Barrelhouse Reviews: Vulgar Mechanics, by K. B. Thors

Review by Sarah Alcaide-Escue

Coach House Books / September, 2019 / 112 pp

“The body suffers no false progress. / Eventually you cross yourself / and your bite will never be the same.” Vulgar Mechanics by K. B. Thors is an unflinching debut that examines how the body moves and survives in a world of violence and loss. In the wake of the #MeToo movement, Thors examines the relationship between the personal and political, while interweaving memories of family illness and trauma. She translates her inner world into searing language and biting imagery as she explores grief, rage, desire, recovery, and embodiment. Part feminist manifesto, part poetic memoir, Vulgar Mechanics is written from, of, and for the body as a site of resistance and resilience. 

Sharing stories is a form of survival. Thors’s story is a celebration of the body as chameleon, and how it constantly shifts and bends barriers of passion and power. Her beautifully wrought poems root themselves in the sustenance only personal freedom can provide: “Sensing ourselves / prey in that predicament, / we sought shelter / in an ox carcass, / scraping its walls / for strings of protein.” Thors bares her heart, and her teeth, as she navigates her fears and frustrations as a woman, sexual being, and trauma survivor. She demands justice and consent in a world where safety is rare: “The Supreme Court has no safe word.”

The body acts as a witness to the fragmentation and disembodiment that often accompanies trauma. Thors writes, “Where do I direct this dread when my body begs to differ?” The speaker aches with desire, and she doesn’t shy away from pleasure and play. In “Reverse Cowgirl” she says, “I can’t promise not to laugh but yes, sir, / I’ll jump your gun.” She achieves a stunning balance between humor and heartbreak, reminding us that laughter and joy are still possible in the midst of suffering. 

Yet her work reminds us that the Othered body is inherently political as she observes what it means to exist within a rape culture: “Rape culture is an imperative form. Ready to wear.” Thors addresses how rape culture shapes society and how we grapple with our personal histories, traumas, and desires. Her anger and heartbreak are unmistakable as she investigates how sexual abuse becomes mundane: “On the farm, girls talked / about molestation on the way to school, it was unnamed normal.”

Within a pervasive rape culture, survivors are often ignored or punished, and their voices are erased. The burden has always been placed on women to keep each other and ourselves safe while abusers aren’t held accountable for their crimes (i.e. Brock Turner and Brett Kavanaugh). In “What’s With the Girls?” Thors writes, “She’d warned us about him—he’d cornered her when she was a teenager years prior—I’d been on guard since thirteen.” This poem, in particular, reveals the complicated and troubling secrets that a family can carry—secrets that long go undetected and unconfessed. These secrets fester and eventually erupt on the mother’s deathbed. How often do secrets such as this die with the survivors? How often are they buried deeper and deeper until no one can find them again?

Thors writes the body as metamorphic and volcanic (the site of secrets threatening to erupt), yet somehow still human. In “Self-Portrait as Sulfur” she writes “Call me brimstone. / Sing my lungs and bathe / the letters / the lashes that spell / the brightest salt.” Brimstone, or elemental sulfur, is an essential macronutrient for all living organisms, but it’s also highly flammable and can be lethal. Likewise, humankind has the capacity to both destroy and sustain life. 

This necessary and timely work instills a sense of poetry’s vitality in a world where the Othered body is threatened, violated, and exploited. As she attempts to reclaim radical and unapologetic ownership over her body, the speaker acts in protest against patriarchal oppression: “If I shave the moustaches of famous dictators / into my pubic hair, do I cease to be a threat?” Donning steel-toed boots and nipple clamps, she marches through the sleeplessness of New York City and fracked prairies ready for revolution. The poem “Exorsister” calls out and casts out abusers, as well as speaks to “sisters,” or survivors:

The world is one 
big underlying condition: 

personality            disorder              post-pussy grab
symptomatic         aggravated         assault 

survivor                 guilt                   sounded out

Nobody can reject an organ on another girl’s behalf.

The white space here gives each word room to breathe so it can stand on its own. These words demand individual attention to be seen and heard, to be held in the mouth and mind of the reader. The poem expresses the consequences, or symptoms, survivors often endure—feelings of shame, guilt, doubt—and the importance of bodily autonomy and consent.

In “Comme Des Garçons” Thors says: “Walking home with headphones / in bare legs in the dark, how often I’ve done such stupid things. Day look at night, no keys spiked between my fingers, a vulnerable population walking fast…” Thors makes the point that women are preyed upon, and the possibility of violence and assault is ingrained in us. It’s almost as if it’s a part of our DNA. We grow up learning different methods of self-defense; we memorize the fastest and most well-lit routes to our homes and workplaces; we’re gifted rape whistles and pepper spray; and worst of all, we’re taught to keep quiet and apologize for taking up space. We’re always on the brink of running, always on the verge of becoming another statistic. 

Vulgar Mechanics is a poetry collection that breaks and rebuilds. Each page of this book is full of glitter, grit, and unsettling truths. Thors reminds us that the body is a site of self-determination; we can occupy the rupture we create without apology, and we can transpose our energy into radical action. Vulgar Mechanics is a battle cry written for “everyone not believed, with no one to tell, working to break these cycles.” Thors’s indelible authenticity reverberates throughout this text, offering love and hope as the ultimate weapons for change: “What can be said / for certain: the future will admit / the heart is that which digs / in the deserted village.”

Sarah Alcaide-Escue is a writer, artist, and editor from the swamplands of South Florida. She earned her MFA from Naropa University where she served as a Graduate Writing Fellow and was awarded the Leslie Scalapino Award and the Robert Creeley Scholarship. Recent Greywood Arts resident in Killeagh, Ireland, Sarah has been awarded fellowships from The Bucknell Seminar for Younger Poets, Writers in Paradise, and The Jack Kerouac School, among others. Sarah's work has appeared in Mud Season Review, Entropy Magazine, Bear Review, Diagram, and Atticus Review, among others. Sarah is a poetry editor at The Adirondack Review. Her chapbook Bruised Gospel is forthcoming from The Lune in 2020. You can visit her website at www.sarahescue.com.