God Complex

by Rachael Allen

God Complex is a sweeping and corrosive epic, a narrative poem that tells the story of the breakdown of a relationship against a backdrop of progressive environmental degradation.

A grieving body moves through states of toxicity, becoming an instrument for measuring the impact of pollutants. an entwining of human and non-human, built environment and natural landscape blurs perspective and distorts logic, creating an erratic decline into disorder. Loss is divined in human relations, in the ruptures of class and privilege, and the poisoning of the planet.

It is through a purgatorial leavening of pain that the narrator comes to terms with the delicate, shifting states of the ecological systems that merge with and surround us to create new forms of being and devotion. The result is visionary - a book that vibrates with urgency and feeling.

Genres: Poetry

113 pages, Kindle Edition

First published January 18, 2024

Reviews

[leah · Rating 3 out of 5]

a narrative poem about the breakdown of a relationship told alongside the degradation of nature. i really enjoyed how the imagery of an abusive relationship was intertwined with flashes of a decaying environment, with clear comments on our current climate crisis.

also the author is originally from cornwall (like myself) which made the environmental imagery a lot more visceral for me, and i love to see some cornish representation!

[anfal]

“i have been force-fed lack”
i’m kind of obsessed with this

[cami .✶ฺﾟ｡ · Rating 4 out of 5]

feels a tad cliché near the middle, and reuses a lot of imagery. however, beautifully written, and i love the idea of a relationship and its environment decaying in tandem. there were a few instances wherein i felt as though lines were using ‘big words’ just to ‘sound like a poet’, which is sad - this collection’s wonder comes from the prosaic deliciousness of those disgusting, gritty images allan creates.

[vasiliki ˖ ࣪⊹ · Rating 5 out of 5]

“I look out / through stained glass / pressing my neck / for religious lumps. / In my head, time works / on a flattened disc.”

“Perhaps / I have a deity in me — / lucid angel in the soft reflection —“

“the blood switching direction in the vein.”

“What is it to love a person? Or a virus, a prophylactic acid?”

“Immediately after you left, I swam in the toxic river. / Rapid and thick with hard-scrummed edges, / feverish from farm waste and floating cut grass.”

“I make you / here the scapegoat, mimetic violence.”

“I used to look up and feel the earth come / apart in my stomach with power or potential; not now, / you have closed me.”

“I was / learning what it meant to be subservient to someone, / the miraculous, the dog.”

“Rub me between your fingers like an emulsifying scent, / or what you expect to heal you. / In being used I take great power, I try to tell myself, on all fours, / that yes I am a god in my submission.” *** WHATTTT YES

“I became obsessed with nefarious / facts about you. I wanted parts of you inside me forever.”

“I want to stop / taking my hormones, like an organic cow. I need metaphor / like a bird sucking at the bud, inhalation of sugar.”

“All are living / memorialisation.”

“Unspeakable things happen everywhere, like you, / who are lilac with cold.”

“I am a fly on the end of your rod / and in that moment, an indeterminate / species, dead fly a prophecy / in the undead mouth of a fish.”

“Blemish on your neck the shape and mark of a religious / burn, I did that. I call it the worship condition. / There’s a taste in my mouth / like there’s a body under the tongue / all purging out like gods purged from mountains.” ***

“Seed-colour sky, rigid altarpiece sky, / good in the polyptych mottles. / Even more bloodletting, / these are my acts of devotion.”

[emily · Rating 3 out of 5]

'Memories are tactile, a deep entrenched old smell, an engastration of feelings.'

Didn't 'feel' much/enough for the poems (perhaps it requires a second/later reading?), but a strangely mesmerising read nonetheless. Feels a little bit cinematic almost, if that makes any sense? The poems (to me felt like were) arranged to be read from one 'scene' to another. In any case, I thought the collection rather 'pretty' (in terms of 'vibes', if that makes any sense at all?) .

'No such thing as something for nothing. If you know your way around one town here you know your way around them all. A country of industrial estates, ballooning from motorways like bronchioles. Churches in industrial estates. The industrial estate shaped church. The industrial estate shaped like a church. The industrial estate with the orange-rimmed church in it, stained glass in the prefab huts, and all the bodies lying in state like a reflex. The suburban dentist in their hackery. Lonely is the regional library sweating under strip light, mood spreading like a gas, flinting into oblivion. A robin there, on the bush outside, grubby from living by the hard shoulder, bloody of chest from his victims. All are living memorialisation.' (from 'english landscape tradition')

[Nic · Rating 4 out of 5]

“Sun-wrecked, river-slapped, useless miscellaneous. Describe the water's brown: I want a life I know I am not accessing. It lives at the bottom of this river. There is no control at any point in a narrative. Breeding swans live on the bank. I despise the lone mother bird for her freedom, weighted down by felt-grey babies with no consideration for what she can afford. Unsquashed, animals cannot be saints. The swan is a bitch. I took that from another book. One cygnet pokes up through white feathers, like in a Rococo painting, eyelash-tacky and colour-swept. Parenthood seems all platitude, even at the staggered nuance of the riverbank.”

[Conor]

The collection has its motifs: trees, skeletons, performance, dogs. They are fine, but undemanding. Her clearest preoccupation, though, is with blood, specifically her own blood, a kind of disbelief about its constant movement throughout her own body. It's a nice alteration on that idea's counterpart, much more widely used in poetry and rap, of the breath, its consistent ability to give life to its subjects and its issuer. Here, juxtaposed with stagnant, eutrophicated ponds and pestiferous streams, blood serves as a small reminder to the speaker that while their world is breaking down, something in her keeps working. Even if it feels to be, in her words, scutwork.

Really, I was glad when I found this in the text, as it seemed to me to provide a bit of counterbalance to the ubiquitous doom. When Allen strikes this balance, when she puts a little meat on the bones of her skinny lyrical fragments, they come to life, and the doom is actually enriched. The closing line of the poem on page 67, for instance, 'So much I want to show you.', is strong not just because of how it recontextualises the past tense list of images that precedes it, but because, with its present tense, it's genuinely hopeful rather than merely wistful. You have to create hope to crush it. Not that Allen's sole end is or should be to depress the reader. But really, in a collection about the demise of a relationship in conjunction with the demise of the planet, she has to do more to convey this particular emotion in spite of and through the thick crust of cliché that encrusts the topic. She does this decently well.

Some early poems worried me the entire collection would flop. The cumbersome Kaur-like sincerity of lines like 'Sorry was the language I learned' and 'I was learning what it meant to be subservient to someone...the dog' was hard to square against the hit-or-miss naturalist collage. With her portrayal of the man being often so oblique, addressed in second person but rarely described in third, her mistreatment at her previous partner's hands seemed vague rather than ominously unbounded. Some, too, reminded me of the Rimbaud I read earlier this year, and not in a good way. Big, implacable adjectives would stack, one after the other, creating a surreality that lacked any anchorage, that ended up seeming mealy-mouthed. My personal allergy to some strains of Symbolism aside, the collection starts too soft and crumbly, leaving its frequent extended metaphors unsupported.

Around a third of the way through, Allen begins to press on an exciting possibility sketched in the opener: 'Perhaps / I have a deity in me – / lucid angel in the soft reflection –'. This god complex, then, is not simply a literal one possessed by her controlling, callous ex-partner, but something she has resultantly contracted. Pathetic fallacy, ostensibly dewy-eyed in its initial uses, is presented as the speaker's small straining towards their own fantasy of omnipotence: that when their world ends, so does everything else. This may not seem all that mighty or deific: her line, 'I try to tell myself, on all fours, / that yes I am a god in my submission' shows her being unconvinced. But by the book's close, where she says 'I can bewitch an insect / with a swinging tit / but never a man', Allen seems to capture what we can imagine a god would lament: their inability, despite complete command over the natural world, to control humans fully in their ways. The line between the god complexes of 'the people who block / the ants' nests' swirl' and her own, willing them to 'maul the house / and surfaces with black trail' is, to me, deliberately thin. Thus the desire in these poems, that quality I identified earlier, is real and raw in its potential ironies. 'I called the wrong thing love for so long / I cannot switch it back.' What's left, then, but to wish for decimation. That way, at least, your wish can come true.

I am unsure, however, how well this reading is supported by most of the rest of the collection. Allen is more Herbert, her physical boundaries made pathetic and porous in the face of a terrible oncoming rapture, than Donne, one will wrestling flamboyantly with another unfortunately more powerful force. Don't get me wrong, I love me some Herbert. But Allen also lacks a properly religious sense of ultimate consolation. Her poems share quite explicitly in that contemporary condition, as Jacques Rancière and François Hartog would have it, of being utterly unable to imagine a future: 'History is a series of repeating patterns so extreme they are inescapable...They are / nefarious pre-fact; they're writ.' I have many feelings about this idea, but the main one is: what does the reader do with it? What room is left for us, as an audience, maybe even interlocutors, when it's all, all of it, 'writ'? I don't have an answer to that question.

What I can answer — what I've just realised — is the artwork that does deal with god complexes in the way I describe. One which, I think in quite a lot of ways, does what this collection tries to do but better on almost every front. It's Mitski's 'The Land is Inhospitable and So Are We'. Allen's poem on page 32 even seems to paraphrase directly the title of that album. A shame she only captured some of its ecstatic precision.

[Goodreeds User · Rating 4 out of 5]

spiralling inwards and outwards, disorienting and cool

[Celeste Crouch · Rating 2 out of 5]

Felt like I levelled up my poetry game. Not sure I got it but I’m glad I read it.

[Ada · Rating 3 out of 5]

Alguns poemes m'han encantat, però com a col·lecció sencera no tant. És el retrat poètic d'una relació llarga i abusiva.

[Sophia · Rating 5 out of 5]

Picked this up in a book shop in Lisbon. Loved every page. Beautiful, elegant narrative poetry about the breakdown of a relationship against the backdrop of ecological decline

[Abby Moroney · Rating 3 out of 5]

Finishing this poem and realising the author is from Cornwall makes a lot of sense (I should start reading author biographies more). Felt some of this poem in my bones

[Maestron · Rating 4 out of 5]

Skräddarsydda ord, berättelser som fabler, skicklig sömmerska.

"I have this army
of men's brains.
What should I
do with them next."

[Paul Scott · Rating 5 out of 5]

BEN PHILIPPS'S RECENT REVIEW of this book in n+1 persuaded me to pick it up. As I read it, to my surprise, I kept thinking of Eliot's The Waste Land, but maybe The Waste Land would fit Philipps's category of "eco-confessional," now that I think about it.

Besides being, like Eliot's 1922 volume, a book-length poem ("a sweeping and corrosive epic," according to the jacket copy), God Complex resembles The Waste Land in showing both the natural world and social institutions locked in some feedback loop death spiral, each coming unglued in response to the other's coming unglued.

"Once, twice, three times a year,
the river would burst its bank.
The river would burst its muscly bank
all over the closed bars and into our house,
dark, destroying our rooms,
like someone in an unpredictable rage.
The parasols and our belongings heading out to sea."

Phrases like "one sanitary pad floated in the river's dank" and "rat-sweetened water" might have come right out of that description of the Thames that opens "The Fire Sermon."

And, as in The Waste Land, at the core of all the coming unglued lies a disastrous relationship--there are several in Eliot's poem, actually: the "my nerves are bad tonight" couple and Albert and Lil in "A Game of Chess" and the typist and the clerk in "The Fire Sermon." God Complex has just the one disastrous relationship, but it is as bad as all of Eliot's put together. The speaker is in a slow-motion shipwreck with a fellow next to whom Eliot's clerk, the "young man carbuncular," seems like a chivalrous charmer.

"I called the wrong thing love for so long / I cannot switch it back," Allen writes. Much to one's relief, however, the very last poem in the book (p. 99), cast in the third person, suggests she has started to do a least a little better. Just about anything, though, would be better than the hell she has been through:

"In this pain I was a charred donkey in an office chair--steaming, stupid and unusual. I'd have whole conversations with myself pretending half of me was you. I was so alone, so deeply, there was only river, and an inexplicable dome of smoke in the sky."

[Juliano · Rating 5 out of 5]

“I have never kept a journal, / and this reminds me why. / I am too precarious in all directions. / I wake up even now in the night, / sweating over flooded documents.” Since Kingdomland I have felt quite sure that Rachael Allen is among the great poets of her generation, and her second collection, God Complex, does little to dissuade me. It’s a striking, daring work about the dangers of love and need in a world of violence, and the womanly inheritance of subjugation. “I wanted to disrupt the history of women's stories in my life, but it turned out I couldn’t. History is a sequence of repeating patterns so extreme they are inescapable”, she writes in one poem, and in another, “This is the most flattering and lasting gift bestowed upon / the women in my history: / they were so loved it calcified bone white to hate.” Allen boldly declares, early on, that “It’s a risk, a life with someone.” Is it worth the risk? It’s hard to say. Reclaiming aggression fails to empower: “Husband, wearily / I admit to having these dreams — / I turn and face you, chin in hands / and drive and drive / my thumbs into your eyes.” And throughout the brilliant, often fractured poems that make up the whole, Allen grapples with the form itself and what it is doing, what it can do, to perpetuate or liberate the writer from history: “being uncontaminated is impossible. Is a love poem about framing? These obsessions with interface reach back in time, which is to say, the form of the past pollutes a future terrain.” “What's the point of all this text? / I still have to live without you.” The point of all this text is manifold, but mostly it seems to be an exercise in training the eye to see history in both directions.

[eris · Rating 3 out of 5]

i had such high hopes going into this collection. the grieving body, the breakdown of nature at human hands, the increase of entropy; everything about allen's poetry should have been right up my alley. and yet, i was disappointed. the poetry lacks depth. it occasionally struggles through awkward turns of phrase and language that promises moments of clarity in its simplicity but ends up tangled in cliches. the emotions thrumming behind the poetry are never fully unleashed or encapsulated on the page.

[Elliot · Rating 4 out of 5]

Starting its life as a novel, resulting in a work of narrative somewhere between genres, aligning with the growing movement of poetic-prose hybrid works. The book merges fears for the state of the environment with the language of romantic heartbreak, challenging traditional notions of how the individual mourns both personal and global conflicts. The slow erosion of romantic heartbreak amalgamates with the breaking down of the earth, as the personal meets the ecological with a sense of toxicity at the centre of it all.

[Rachael Miller · Rating 3 out of 5]

I love the premise of this, to weave together imagery of an abusive relationship and escaping with environmental crisis. There are small segments of this that deliver strongly on that premise. For a lot of this book I felt I was being spun and spun around until I was dizzy and my vision was blurry and I could just barely make out what was around me. And perhaps that feeling alone also accomplishes the goal.

[Rebecca May Johnson · Rating 5 out of 5]

a page-turning epic. relationship and environmental violences woven into each other. so many expressive textures, materials and close-in landscapes. the rare desire to read a book of poetry in one sitting.

[james · Rating 3 out of 5]

that I'm finding it hard to decide the appropriate mode of addressing this work perhaps speaks to its complexity, its acuteness. this won't be one I 'revisit', I imagine it'll just continue to swim about in my mind rent-free

[Maria Stallmann · Rating 3 out of 5]

as with most poetry, most of it was meh, some of it was great! the conversation she had with max porter at my local bookshop was enlightening - don’t think i would have appreciated this as much if i hadn’t heard her read the poems aloud and talk about them.

[Steven Green · Rating 2 out of 5]

On the one hand I feel bad about giving this book such a low score, but on the other, the poems in this book didn’t make me feel anything and I was glad to finish it. Really can’t believe this has been shortlisted for the forward prize this year. It’s really Not Good™️

[Conor]

Winter, and I arrive at a beach
I knew from childhood and think
I've been here before, more years back than I've been alive.
Confirmation there's been a lifetime already,
even stupider than this one.

[Jessi · Rating 5 out of 5]

Never to have written a poem about falling in love, which is much the same as moving through a sticky spring stream, the banks of which are made from oil or phosphorous substance: being uncontaminated is impossible.

[Emily Taylor · Rating 4 out of 5]

Started this ages ago and only picked it up again this morning. I thought this was beautiful, much more tangible than Kingdomland (which tbf I also rated), but it felt like a graduation for her in terms of clarity. My favourite sections were ‘saints in the wild’ and ‘English landscape tradition’

[Harry · Rating 5 out of 5]

4.5 (but rounding up). really loved this. ecological meltdown paired with a breakup but in a super precise and nice way.

[Karolina · Rating 5 out of 5]

Absolute triumph. She knows how it feels.

“I called the wrong thing love for so long
I cannot switch it back.”

[Phillip · Rating 4 out of 5]

This poetry collection is interesting because many of the poem focus on a kind of aesthetics of urban decay, and yet some of the language is amazingly beautiful. The poems explore the experience of a romantic breakup alongside imagery of poverty, post-industrial decline, and putrefaction, which works really well as an analogy. But just hearing those themes, one wouldn't necessarily think the poetry would be beautiful, but often it really it. For instance, this is the second stanza of the poem on page 50 (the individual poems rarely have titles):

For company I look up to the sheet-white sky, streaked with
medicinal blues, or towards a barren tree, reaching up.
The iridescence of a smell like an old man's meat on
thermals, a flasher's thin stink on the air, animal scent
glimpsed. Unspeakable things happen everywhere, like you,
who are lilac with cold.
https://youtu.be/3hAapgHAPSw

[S P · Rating 4 out of 5]

from God Complex
What is it to love a person? Or a virus, a prophylactic acid?
A trouble in the systemics? Which is like a riot in the
municipal architecture of a body. How emotion and clinging
affliction make a way through sinus and back out again. (6)
[...]
Immediately after you left, I swam in the toxic river.
Rapid and thick with hard-scummed edges,
feverish from farm waste and floating cut grass.
Algal blooms in eddying parts from
animal matter, made inorganic with antibiotics,
a clean grassy odour reminding me I'm not far from people,
or animals kept by people. I swim in the slush,
and the effluent coats me.

Red roots grow like a photograph I saw
of a Monsanto-plumped lake,
plant arms turned pink from runoff,
hemming the water, nothing else can grow
from the glyphosate. (7)
[...]
Sorry was the language I learned.

I followed you too far into the ill-green of your mind.
Green at an angle, grading up in colour: the darker green
of a plane's still-flying shadow on the lattice of field as it
lands. Light joins in a continuum. Frequencies occur, a flash
between my eyes.

When I stand in one position, hand to my forehead, shading
the light, I can imagine you stepping off a train and the limits
come into play: you loom larger. How can one tree's stem and
bark represent the logic and order of my own perspective?
Is a branch or a tree in this way like deep feeling,
unboundaried and usual?

What about that livid green over there? Suddenly it stands
out, an unnatural green, as if there can be such a thing. It is
back-of-chessboard or hardware-store green. The green of
a swing bin or car door. But it is planted and skew-whiff in
shapes; someone's garden of entropy, someone's flowering
bit of temple. Sorry. (13)
[...]
Never to have written a poem about falling in love, which is
much the same as moving through a sticky spring stream, the
banks of which are made from oil or phosphorous substance:
being uncontaminated is impossible. Is a love poem about
framing? These obsessions with interface reach back in time,
which is to say, the form of the past pollutes a future terrain.
There is blood in my carcinogens, like alphabet soup. (85)
[...]
The fibrous circuitry of veins
is a council in my body -
a sequence of fraying sects
created for the processes
that gouge away without permission,
making me better.

There is a big light turned on
in there.
It gapes through my mouth
when I open it, in servitude.

Seed-colour sky, rigid altarpiece sky,
gold in the polyptych mottles.
Even more bloodletting,
these are my acts of devotion. (95)

[Kristy · Rating 5 out of 5]

Absolutely breathtaking in its entanglement of violence and beauty. Wow.