Rachel Rabbit White’s Porn Carnival (Wonder, 2019)
Review by Katie Ebbitt
“I am not writing about money/ I am writing about women and death” says Rachel Rabbit White in her debut book of poetry, Porn Carnival. Despite the book’s obvious glitz, this is a melancholic text — one that is a manuscript devoted to survival; a perspective missive to “fellow sufferers,” to those “sentenced to life,” to the workers trying to bend rules that have very little give. Under a swirl of imagery, simultaneously hedonistic and urgent, Porn Carnival fundamentally questions being and body under capitalism, contemplating the limits of autonomy for workers within it, and the grief and rage that limitation inspires.
White’s writing is deeply political, in part because of her centering her labor as a sex worker. In framing her identity around her labor, she seeks to analyze the limits of her control, writing “everyone knows/ we live for independence/ and our independence/ is the gift that keeps on taking.” What independence White contains is evidenced in her fecund, thoughtful imagination breathing life into the poem, making the poem work. White’s poems emerge into sentience, becoming “a Playboy bunny,” “a decorative Kleenex holder,” “a dust ruffle.” The poem invites the reader to an orgy. The poem encourages empathy towards inanimate objects. What White suggests through her personification of the poem is the inexistence of singularity, letting the poem have a body through the writer’s body, allowing that poem-body to relax by encouraging the poem to “do what it wants.” In Porn Carnival the poem works towards its own liberation through excess, encouraged by White’s relentless request to “to make a scene.”
Porn Carnival reads with a contradictory voice, one that diverges between weighty and cheeky and dives into the exploration of labor and the choices individuals are able to exercise as workers — specifically the limitations of agency. White explores the way a worker can exercise control over their labor, and the inherent contradictions of attempting to maintain control in a system that feels beyond wielding, that evades and exploits. With a dazzling velvet thirsting plumage, White focuses on the conditions in which she labors, and how those conditions impact her as an individual worker, and continue outside of the space of labor. Work subsumes the self, White concludes as she details her reproduction at home amidst “piles of receipts, laundry, vitamin jewels,” a “hairbrush fallen into cat litter.” Addressing even the cognition laborers exercise when they work, White writes, “I outsource my thinking to the moment, reacting only to the moment and its money.”
The interiority present in White’s work reads throughout Porn Carnival, but is felt most acutely in the poem “Doves” where the question “to commit love/ isn’t it always an act of violence.” This poem reads as memorial, warning “there’s no coming back from motherhood or porn” and questions, why we are “warned only about the later.” Reflection and remembrance appear repeatedly throughout the book, as does the lyrical, subtle inclusion of rhyme: “hand on receiver/ same slick/ twist through plastic/ fingertips” or “lie cheek/ to carpeted vent of/ childhood scents.” In her exploration of sexuality, she steps back into childhood detailing “the voice of an adult male” who imposed as her internal narrator.
White offers the reader release from the expectation of labor in Porn Carnival through “a scream,” “a bed of roses,” “a cabaret,” “a dazzling affair,” “dripping blood.” She empowers adoption of the mantra, “I would rather die than work.” And while White is too anarchistic to accept this role, she would be the perfect Ring-Master for a world outside the impossibility of capital, the “horrifying woman” that directs the circus towards a devilish salvation.