I was not always sure, as I read Connie Voisine’s And God Created Women, published in 2018 by Bull City Press, exactly what Voisine was doing, or exactly what she meant. But I was damn well sure of her anger. I could feel it simmering under every word.
And God Created Women is, perhaps unsurprisingly, a woman’s story. Or maybe it’s women’s stories, plural, the stories of trying desperately to hang on, to make it, maybe even to find some modicum of peace, in a world where women can do nothing quite right, where we bounce between virgins, whores, and crones; where we are seldom seen for ourselves but for our bodies, and for what our bodies might be able to do. (I’ve long known, as a white woman, that the only value I have in many societal eyes is as a potential production point for white children—never mind that my children will likely remain cats, now and forever.)
In Pank Magazine, Gabino Igelsias, speaking of And God Created Women, comments that it “is like witnessing a religious ceremony from an unknown culture conducted in a language you don’t understand and then trying to explain exactly what was happening.” It’s a pretty good descriptor for the ways in which Voisine manipulates language and image and metaphor and simile to work for her, thrusting up at us a mirror of our patriarchal society. That this was published in 2018 is, I think, not a coincidence.
There are some moments of hilarity here, as when Voisine writes, in “Shameful,” that she inherited her fair skin from ancestors “who only recently emerged / from the forests we were banished to.” They ended up in the forests because they were poor (and also there was a murder somewhere!), but then there was also the “other bad luck, / real and imagined.” As the pale descendant of people who fled their foggy home because they blew too much stuff up, I laughed pretty hard at this—even if it was one of the few moments of levity in “Shameful.”
The almost-titular poem “And God Created Woman,” meanwhile, is an incredible vision of the personal and the political melded into poetry. Voisine notes that our God-given “#1 3-D / printer, her womb” doesn’t always work as intended:
Some / women did not get the hair, / or the chest or a womb programmed / to function properly, which became / a management issue.
Later in the same poem, she mentions Cain and Abel: “that fratricide, another / management fail.” Management sucks, my guys. Not only are Cain and Abel borne in much pain, but management just keeps fucking everything up here. And it’s not like Management ever asked Woman what she actually wanted in this whole deal. She was just given that 3-D printer womb, and voilà.
And God Created Women is an intense chapbook, a reminder that the personal is always political, and so is that magnificent, terrifying owl over yonder, and also the moon, who is so goddamn tired of your shit. It almost reminds me of my late grandmother, though she probably would have hated it: it, like Grandma, is a spiky little thing, all sharp angles, and filled with hidden depths.
Essentially a Nerd 