The Bodies We Inhabit: A Review of Life of the Party by Olivia Gatwood
Over the years I’ve attempted to read poetry many, many times but each time I found I could never commit. I’d read a few out of a collection, set the book down, and never return to it. I always had the best intentions of finishing a collection, but because of what I chose to pick up, to try and connect to, I couldn’t. The experiences described weren’t any I could relate to. I couldn’t see myself in them. Last year I picked up a copy of Life of the Party, excited to start reading. It sat unread on my bookcase for months until the past week. Upon opening it up and reading the first poem, I was hooked. Every poem that I read, I found myself overwhelmed with a wave of anger, despondency, and understanding. This collection is one that I believe so many young girls and women would benefit from reading. It articulates so well the many trials that women face every day and the perception of them from society.
As a woman, I felt like someone had managed to put to words what women experience throughout their lives - all because of the bodies we inhabit. Gatwood’s poetry puts front and center the violence, trauma, and abuse that women and their bodies are put through by boys and men, as well as how our culture romanticizes violence against women. We are constantly bombarded with images - whether on television shows or movies that show crimes committed against women, bringing to life those fears we all carry every day. The more we view these images, the more normalized it becomes and the more numb to it we become. We begin to show not even a flinch when confronted with yet again another image of domestic abuse, sexual abuse, and assault.
“He was a murderer of tiny things & we were tiny things, I remember, even then, understanding the smallness of myself, of all of us & the way we had to dodge and skip through the world like rodents under the boots of men.”
We are reminded throughout our lives of how small and at times insignificant women are viewed as. Gatwood’s poems remind us of how easily it has been in the past for men to establish and flaunt their power - primarily physical power. In her poem, First Grade, 1998 Gatwood writes of what it feels like to comprehend what being a woman in the world is like, comparing a family of baby mice smashed by a rock to the smallness of women and how we have to go about our lives always looking behind us. It’s a sobering reminder that no matter where we go, there’s always a chance that there is a man waiting with a rock. And it makes me think, why don’t men have to go through life with this burden, this weight?
Gatwood’s poems explore not only the violence perpetuates against women—and how race plays a part in how the media covers that violence, but also the many different things that are asked of women everyday. In one of the poems that stood out the most to me—Murder of a Little Beauty, Gatwood comments on the violence and death of JonBenet Ramsey a child beauty queen whose lifeless body was discovered in her family’s basement while also making a statement on the lack of coverage that is afforded little black and brown girls when they go missing or their bodies found. Why are the lives of black and brown girls not worthy of being celebrated and mourned on the news or the cover of newspapers and magazines? As Gatwood says in her poem—“only the blondes get a cover story.” Why do we value some lives lost over others? This way of thinking as Gatwood illustrates in her poem, hinders the way and intensity with which we bring to justice the killer or kidnapper of a black or brown girl versus that of a white girl.
“Naturally attractive, exceptionally bright
how many ways can we say the word white?”
Gatwood’s poems remind us of the decisions that women have to make everyday or that are made for them in a world where girls and women are abused, followed and pursued against their will, murdered, beaten, and used up by men however they please and thrown out. And yet women maintain a softness, an innate want and need to care. And whether that is as a result of society’s need to keep women meek and pliable no matter what is done to them. In When I Say We Are All Teen Girls Gatwood writes about how so many things around us are teen girls, from the birds with their cliques to the sea with its many moods. The comparison to the sea was especially powerful and flawlessly put into words the treatment of women. The way in which we treat the sea with complete disregard to the mounds of trash we pour into it and how we constantly take from it much like a lot of women. But women still manage to remain kind and nurturing. They do not become hard and cold.
“And the sea, of course, the sea,
its moody push and pull, the way we drill
into it, fill it with trash, take and take
and take from it and still it holds us
each time we walk into it.”
There are so many important topics discussed in Life of the Party, nothing is left unspoken. Heavy topics like violence and sexual assault are confronted, but so is the constant badgering from men telling women to smile and women feeling like they need to lose if you’ve won too much so as to not insult a man’s ego. Gatwood’s poems feel like a companion, an older mentor aiding and comforting you while also reminding you that you’re not alone. Gatwood writes of the experience of what it means and feels like to inhabit a body as a woman in this world with such honesty. In this collection, I not only found words that put forth what women deal with in their youth as well their adulthood and how sometimes they are forced to grow up too quickly, but it helped usher in a love for poetry that wasn’t there before.
