Barrelhouse Reviews: Good Morning to Everyone Except Men Who Name Their Dogs Zeus, by Lannie Stabile

Review by Julia Tagliere

Cephalopress / June 2021 / 101 pages

In the movie The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, Douglas Adams introduced a powerful weapon: the point-of-view gun, which makes the shooter’s intended target see things from her point of view. Think “instant empathy-delivery device.” In real life, books are the closest thing we have to point-of-view guns, and Lannie Stabile’s new poetry collection is no derringer: it’s a point-of-view bazooka.

Built to blast holes in the unwarranted hero worship by a surprising number of men of the Greek god Zeus (that ancient deity whose universal mission was deceiving, seducing, and raping as many women — and men — as he could), Stabile’s collection of 39 devastating poems chronicles the long aftermath of sexual assault. Stabile delivers these experiences, heartbreakingly familiar to too many survivors, with an elegant lyricism punctuated by jarring slaps of blunt language and stark imagery, shaking the ground with the force of silence breaking.

Stabile misses no aspect of trauma: the survivor’s unspoken sense of betrayal by could-be/should-be protectors, like the bartender in “1. Side flash,” telling the zipper-fondling man to “take that shit outside,” only increasing the woman’s peril; or the mother in "My Mother Deftly Misses the Point," not hearing what her daughter’s trying so hard to say:

I tell her, Billy stares at me.
Billy of the ponytail, of the chatter,
of the unpaid rent.
Billy, the virtual stranger,
whom I beg my mother
not to invite to Thanksgiving.

[…]

I tell her I won’t come to dinner
if Billy is there.

She ignores the ultimatum and asks,
Are you sure you don’t mean Tim?

Many survivors never speak of their assaults, and in "I Can't Talk About It," Stabile nails this, too:

[…]My womanhood,

that lost and weakened wheel squeaks, even
as I weep to keep things moving along. Every

day I am misrepresenting myself: Am I the
apple, the serpent, or the whole damn rib cage?

Protecting a man who refused to protect me. For
years, I have been howling on the inside, raking

my soul red and raw with the need to tear this story out
of my body, and still I can’t talk about it. 

Stabile’s compact(ed) poems speak of grief and depression, and the continuing fear many survivors experience. But in poems like “When I Tell Friends My Therapist Suggested Anger Management, They All Say, But You Don’t Get Angry,” there’s also palpable anger, heartbreakingly constrained:

My therapist hands me a padded club
and points to a couch
pressed against the wall
Hit it. Go on.
And I stand there,
with the answer blistering in my fist

But beating the shit out of a lumpy sofa
indicates a loss of self-control
and command of my own body 

The bulk of Stabile’s firepower is aimed directly at these guys “who name their dogs Zeus.” Now, before anyone who actually named his dog Zeus starts sputtering about “Not all guys who name their dogs Zeus,” witness Stabile capturing one of the seriously aggravating and, frankly, terrifying aspects of defensive phrases like that in “His Worst-Case Scenario.” The guy starts off a date seeming decent, but ends the night wanting his money back because the woman didn’t sleep with him:

She lets him kiss her once,
but treads midnight alone.
He is horny, disappointed.
The night was a total bust,
the company was lackluster,
the meal mediocre.
He wants his fifty bucks back. 

It’s not a leap to think that if more alcohol were involved, or the man were more angry than disappointed, he might’ve taken far more than the $50 to which he thought he was entitled. This scenario happens too often not to fear it; the problem is, victims can’t tell which date will be a disappointed guy who’ll just go home and mope, and which will be a dangerous one who’ll try to take by force what he feels he’s owed. Predators are just too damned good at fooling the vulnerable. Stabile’s invocation of this man’s potential for harm is all the more unsettling for being implied rather than made explicit.

The biting truth at the heart of Stabile’s collection is that a potential for harm lies in all men, so seeing some of them glorifying, worshipping, or even striving to emulate men who have already (even mythologically) enacted harm is baffling.

We strive to emulate those we worship, whether they’re Greek gods, billionaires, or “heroes of the Confederacy.” Naming pets for them, erecting statues of them, or celebrating whitewashed myth as universal truth reads to Stabile and other survivors as a public declaration of support for deeply flawed entities. At best, such adulation conveys insufficient awareness of the subject’s harmful actions toward others, understandable in a culture where some view the jovial, cuddly, father-knows-best Zeus of the Disney movie Hercules as the original Greek god, rather than just another myth, crafted to shield innocent children from the knowledge of Zeus’s wicked behavior. At its fully-informed worst, that adulation conveys celebration. Maybe Zeus is “built like a Greek god,” or “has awesome thunderbolts,” or whatever manifestation of power attracts them to him. But when men like those in Stabile’s collection name their dogs Zeus, what they’re really doing is trumpeting their enthusiastic seal of approval for all his terrible acts, too, whether they realize it or not, convincing themselves that’s just what the powerful do, whether they’re myths or legends or just ordinary men whose only power in this life is over a vulnerable human being.

And Stabile is done with it. Done with the men frantically slapping more white paint onto those crumbling statues as fast as their survivors chip it away. In “Europa,” she makes this particularly clear: “But there was never more bullshit / than a tale of a man / washing himself clean.”

This is not an easy collection, though Stabile adds touches of levity (the opening sketch by artist Koss, “Leda’s New Coat,” is laugh-out-loud funny and a heartening reminder of survivors’ tremendous power). But, just as with Hitchhiker’s point-of-view gun, survivors aren’t the ones who should be on the receiving end of these poems. They already understand the trauma and damage inflicted by these specific types of Zeus-worshipping men. Like Trillian says, “It won’t work on me; I’m already a woman.” But the courage, lyricism, and unadorned truth of Stabile’s poems? Those qualities benefit us all.  

Julia Tagliere’s work has appeared in The Writer, Potomac Review, Gargoyle Magazine, Washington Independent Review of Books, and elsewhere. Winner of the 2015 William Faulkner Literary Competition for Best Short Story and the 2017 Writers Center Undiscovered Voices Fellowship, Julia completed her M.A. in Writing at Johns Hopkins University and serves as an editor with The Baltimore Review.