Red Sugar

by Jan Beatty

The torso facing east, the head nearly west, as if she couldn't take in the sight of her own skin and its failings, its parts spilling. D. A. Powell What is it about the poems in Red Sugar, Jan Beatty's astonishing third collection, that brings to mind the incomparable music of Miles Davis? 'It's just that I can't play like anybody else... I can't do anything like anybody else, ' Davis insisted. These poems go their own sure way, making their own fierce music, charting 'the fluid stages of / empire & slavery' in the human body, yours and mine, as we rehearse our sometimes sorry but always necessary seductions. Jan Beatty is the author of Boneshaker and Mad River, winner of the 1994 Agnes Lynch Starrett Poetry Prize. She is the recipient of the Pablo Neruda Prize for Poetry and two fellowships from the Pennsylvania Council on the Arts

Genres: Poetry

80 pages, Paperback

First published March 30, 2008

Reviews

[Robert Beveridge · Rating 4 out of 5]

Jan Beatty, Red Sugar (University of Pittsburgh, 2008)

Red Sugar has, perhaps, caused more controversy than any American book of poetry since the sixties. Not that many people have noticed, but Jan Beatty's third volume got a scheduled reading at a Joseph-Beth Booksellers location cancelled back in the summer. It's caused quite a stir among book nerds and the hardcore anti-censorship types, but as is usual in this country, poetry-related matters don't make the national headlines. That's too bad, because like all of us, Beatty, who is a fine poet, could certainly use the publicity.

The controversy stems from the explicit nature of most of the poems here. I say “most” because there are some that are surprisingly tender (and some that don't seem to fit the theme at all). Where the real surprise kicks in is about two-thirds of the way through the book. You know Beatty's on a theme here, and as we progress we get deeper into that theme (in a predictable way; we get the present, and we dig deeper and deeper into the past until we get to the event that started it all), and then, all the sudden, wham, we get to “Serum”: a left turn out of the blue that still fits. And that's when Red Sugar goes from being a very good book to a possibly great one. I'm not going to quote from those back pieces, because I don't want to spoil this for you (and I believe this is the first time I've ever referred to spoilers in a book of poetry), but I can't really quote from the first bits, because Amazon would redline this review faster than it would an excerpt from a porn film. So I'm stuck with quoting from one of the poems that doesn't really seem to fit until much later. But then it's one of my favorites in this book, so that's not a real hardship:

“sometimes I look at people and think: I can feel the blade
of your little machinery, turning inside you from some generator.
cutting you off from yourself. no trace of the older couple down the street,

their bodies he sliced into bits. up the cement ramp to the county jail,
he looks down, pieces of skin still under his fingernails but nothing
we can see. I think: look at his undiscovered cities. the buildings rising

in him and their fierce armies. you can't tell how he packaged them
in 6-inch squares, to be sent through the mail. christmas presents
to the family. now the woman next door: he made good potato salad.”
(“Stray”)

Beatty takes the old “he was so quiet” cliché (in the stanza before I started quoting) and plays with it, twists it, makes it her own with the potato salad line. In between, all the transformation you could possibly want. (Contrast the language in here with that of the poem quoted in the Forgive My Trespassing review, elsewhere in this issue; can you see the difference in the power of the language here?) This is a wonderful book, and I'm hoping Beatty can find a way to get word of the controversy out there and use it to sell some copies. After all, who doesn't like reading about sex? ****

[Juliet · Rating 5 out of 5]

I have not bought a book of poems in years. I heard Jan Beatty read some poems from her newest collection, The Switching/Yard, and I was so impressed by her complete vulnerability and sincerity in every line, I had to go buy her books. People who know poetry in general and her poetry in particular said I should also read this, because it was incredible. So I took their advice, and I read this first, since she wrote it first. Their advice was on the money. This was incredible.

It's about really painful stuff -- having been raped, and not knowing who her birth father was, and doing drugs, and being in all kinds of dangerous situations. But it never feels exploitative, it continues to grapple with the drive to be alive, the push for life that is in the blood ("red sugar" is her descriptive term for blood), how she continues to choose, in spite of all the shit that has happened to her, to live, dammit, not to go down without a fight, that the fighting and the living are maybe the same thing.

After I finished, I went back and read it again. On that reading, the close of one poem in particular stood out as the clarion call that maybe the collection as a whole makes. (On another reading, I might say the same of a different passage.) Here it is:

Some people say this life is just an idea of life,
but I say the highway of fear is real.

& so we have this comic, this
poem, this small, small matter of
wanting to eat the world,

swallow it up, say I was here.

Powerful, stunning stuff. I can't wait to read the next one.

[Jcat · Rating 2 out of 5]

Had its great moments. Overdone and uncomfortable (not the sex, other aspects). 2.5.

[CARA ARMSTRONG]

In the epigraph for the title poem of Jan Beatty’s third book Red Sugar, in which she quotes nature writer and poet Gretel Ehrlich – “You walk inside yourself on roads and ropes of blood vessels and tendons”— Beatty clearly lets readers know that like Ehrlich, she is up to the challenge of merging intense observations with a wryly mystical personal voice. However, instead of looking outward to nature around us and skimming across the surfaces of poetry, Beatty directs our gaze inward toward the nature within us. To Beatty, red sugar is the blood that we contain, the essential, intrinsic maps and codes that define us. She refers to these maps throughout the book in poems such as “Procession” and “Hitchhike”, but it is in “Lip” that we get the deepest understanding of what the map may mean.

To Beatty, this map is personal, female, and fearless and is structurally similar to the bebop she alludes to in line 10 of “Lip”— “liplipliplip/bopbopaloobop/as good as dope/almost.” Like bebop, Beatty’s “Lip” is not a straightforward composition. She strings words together to create a fast tempo with asymmetrical phrasing, starting with the first line of the poem—“Edge, verge, labium. Flange, impertinence, recompense.” She builds up her words and lines to create intricate, internal melodies and uses rhythm to expand the lines’ role as tempo-keepers, using enjambment to draw out sounds and punctuation through slash marks “/” to condense lines and reverberations together. Hearing the poet read her work, or even in reading the poem out loud, the poem’s bebop syntax sounds jarringly different to the bouncy, organized, and predictable sounds of something like a sonnet. Instead, like bebop, it sounds racing and fragmented, an exciting and beautiful revolution.

[Deirdre Fagan · Rating 5 out of 5]

In these poems Beatty eats our hearts out one bite at a time. She forces us not to look away from realities that burden and pain. She also celebrates momentary joys, and we take a breath. There is red sugar but sometimes we are left bleeding. She tells it straight, beautifully.

[Bruce Cline · Rating 4 out of 5]

The words that came to mind as I was reading this book of verse were: brutal, resilient, terrifying, dogged, raw, bleeding, and horribly real. It was a tough read.

[Katie · Rating 5 out of 5]

Red Sugar is about class, women, and blood. Beatty, in an 2008 interview with radio station Classical QED 89.3 Pittsburgh's series Around Town, says that “class runs all through [her:] books, in terms of work, in terms of attitude towards work, in terms of survival,” and Beatty claims that this book, unlike Mad River or Boneshaker, her two previous books, tries to get inside the body, into the blood of people, into what drives them. We see these twin themes of class and heritage play out as Red Sugar marches into the center of the gritty side of life and stays, shining stage lights on the personas who exist there, drawing them into character with clear and hard language. Beatty’s profiles of fear, exploitation, sexuality, abuse, drugs, and death give voice to complex lives full of contradictions.

Read the rest of my review at http://blogthisrock.blogspot.com/2009...

[Courtney LeBlanc · Rating 4 out of 5]

A collection of poems about sex, drugs, the female body, and growing up.

from Red Sugar: "When I was young, I was a comet / with an unending shimmering tail, / and I flew over the brokenness below / that was my life. I didn't know until I was / twelve that we carry other bodies inside us."

from Procession: "Little wren, your body is breaking down into air. / I find you under my desk, / —how long dead?— / What do the hollowed black cones of your eyes / and your tiny claws have to tell me about home?"

from The Punch: "My father at thirty / knows the bend over & take it, / but he also knows the flipped switch, / the moment of recalcitrance, when the burn / turns to fire, when the body's magma rises / up, comes out the mouth in a full-blown // motherfucker, when the first swings high / in its 60-degree orbit to an uppercut."

[Tiffany]

A little bit of witty, a little bit of sexy, a whole lot of dangerous. I think this is Jan's best book.

[Kelley · Rating 4 out of 5]

She's a favorite - so I'm biased. But this is a pretty gutsy book, as all her work usually is. She delves into the body and comes out with blood on her hands.

[James Grinwis · Rating 4 out of 5]

hard hitting, gutsy, overt, inside the experience. An exciting read.

[Sarah]

Red Sugar (Pitt Poetry Series) by Jan Beatty (2008)

[Lisa · Rating 1 out of 5]

A feminist Bukowski?

[Khadijah · Rating 5 out of 5]

I love this book. Beatty is fearless. The poems are just the right kind of messy; visceral, human, tough.

[Stevie Edwards · Rating 5 out of 5]

Jan Beatty is a beast! Buy this book! Then think about how you should be a braver writer (if you are inclined toward writing your own work).

[Amy Kitchell · Rating 4 out of 5]

Very steamy...edgy...fresh voice.