HIV, Mon Amour

by Tory Dent

Tory Dent's is a voice like no other. Her use of language is virtuosic, complex, and plangent. These are daring poems that also dare the reader. HIV positive, Dent writes out of her own experience and profound refusal to look away or suspend feeling or turn from love. When her first book of poems, What Silence Equals, appeared in 1993, it was recognized as "immediately one of the great, necessary books to come out of the AIDS crisis, flinging its challenge in the face of death." With HIV, Mon Amour she moves further into the whirlwind -- as witness, lover, and observer.

Genres: Poetry

Hardcover

First published December 1, 1999

Reviews

[Joe · Rating 5 out of 5]

Of course I like a poet who risks in saying something beautiful and outrageous, saying something so absurd as to be insulting.

Dent's poems generally consist of block like stanzas made up of long, dense lines. Her subject is sickness, love, sex, and death from a decidedly post modern stance. I.e. from Cinema Verite where Dent laments the death of a lover in the light of her own declining sickness: "O in Oshima's In The Realm of the Senses when Sada castrates Kichi / after his own death, I want to keep you like that, your cock preserved / like the brain of a genius, beyond bronze, pickled in a jar of formaldehyde, / 'That movie's about castration,' you said. / 'That movie's about possession' I said."

It's very difficult to quote Dent, because her poems are restless--her line, her syntax, her thought keeps pushing forward. What one thinks it's about changes. At it's most difficult her poetic strategies can seem like a more academic version of what goes on in some of Frank O'Hara's denser poems, her sentences desperately trying to buck their own meanings with unlikely similes--"The muscle adapts, adopts the image as if the imagined face of a Bosnian orphan, the brow-swept features / dumb, and blind substitution for the mature articulation of longing and hate." (Now imagine this going on for a dozen pages.) Some passages seem to be elaborate, improvisational and often breathtaking howls of pain--passages that foreground the tension between the appearance of an intellect out of control (as a result of bodily pain) and the artist as a purposeful maker: "But only a pattern, arbitrary, absolute / of lights, lonely and tiny, lay out against the lawless expansion, a game / of dominoes played cursorily in the hawking blankness, bipartisan, yes / in its PC chaos but neglectful and rancorous in this fail-safe, / do-no-harm schematic: the more godless the landscape, the more demonically / driven the agenda. Bored by ideas of persecution and fatigued with my efforts / to connect sign with meaning, closure, and hence beginning, I turn my head, / heavy and mechanical, pull the strangulating cord to turn off the overhead / fluorescence, and allow what balance this queer harmony of weakness and strength / might make, the pallor of city lights lending an alien glow to my limbs."

The first poem, "Fourteen Days In Quarantine" is phenomenal. And most of the rest of the work deserve multiple readings. Dent is dense, though, and this book, at 93 pages needs a fair amount of time and patience. (And her shorter poems don't offer the reader much of a break--because they're not very good).

[Niel Rosenthalis · Rating 5 out of 5]

One of my TOP three favorite books of poetry. Absolutely stunning and necessary. The energy of these poems makes me want to go out and run around. I wish she were alive today, partially so that she could spin together more collections like this. Unbelievably brave poetry that makes most contemporary poetry seem laughable, provincial and/or sluggish.

This woman's got POWER.

Caution: if you don't like latinate words (like apheliotropically, diagetic, etc.) then you'll raise your eyebrow at this. And even though I don't like long poems too much, these poems go by so fast and so furiously, you forget you're hand has even turned the page.

[Melzanie · Rating 4 out of 5]

dense poems...but the obvious negative effect of an AIDS diagnosis on the psyche of a pretty young woman clashes in her poems, which make them immediate, relatable (aids or sans aids), and just posture the fascinating idea of subject matter for those who are technically dying, yet have such time to express their feelings in poetry.

[Julene · Rating 4 out of 5]

This was the first book I read of Tory Dent, it is her 2nd book. It is difficult to read, painful and very wordy. But the pain is real and reflects the world of pain she was living with full blown AIDS. Her third book came out around the time she died and it is on my list to read. This is important work, it is rarer for women to be as open about their experience of living with HIV than for men. I'm sorry she has passed and when I heard she died I did not want to believe. It is funny, I work with HIV and saw so many die, but I didn't expect this author to actually die.

[Queer · Rating 4 out of 5]

This poetry kills me. In a poetic way, she describes the details of her dying, her aims at living, and the ways she lived and loved. There's so much to learn here and the work is far from a quick read. Each poem is a breath of life sneaking away.

[Kelsey · Rating 5 out of 5]

Dent's lines go for days. They wind and twist and stretch and I would follow them anywhere. These poems grip your heart and squeeze.

[Mark Lester · Rating 5 out of 5]

Holy shit

[Timothy Juhl · Rating 1 out of 5]

I'm sad to admit this is my first DNF for the year and it's a poetry collection.

It's been sitting on my shelf for probably 20 years, the title was the reason I picked it up back then. I'd also assumed this was a gay author (oops, it's a woman, I don't know if she's gay). She is/was HIV positive.

I was hoping to spend the time with this collection recalling the early days of the AIDS crisis (the book was written in 1999 and when I opened the first poem, I was dismayed to find it was 12 pages long (and I hate long poems) and it was in the form of massive paragraphs masquerading as prose poems (and I hate prose poems).

I'm not denying there was some interesting lines in those first seven(!) paragraphs (and mind you, these are densely written, in a small font (I'm sure to keep the "poem" from literally being the whole collection). I skipped ahead and found a couple of more traditional looking poems, but this author was into density and being overly poetic in her visions, none of it was hitting with me. Interspersed with these few traditional-looking poems, are more prose poems, and quite frankly, I don't care to read further.

I will keep the volume in my collection for the subject matter, but it's continued residence will always be tenuous should I ever need more shelf space.

[Cheryl · Rating 3 out of 5]

I'm going to have trouble reviewing this because I struggle with poetry. I sort of need someone to explain things that I am going to miss because of that struggle.

Some pieces were more moving to me than others, but that could simply be because I was able to grasp those better for whatever reason.

[Steven · Rating 3 out of 5]

My immediate reaction after reading this book was exhaustion. Dent's dense language and intricate examination of the minute moments that one notices and must survive in the face of terminal illness mimic perfectly what I imagine (and have witnessed) to be the experience of living with HIV. The long lines and thick stanzas parallel the vivid way every detail of life can come to be important with the time to linger on it. Most of the narratives here are stories of "interiority" (a word she uses multiple times throughout the book), where the voice struggles "on which subject outside to focus" (62), looking at art, movies and other cultural artifacts for answers about existence. And like the disease itself, Dent works from the smallest cells of her life and works her way out to tackle the huge subjects of life and love in the face of death. So, although exhausted at the end, this book also has moments where it jolts the reader awake, making us look around and appreciate everything.

[Maughn Gregory · Rating 2 out of 5]

I give the first, long poem in the book a 5/5, the rest, unfortunately 1s and 2s.