Book Review: Our Lady of the Flowers, Echoic by Chris Tysh

Our Lady of the Flowers, Echoic
Poems by Chris Tysh
Les Figues Press, October 2013
ISBN-13: 978-1934254479
$15; 144pp.
Reviewed by Alyse Bensel

One need not be familiar with Jean Genet’s 1943 debut novel Our Lady of the Flowers to be swept up in Chris Tysh’s poetic refamiliarization of Genet’s sensuous, lyrical, and complicated prose. Genet’s novel’s languid and sprawling language becomes transformed into more than simply a novel-in-verse. Rather, through Tysh’s reworking, the narrator’s already strong and poignant voice serves as a mooring post for the sometimes dispersed narrative—filled with digressions and expansions that weave throughout a few key events—which culminates in pitch and intensity as the poem progresses.

Readers unfamiliar with Our Lady of the Flowers can still trace the novel’s fluid plot in this book-length poem. Serving a prison sentence, the narrator retrospectively relays the story of a drag queen named Divine, her lovers, and the young and beautiful murderer Our Lady. Eventually put on trial and executed, Our Lady sparks a series of betrayals, sexual encounters, and, from the narrator, a sense of lust and longing. As the plot creates a fair amount of drama and intrigue, the novel’s taboo subject matter—gay men living their lives in Montmartre—generates the enrapturing speaker’s voice, which drives the work as both a novel and as a poem.

In this adaptation, Tysh is able to draw the reader’s attention to Genet’s language even further, crafting images often embedded into the original novel’s dense descriptive prose. Lineation serves to break down and heighten the language without detracting from the reader’s ability to comprehend the vibrant characterization of the narrator and the men in his life. Early in the poem, the verse enhances the explicitly imagery used to describe Divine:

She’s cruising tonight and no dice
If it were up to me I’d give her marble
Hips, polished cheeks and pagan knees
From which to climb toward Pigalle

Through lineation, the plot develops initially through even septets to serve as a foundation for the poem. However, as Our Lady’s trial approaches, the lines become more harried and uneven. During the trial, in observing the proceedings from the gallery, the narrator observes how

Death here is but a black
Wing, a pirate’s flag,
Green crêpe de Chine tie
Only visible evidence
Lies a handprint
On the judge’s desk

In drawing the reader’s attention to Genet’s vibrant language, Tysh has created a new lens in which to view Genet’s work—as an epic-like poem still rooted in the explicit quotidian, filled to the brim with sexual exploits and struggles for gay men in the 20^th century. Additionally, Our Lady of the Flowers, Echoic reveals the porous relationship between fiction and poetry, and how altering form and genre can heighten language through dynamic exchange.

Alyse Bensel is the Book Review Editor at The Los Angeles Review and Co-Editor of Beecher’s. She is the author of the poetry chapbooks Shift (Plan B Press, 2012) and Not of Their Own Making (dancing girl press, forthcoming 2014). Her poetry has recently appeared in Cold Mountain Review, Blue Earth Review, Ruminate, and The Fourth River, among others. She is a PhD candidate in creative writing at the University of Kansas