Inclined To Riot by KMA Sullivan
Artists and poets have grappled with the relationship between life and art for millennia. KMA Sullivan, in her collection Inclined to Riot (Sibling Rivalry Press, 2019), brings timely and current considerations to this conversation. These poems smolder with passion, longing and fury as the poet considers art and compares it to her experience as a woman,
in a land where peace equals a naked woman
on her knees
milking a goat
where a river of pink babies
is called the source of life
I am not a woman at tea
the same as still life with pear
We don’t need to be told that the art the poet is viewing is by a male artist. We feel it. These poems center defiance to the male gaze and idealization of women across time and in different art forms.
The poems in Inclined to Riot are written without punctuation, no capitalization except “I”, and are mostly in short lines and in first person. The capitalized “I” rightly draws attention to itself, a statement of assertion. Sullivan uses the steady rhythm of short lines to effectively amplify emotional intensity, as in the poem “here”:
a glass box of broken limbs
face worn away
I can still ride this horse
glow at night
like red light on egyptian blue
I was born to be luminescent
a stampede
here
forced down on one knee
held by my hair
that languid boy
cast a shadow even in relief
even in fragments
mouth open, nostrils flared
I am nomad, moon goddess, carbon smear
if wings sprouted from my face
I would not fly back
Sullivan writes in her post notes that her visits to nearly sixty galleries and art spaces in Europe and the US influenced the poetry in this collection in which they offered a “conversation” with her inner life. Sullivan grew up with an art historian mother and this deep exposure to classical art is reflected in her poems. These are more than ekphrastic poems; Sullivan draws on our collective knowledge of famous art pieces and expands on it as she challenges long-held feminine ideals of virtue, beauty, domesticity. She writes:
the cubists got it right
we are all this fractured form
but we make it down the stairs
with our pieces tumbling
choose among milkmaid and saint
and slotted spoon
I find myself teaching these poems in workshops, especially to show how Sullivan masterfully combines lyrical and narrative poetry with aspects of language poetry, how she layers image upon image to build intensity. As in the poem “armature”, Sullivan writes:
rodin offers joan of arc
her head of sorrow
in ecstasy
among twigs on fire
I refuse to sit for my portrait
become a placeholder
a fragment of a door
Each line packs a powerful punch. Teachers of poetry would benefit from using Inclined to Riot in their armamentarium as a book that uses many craft devises to amplify emotion and power. This book is both timely and timeless with its contemporary and feminist examination of art that has endured. I am glad for this collection that not only questions our relationship to self and art but are poems of feminist empowerment using a kaleidoscope of images that linger in the mind’s eye.
KMA Sullivan is the author of two poetry collections: Inclined to Riot (Sibling Rivalry Press, 2019) and Necessary Fire, winner of the St. Lawrence Book Award (Black Lawrence Press, 2015). Her poems and essays have appeared in Boston Review, The Rumpus, Southern Humanities Review, Forklift, Ohio, The Nervous Breakdown, The Offing, diode, and elsewhere. She has been awarded residencies in creative nonfiction and poetry at Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, Vermont Studio Center, and Summer Literary Seminars and she is the coeditor-in-chief of Vinyl and the publisher at YesYes Books. KMA received an MFA in poetry from Virginia Tech; in earlier years she earned degrees in philosophy from Trinity College and Boston College and raised five children with her partner of 35 years. She is the cofounder of YesYes Healing Garden, an acupuncture and Chinese Herbal Medicine in Portland, OR. KMA believes in the power of art and literature to improve the lives they engage.
Michele Bombardier’s debut collection, What We Do was a Washington Book Award finalist. Michele is a Hedgebrook and Mineral School fellow and the founder of Fishplate Poetry, which offers poetry workshops while raising money for medical care for refugees in the Middle East and elsewhere. She earned her MFA in poetry and works as a neurological and developmental specialist SLP. Her work has been published in Alaska Quarterly Review, Atlanta Review, Bellevue Literary Review and many others.
Risa Denenberg is the curator at The Poetry Cafe.
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