaks are not love bites / when what you really crave is shrieks. Something unconstrained / only fleetingly tamed. Beautiful predation.” Her use of language lends to the imagery and movement of the poetry, which can be read as internal monologue or commentary on beauty. Whatever the case, each poem is unique, contains “[s]omething unconstrained,” and encourages the reader to reconsider what constitutes beauty.

Read Cynthia Reeser’s interview with Juliet Cook in this issue.

Read the entirety of Horrific Confection online at http://www.blazevox.org/ebk-jCook%20REAL.pdf.

Cynthia Reeser, Editor-in-Chief and founder of Prick of the Spindle, is a freelance writer and web designer whose book reviews can be found on NewPages, Tarpaulin Sky, Bookslut.com, and in other places througout the web. Her poetry is present or forthcoming in 42opus, elimae, DOGZPLOT and temenos; and her artwork can be seen at www.cynthiareeser.com. She holds degrees in Music (Piano Performance) and in English Literature. Her poetry chapbook, Light and Trials of Light, is forthcoming from Finishing Line Press sometime in 2009.

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