Barrelhouse Reviews: Glass Bikini by Kristin Bock

Review by Cassandra Whitaker

Tupelo Press / December 2021 / 100 pp

Kristin Bock’s Glass Bikini, a dreamlike (often nightmarish) examination of contemporary life, serves truth wrapped in whimsy, wonder, horror, and perversion, a perfect pairing for contemporary, post-satire reality. Employing mostly prose poems, Bock’s collection functions as a collection of surreal snowglobes, cataloging disruptive dream-narratives. In “Welcome to the Dollar Store: A Translation,” the speaker tells the clerk “I want to make people think of what we are made of,” an exigency that applies to the whole of Glass Bikini. Bock’s poems, tiny worlds, either swole with shaken snow or serene and still, both reflect and distort the world as it is, our world, as the reader looks on with wonder, shock, or both.

For lovers of surrealism, Glass Bikini will delight. Bock illuminates the collection with curiosities through assemblage and juxtaposition. Surrealism, accomplishing emotional distance through whimsy or horror, can reflect intimate truths. Despite the trauma and violence depicted throughout the collection, Bock remains warm, inviting. In some poems, this stance disarms the reader only to later horrify them with nightmares. For Glass Bikini focuses on monsters.

Creatures, robots, altered or modified humans make up Bock’s menagerie. Human and non-human characters alike find limitations in their bodies, in turn reflected in the limitations of language for emotional honesty.  Late-stage capitalism has spawned busy lives which have in turn created monsters and robots for the little snowglobes of our lives, and the monsters, robots, and symbiotic humans that populate the poems in Bikini have inherited our insecurities and desires and failures. We are the monsters, but so are the culture we navigate, the love we share, and the laws we follow. “Sometimes the monsters are so big you can’t see them. But you can feel their hands ragdolling you,” Bock writes in “The President’s Dream.” Sometimes the robots and monsters are more human than the humans that populate these poems: “My soul / sits patiently in a chair,” the robot muses in “Unwilling Robot.”

Bock recognizes that contemporary life is a myriad of realities overlapping and intersecting, and if taken all at once it can be dizzying and depersonalizing. In “The Island of Zerrissenheit” (n., German: disagreement, disharmony) the speaker mourns the loss of a friendship: “I am dead to her.” The speaker is stuck on an island that “pulls at you every moment” where the “abandoned/always retreat or lash out, but never make it free.” The island, “where your hands fall off first,” serves both as setting and symbol; allegory and emotional topography are unified. Here, “mermaids go mad, biting the bottoms of boats.” If even supernatural creatures suffer, surely such grief will destroy human travelers. Language fails. Elegy can only be expressed by art, in Bock’s case, poesis. Poetry and art are the only sane responses to the current cultural climate.

Though much of Bikini is dark, one can also see Bock smiling as she composes, transfigures, and warps realities. The poems do offer wonder. “If I were a pole-vaulting robot, I wouldn’t be thinking about snow storms,” Bock pines in “Not a Pole-Vaulting Robot.” Bock accomplishes this by deftly wielding surrealism as if it were a painter’s brush. She establishes this mode in the opening poem, “Overcome,” where “art became extinct” but people went to galleries and museums to watch “a man rolling around on the floor like an unbalanced washing machine, knocking into things and coughing up wet rags.” Absurd, yes, but also a spot-on critique of our cultural woe, where craft and invention are commercialized, imitated, or abstracted into an NFT.  A devolution, a mark of decline? White noise? Bock doesn’t offer answers; her synthesis of information, data, meaning, and emotion in our accelerated world is dizzying, at times overwhelming.

Throughout Bikini, Bock’s synthesis exposes cultural absurdities. Her satirical eye is also a loving, empathetic one that understands dynamic change is necessary.  This hope for transformation culminates in the final section of the collection, “Looking Glass Planet,” which consists of a single poem. “CoPilot” exposes a fragmented narrative through the lens of loss and eros, or life spirit. The narrative is set up like a science fiction adventure. “All day long we blow them off the highways with our lady-colored laser gun,” the poem begins, and it continues in variable diary-like entries.  While the macro-narrative isn’t entirely clear, Bock doesn’t wish it to be. The poem’s science fiction motifs offer a frame of a narrative, but as with the other poems in the collection, the narrative and the action are distorted, disrupted, and disfigured.

Over the course of the poem, the copilot is transformed into a bird. The transformation is funereal. “How I see nothing but the little noose swaying deep in the pupil of her eye,” the speaker notices in “Day three,” and later, in “Day 26,” the transformation is grotesquely glamorous: “My nail begins to bleed. She vomits glitter.” The physical environment of this snowglobe is distressed, the climate ravaged, the rain clouds “septic.” By “Day 80,” the copilot has already transcended reality: “a girl who turned into a bird and flew next to you for a time.” The poem expresses love and companionship between copilots, which could function as a stand-in for siblings, or friends, or lovers, or even community. The sparseness of the poem’s movements highlights the pain of loss, while the plainness of the diction reflects grief’s effect upon cognition—how grief becomes a slow glacier of time, how words cannot offer comfort. How suddenly, it seems, there is so much emptiness.

Full of surprise, Bock’s snowglobe constructions are curios of contemporary life. Glass Bikini is a wondrous distortion of emotional and cultural life, a response to the accelerated now.

Cassandra Whitaker is a trans writer from the rural south. Their work has been published in Little Patuxent Review, Kitchen Table Quarterly, The Daily Drunk, & Anti-Heroin Chic, among other places. They are a member of the National Book Critics Circle.