Barrelhouse Reviews: Referential Body, by Rosie Accola

Review by Marianna Nash

Ghost City Press / March, 2019 / 76 pp

The references that make up Rosie Accola’s Referential Body are both wildly wide-ranging and intimately familiar, like a conversation that keeps you at the party too long. Accola’s poetry weaves a home for the weary out of the glittering scraps of our lives (or at least, the last two decades of them), a cozy bird’s nest for sensitive types, offering respite from the world’s boorish brutalities. Each poem is an ode to queer family and the miracle of discovering how much you love your friends. Its celebration of how friendship helps us survive is uncannily well-suited to this moment.

“I wanna be my own Wonderwall / a take-out container for small divinities,” Accola writes at the end of the first poem, “Take Pride in Everything You Do.” The two lines are a kind of nutrition label for the rest of the book. Never let anyone tell you that your subject is too trivial — or too commercial — to honor in a poem. You can grow up nestled in plastic and still find something beautiful in it. Accola’s work seems to argue that we should try.

“The impulse of a poem / is to marvel,” she writes in “Warm Scenes,” from the point of view of a people-watching bookstore cashier. She rings up books on wedding planning for two women, congratulating them in a “crush tone.” They share a moment of history-obliterating joy before the broken world fades back into frame. The poem reads like a held breath — like someone fighting for a moment of uncomplicated happiness to last forever, knowing it can’t.

Many of the tender human moments enshrined in this collection are about recovering from adolescence. Reading them can feel like losing yourself in a shoegaze album, or like watching a teen movie set at a 7-Eleven. Belonging is a major theme across all of the poems, and the “references” Accola uses to build this world (or home, or party, whichever holds more comfort for you) are really just points of connection. The weird detritus of American youth shines like rhinestones throughout. Early-aughts kitsch, punk shows, Harry Styles, reality TV, Forever 21, the poetry of Jewel, tattoo chokers, Pete Wentz, heather red scrunchies, even Regina Spektor’s sneeze-like phrasing — they all greet us like old friends. There is a poem called “If Snooki believes in herself, why can’t I?,” and another called “Claire’s is Closing 92 Stores as it Files for Bankruptcy.” There is no irony here, just wonder. “For me, Drake is the one connection between / the real and the ontological,” Accola writes in “A loving portion of space,” and she is probably right.

With its encyclopedic sprawl, Referential Body reads like the Old Internet: meme-free, a glorious ungapatchka of fan culture, bits and pieces scattered over snapshots of beloved friends and meaningful asides and feelings, so many feelings. While this style might leave some readers cold (those over 40 or under 25, for example), it feels intentional and crafted, and works exceedingly well for the Angelfire generation.

For all the moments in this collection that glow like faerie lights, shadows hang not far behind. The poem “My mom never let me go to Warped Tour” is really about childhood loneliness. The poem starts out with admonishments about sleeping in eye makeup and teenage dreams plagued by “leering men cachéd in alleys.” As an adult, Accola looks back on what she wanted most as a teenager and finds that it was exactly what she found as an adult: a community. “When I was 14, I wrote in my diary that I wanted / ‘friends to do punk things with’ / tonight, I threw a party for everyone I love,” she writes, like a song. She bakes cupcakes and holds a PBR fundraiser for Planned Parenthood. The faceless men and screaming emo boys of her youth fade out, and her new friends, each specifically and lovingly named, burst onto the scene in all their Petra Collins vibrancy:

Precious brought her dog and Rachel brought one of the many jars of
kinetic sand
that she recently impulse bought.
Someone did a lo-fi cover of ‘Allstar’ by Smashmouth.
A small part of me wished you could see me now,
in my velvet bodysuit with my lion hair and a real smile.
If this is existing, I’ll take it.

Accola knows just when to go in for the close-up. You can practically hear the power chords swell. This is the victory, the narrator’s ascent, the iconic last line of her bildungsroman-capping internal monologue right before the credits roll. There are many other moments in the collection that capture the quiet revelations of young adulthood, but this one feels the most triumphant.

The cinematic quality of these poems is crucial to the work of creating new images of love. That they are funny, accessible, and sparkling with pop culture arcana only makes their political message more potent. These poems make the profound argument that love can be so copious as to be ordinary. They create a new world, banishing old tropes (“The conditional image of awestruck hands struggling to unclasp an old bra”) in favor of gentle scenes that feel novel and fresh, and which convey real affection. The poem “Greater Than” gives one of the writer’s friends the same lingering close-up treatment:

Picture queerness as potential:
A sloppy forehead kiss from a best friend, a futon to curl up on, a pillowcase covered in little stars, a tattered wristband glued in the back of my notebook, the soundtrack to the live action Josie and the Pussycats movie, Scout smiling right before they dive into the pit, arms up, beaming.

In keeping with the tension between vulnerability and intimacy, the mosh pit dive is a kind of trust fall. “Spit, sebum, it’s all the same — mucosal tissues, / to be soft is to be prone to injury,” Accola writes in “HOW DO WE VALIDATE LOVE?” But it’s softness that makes this book so luminous, these moments so enchanted with their own cozy magic. Vulnerability and intimacy are intertwined, and although the body is the site of anxiety, it is also the site of connection. “I think I find comfort in the ritual of you / washing bleach out of my hair, / my forehead gently scraping the faucet / feels like home,” Accola writes in “BRAINSPACE.” This is what domestic bliss looks like. A hair tie with hair knotted in it becomes a poem which, later, becomes a friendship bracelet, an offering of the self.

Real intimacy is impossible without safety, so Referential Body is necessarily concerned with both. Accola understands how a lack of safety in the world can cause us to draw inward, missing those opportunities for connection when they appear. “When was the first time that safety crawled out / your bedroom window without leaving a note?” she writes in “Down Deep.” “In the absence of language, / I lock my door and dream / I just want all the people I love / to feel safe at parties.”

The richness of these poems is in their insistence that love and safety are possible in a dangerous world, that home is where your friends are, and that velvet bodysuits and tattered wristbands hold more power than you know. This is a resolutely reassuring work of art, a scrapbook full of Polaroids, a sweet escape to normalcy. And if you see yourself in these scenes, then the party is for you.

Marianna Nash is a writer from Queens. Her writing has appeared in the Nashville Review, Cosmonauts Avenue, Bridge Eight, McSweeney's Internet Tendency, and other places in print and online. She is working on a collection of short stories.