Book Review: Wasp Queen by Claudia Cortese

Reviewed by Paul David Adkins

Wasp Queen
Poems by Claudia Cortese
Black Lawrence Press, December 2016
$15.95; 90 pp.
ISBN-13: 978-1625579607

It’s easy to allow Claudia Cortese’s Wasp Queen to transport readers to the dark corners of physically-abused, possibly-schizophrenic heroine Lucy. The language is ferocious, full of vile names, crude sexual references, and shocking images. “I kill cheerleaders, bitch,” Lucy smoothly terrorizes a rival during an anonymous phone call. She commands a boy to give her hickeys, and she fantasizes about her mother’s death in a plane crash. But despite this strange behavior, Lucy is a hero for our age: bold, flawed, furious, and able to hold her own in a world that hates her.

Wasp Queen centers on body image. While the neighborhood girls call our heroine, “Lucy Fat Face, Ugly, Stupid, Miss Lardy Lard,” Lucy replies that her tormentors are “. . . the skin // of drums I bang // to break.” Lucy’s selfies are snapped “amid Oreos, chocolate ice cream, / last slice of pizza in the box.” Eyes play a significant role as well: “If she doesn’t look your way, your fat-cunt-self ghosting the edges of her crew, it’s okay. To be unseen is to be safe.” At least a third of the collection’s poems address the danger of being seen, or the sanctuary of invisibility.

And, at some point, who doesn’t want to disappear? Who has never felt the pain of rejection, the humiliation of bullies? Who has never been, just once, consumed simultaneously with self-loathing and rage? In this regard, Lucy is our Every Girl, full of fury and a lack of inhibition that we all envy. She uses phrases like “rust-fucked” with the deftness of a comedian. She glues plastic horns on her head, giving her mother a fit. She confesses she loves “any bridge over open water, any wreath marking the highway median.” Cortese’s speaker has perfect comedic timing; the profanity makes it that much richer an experience. One can almost hear Lucy sing, “Nobody likes me. Everybody hates me. Why don’t I go eat wormssssssss?” And then she does, and caterpillars, too. Even spiders crawl from her mouth.

But the reader cannot ignore Lucy’s horrendous abuse, a series of events which forge in her a true sense of I-Don’t-Give-A-Fuck. Her traumas are virtually unspeakable. Her world? “A strip of negatives – // the photo’s seared palm.” But it is Lucy’s indifference, or reaction, to her situation that makes her so vital to contemporary American literature. Not since Karyna McGlynn’s I Have to Go Back to 1994 and Kill a Girl has poetry and humor been so fully-mixed. McGlynn’s blend of fantasy and reality creates an atmosphere of clarity found only in the most ambiguous moments. It is within such space that Wasp Queen thrives and hums her horribly hilarious ditties to us.

Voltaire once said, “God is a comedian playing to an audience too afraid to laugh.” And while Cortese’s subject matter is frightful, it presents us with the ultimate muse: revelatory, sardonic, cutting, incisive, and uproarious. We are all indebted to Claudia Cortese, and Lucy, who let this muse lead them—and us—down such a dark, comical path.

Paul David Adkins served in the US Army for twenty-one years, three months, and eighteen days. Lit Riot Press published his three poetry collections: La Dona, La Llorona; Flying Over Baghdad with Sylvia Plath; and Operational Terms and Graphics.