Barrelhouse Reviews: Phoenix Song by LD Green

Reviewed by Ruth Crossman

Nomadic Press / February 2022 / 119 pp

LD Green’s chapbook may be called Phoenix Song, but there’s a reason the cover features unicorns. Green spent their childhood watching and rewatching the animated adaptation of Peter S. Beagle’s novel The Last Unicorn. With its lush, haunting animation and adult, existentialist flavor, it’s easy to understand why Green jokes that they saw this movie so much that its themes imprinted into their psyche.

In a way, Beagle’s unicorn is a perfect symbol for genderfluid identity. She’s not allowed to remain a unicorn: she spends the middle of the movie unhappily trapped in a human female body before breaking a spell and returning to her preferred form. It also turns out that she’s also not really the last of her kind. The end of the movie reveals that her community has been literally forced underground, driven into the ocean by a violent, menacing creature known as the Red Bull.

An act of solidarity thwarts the Bull’s plan. In the movie’s climax, the unicorn battles with the bull and frees her kin from his control, allowing them to rise from the ocean and return to the land. As an adult, Green came to identify the Red Bull as the symbol of cis-hetero-patriarchy. “He wants the unicorns (marginalized genders) trapped forever for his amusement and under his control in the ocean near his tower,” they explain. It’s the film’s vision of the unicorns surging together which Green has carried into adulthood. They consider the unicorn a personal totem when they write about their relationship with their body and their gender identity.

Green’s body has battled to take up space in the world in its true form. It’s a body that has been violated, institutionalized, tranquilized, and vilified, but also a body which has been celebrated, cherished, and loved. Like the phoenix rising from the ashes and the unicorn finding its kin, Green’s “songs” communicate the possibility of finding pleasure, connection, and even reverence in a body previously dismissed as a myth.

The collection begins with a series of meditations on queer and bi+ sexuality. In “Apples and Oranges” they describe the confusion of their teenage desire for both boys and girls and their journey toward accepting that they have a taste for both:

[…] when I tasted the apple I didn’t taste sin…
And when I swallowed an orange slice
My hunger was satisfied.  
So I know now whatever state I’m in, it doesn’t matter if it’s
South, North, West, or East
When I see fruit
I see a feast.

In “Event Horizons” they offer up a set of prose poems about their changing gender identity. A stranger heckles them for using the women’s bathroom because of their male presentation. A colleague asks them to help with Women’s History Month and they squirm at reading The Vagina Monologues: “Remember when I suspended my misgivings with suspenders? Remember when I uttered ‘cunt’ but it exploded like a bizarre supernova?” They learn about an event open to anyone who identifies and presents as a woman and contemplate their options: “Neither, no. Yes, both, if it means I get to speak!”

Then, in “Lady Macbeth to Octomom,” they give Shakespeare’s villainess a monologue directed toward the tabloid fixture of the early aughts. This riff on murder and fertility weaves high culture, pop culture, and gender critique together skillfully. “Neither of us can escape:” they conclude, “our body counts will not make up / for the power we lack.”

With “Body to Machine,” Green digs deeper into the theme of embodiment. They compare traveling around in a body that has been molested to driving a car that doesn’t always start, and they describe the loss of control and unpredictability of response which both states cause. This loss of control escalates in “Sometimes I Slip,” where Green describes the lack of bodily autonomy they experienced when they were institutionalized after a sexual assault:

[…] I have been too patient
with the good intentions of this secular priesthood.
I held my mouth open to commune with the corporate body
While my blood was measured to determine
The diagnosis of my curse.

In the center of the book, Green points us toward the origin of their phoenix’s fire by recounting their memories of abuse and their struggle to make meaning from it. “I Forgot I Remembered” captures the chaotic, dissociative nature of trauma memory, while “Phoenix Song,” in multiple “verses,” documents taking the shards of trauma and using them to heal through writing. Positioned after this sequence of poems is a pair of essays, “The Mental Health System Fails, Mutual Aid Transforms,” and “Not Confused, Not Crazy: On Being a Non-Binary Radical Mental Health Advocate.” Green mixes the personal and the political to describe how the medical system dehumanizes people with mental health diagnoses as well as people with marginalized gender identities. The pairing of essays with poems offers multiple perspectives on the same series of events. We see both Green the poet, a wounded unicorn trapped in the hospital, and Green the intellectual, weaving their lived experience into a damning argument about the roots of social injustice.

But there is a happy ending of sorts. The phoenix that rises from Green’s ashes is a dapper, enthusiastic, and decidedly sexy beast who has built a way of seeing and loving out of the pain of the past. The last pieces of the collection celebrate sexuality as a multiplicity of desire which can encompass genders of many different kinds, and springs forth from multiple bodies overlapping in one space; “a body who goes in with you / and will take you in, too,” as they write in “A Letter to My Dildo.”

This is a book of multitudes: from pain to love to expressions of gender. Green mixes genres skillfully to make meaning of their lived experience. Taken in sum, it’s a collection of poetic work that invites the reader to go beyond the binary of either/or and embrace a both/and which can hold dual, and even contradictory, impulses and labels. In the end, collectivity and inclusivity allow for all those who have been marginalized and victimized to heal together: to rise out of the ocean and live free once more. As Green states in “Benediction,” the final piece in the book,

I am not alone.
You are not alone.

Ruth Crossman is a Pushcart-nominated writer whose work spans multiple genres. She is the author of the flash-memoir collection All the Wrong Places (Naked Bulb Press, 2022) and her work has appeared in publications including Litro, Flash Fiction, and Maximum Rock n Roll. You can find out more about her at msruthcrossman.com.