Barrelhouse Reviews: Horror Vacui, by Shy Watson

Review by Jon Lemay

House of Vlad / January 2021 / 160 pages

The title of Shy Watson’s second full-length poetry collection invites us to consider the different ways that the concept of horror vacui (a term defined as “the dislike of leaving empty spaces”) frames the content of the poems contained within. In Horror Vacui, Watson renders the malaise of modern existence in poems that are at times uncomfortably agonizing, irresistibly charming, or impossibly hilarious—sometimes all within the same stanza. The poems speak to a desire to fill the space with whatever is at hand, as if no detail, interaction, anecdote, or rumination is too small or stray to merit Watson’s attention. In other words, if there is space on the page to render that which takes up space in the speaker’s mind, it should be used. And in spite of how much territory Watson manages to explore in the collection’s 160 pages—which span three sections that mix verse and prose—the fact that Horror Vacui reads with such ease and cohesion is a testament to Watson’s ability to maintain a singular style and aesthetic even while experimenting with various modes and forms.

Those familiar with Watson’s previous work know to expect inventive framing. Her full-length debut Cheap Yellow titles each section after a real or invented shade of yellow (from “Goldenrod” and “Chiffon” to “Miller High Life” and “Bleached Dead Hair”). But whereas the poems in Cheap Yellow feel situated within a particular physical and temporal space, as they capture the confessions and realizations accumulated over the course of a year or two in the stage known as “late adolescence,” Horror Vacui resists being defined by one dominant trait or focal point, even as it leaves the reader feeling situated in its aesthetic landscape and thematic considerations.

It’s fitting that Horror Vacui features not one but two sequel poems to Cheap Yellow’s “the MET poem,” as this latest collection does seem to pick up where Watson last left off. A series of associative observations from a visit to the Metropolitan Museum of Art, “the MET poem” primarily features distant reflections on what’s in front of the speaker, such as the following:

planned obsolescence
in the 16th century
was unromantic
but the clouds
held cleaner water then

At the very end of the poem, Watson pivots to a more emotionally direct tone as she catalogs a sense of growth and self-actualization before hinting toward insecurity and dissatisfaction:

we have grown in the ways
that we were supposed to
this much is certain
why is this the way
i walk 

Just a few pages into Horror Vacui, in “MET poem 2,” Watson writes:

rejected at the MET again
thinking about how if i
threw my fist into a Picasso painting
something exciting would happen
there would be some kind
of climax
i don’t know,
realities are hard for me
i am a sad man
looking at sad paintings
and of course it’s raining today  

When walking through the Met in Cheap Yellow, Watson’s observations feel concrete and detached, as if the speaker’s emotional state is merely bringing her to a heightened sense of awareness of the world around her. Yet in Horror Vacui, she revisits the location able to articulate her emotional circumstances, to consider radical and reckless action, to acknowledge difficult truths about herself, and to gesture toward the world outside her immediate surroundings. To close-read these recent misadventures in the Met is to understand Watson’s preoccupations in Horror Vacui—to appreciate how she renders emotional states more richly than ever before. In spite of lamenting “how can i move anywhere / and expect not to feel sad / when what i want is / to be a famous painter,” it’s as if Watson has managed to tap into (and at times invent) new shades of color that we didn’t know we needed.

Throughout Horror Vacui, even in poems that don’t explicitly place the speaker’s experience in our current moment, Watson has managed to capture the experience of living “in these unprecedented times.” She provides vivid language to explore life in a world marked by a constant, underlying mixture of dread and boredom. Reading this book multiple times, I was struck by how Watson managed to create poems with speakers who feel detached and involved in equal measures, thereby capturing the feeling that everything and nothing are happening all the time.

In “the brooklyn museum,” a standout poem, “…I suffer / the sense / of missing someone but am unable / to place just whom,” which exemplifies the type of heightened yet formless suffering that permeates much of the collection. Watson appears to notice and catalog everything, and in reading Horror Vacui, I felt the sorrowful frustration that comes with this tendency—for it tends to bring with it the feeling that you’ve actually noticed and cataloged nothing at all, in spite of working through a period in which everything has felt like too much. I’ve tasked myself with describing the effect of lines that speak to me intuitively, like the following (from “I would refill your water”):

the sky is sinking
applying sunscreen
backwards then
upside down
i misunderstand
my own misery
as if it were yours  

Lines like these capture Watson’s ability to ricochet between the lyrical, the associative, the dialectical, the proclamatory, and the confessional. What’s more, for all the ability Watson displays to develop and sustain this modal cocktail over longer poems, some of the strongest moments in Horror Vacui come in short pieces that we might have found in Basho’s Notes app. In “extreme makeover: home edition” (excerpted here in its entirety), Watson confides:

i’ve been lied to before
about renovations,
about walls
& you know,
i’m forgiving
like it doesn’t
take too much from me 

For all the abandon with which Watson appears to write (the lack of punctuation and capitalization, the freewheeling and maximalist nature of the poems themselves), she maintains an impressive sense of control in her poems—in this case, in the realm of ambiguity and double meaning in “renovations” and “walls,” as well as the forgiveness required of her.

In spite of how the collection’s title gestures toward a discomfort with empty space, the moments in which Watson chooses to leave things unsaid or ambiguous are highly rewarding. We are often left wondering whether we are to read into her poems the most mundane frustrations or the highest existential drama. The dilemma of whether or not to take action in the face of exhaustion permeates the collection, and part of what makes these poems work so well, even outside the context of our current moment, is that Watson does such a fine job of cataloguing how exhausting contemporary life could feel even before March of 2020. In “Doomsday Clock,” our existence is characterized as “a tamale / turned fragile / in the cruel passage / of time,” while in “Dreamy” Watson’s daily forecast consists entirely of “good morning / it is cold out / can’t wait for someone / to see / the good in me.”

All this speaks to the strength of the first 100 or so pages of verse that make up the collection’s first section (“Horror Vacui”), but a review of the book would be incomplete without noting the two sections of prose that follow, “Waking Dreams” and “Quarantine Diaries.” Whether fantastical or mundane, cohesive or associative, the events of the short prose pieces in “Waking Dreams” chart the interactions between the speaker and an unspecified “you,” and lend themselves to being read closely.

In “Waking Dream #3,” a kitchen catches on fire while the speaker is in the bathroom, and the addressee points to a window for escape. In “Waking Dream #8,” the two characters show up to high school late, only to find that a chemistry lab has exploded and covered the hallways in red rosary beads. Yet in a piece like “Waking Dream #12,” the semi-plausibility of the scene (the speaker holds a boombox outside the addressee’s apartment as three sunflowers dangle from her mouth) subverts our expectations of “dream logic” and offers a richer dimension to the dreamscape Watson sketches. The overarching plot of these disjointed pieces remains elusive and evades exact location (as does the precise nature of the relationship at the heart of the section)—but what we lack in certainty we gain through an intuitive and immersive understanding, as well as a compelling sense of tenderness betrayed by every unpredictable thing that passes between these two characters.

Thus, perhaps it’s fitting that the collection ends with the most accessible articulation of Watson’s thematic and aesthetic considerations: “Quarantine Diaries,” which do indeed function as a series of journal entries that cover the psychologically squalid realities of 21st century life in a pandemic. The entries span April and May of 2020, and one can’t help but assume the speaker of these pieces is, as many of us were, terrified at the unknowns and simultaneously naive about just how long this all could last. The entries range widely in content and tone, from thoughts and introspections that feel highly specific to the pandemic (“Today is the second time I’ve missed Elaine’s workshop during quarantine, straight-up because I mistook a Tuesday for a Monday”) to timeless realizations and manifestations that are the byproduct of spending so much time in one’s head (“I had a nightmare that an acquaintance of mine went down on me, said my pussy tasted ‘acrid,’ and then we rode a waterslide together”). Yet there’s a lightness and charm to these thoughts—not to mention consistent flashes of humor, as in “05/12/2020”: “Sometimes it’s difficult to pay attention to subtitles. This is the second indication I have encountered during quarantine that I am dumb.”

Indeed, as stylistically particular as Watson is able to be, the majority of what she captures in these pieces is nothing if not relatable, rendered as they are with disarming precision. That this final organizational mechanism reads as the most natural and logical might push us to read all of Horror Vacui as a slow progression toward understanding and stability in the face of quiet calamity. We start with scattered and frenetic verses, transition to dreamy and contained fables, and culminate in a methodical record of real-life events. On one hand, we’re left with the sense that Watson has finally invented a way to organize the things with which she’s filled this space—all this physical and psychological matter she’s used to keep the emptiness at bay for a time. But there’s just as much to suggest that the three modes explored here are simply a few of the many tools Watson has at her disposal—and that each one offers something we never knew we needed, because we feel so satisfied with the last. The inventiveness, singularity, and timeliness of Watson’s vision suggests there’s plenty we haven’t seen.

Jon Lemay is an MFA candidate at Syracuse University, where he is an Editor-in-Chief for Salt Hill Journal. His work has previously appeared or is forthcoming in Juked, Prelude, Hobart After Dark (HAD), DIALOGIST, and elsewhere. Jon also co-hosts Pat & Jon on Their Best Behavior, a podcast about film and music. You can find him on Twitter @yawnlemay and on Instagram @jonlemay, and you can find his other work at linktr.ee/jonlemay.