In Lieu of Solutions by Violet Spurlock, Futurepoem, 2023

The opening lines of Violet Spurlock’s In Lieu of Solutions begin at the farthest point from the eponymous irresolution: a debate.

In a blissful parody of a logical proof, the syntax ignores the bullet points that disrupt the two speakers’ exchange. Eight bullet points, to be exact; a number that finds formal echoes in the book’s eight sections, and again in Beverly Dahlen’s epigraph: “I have an eighth of the solution.” And since we find ourselves opening a poetry book that begins with a debate, it is worth emphasizing that Spurlock competed in policy debate as a teenager. It is perhaps no coincidence that the number eight is also a staple of the competitive debate world, where the format is organized around eightfold arguments and eightfold speeches.

But, for now, the point is the conflicting perceptions of growing or shrinking titties, not numeric form. The first poem invites us to consider two people considering whether titties are, in fact, getting bigger or smaller. But this disagreement is not the point either. What is under examination is the tension between “sensory details” and the word “titties.” Can the relationship between these two things (bodies and words) be rescued from the status of “evidence?” How can we possibly know what is objectively true? As the poem proceeds, the argument is temporarily solved by a tale told by the speaker’s Other, in which “A man wins and loses the love of a fairy.” Spurlock tells us it doesn’t exactly matter what happens in the literal fairy tale, “Because the surface is so rich” and the teller of the tale tells it well enough “for anyone to fall in love.” Even if the form of the fairy tale doesn’t triumph in matters of truth, it does so in matters of love.

The crisis of Love and the crisis of Bodies haunt In Lieu of Solutions, always trying to wriggle out of the questions they are trapped in: what does it mean to win or to lose? to have or to have not? to get bigger or smaller? Falling in love with the fairy tale teller isn’t the solution to the gap between words and bodies, even if it brings the speaker so much pleasure she temporarily puts down her insistence on her receding titties. Later in the book the speaker interrupts herself while wondering how to demand and give love, to demand or give anything at all: “Oprah moment: / you can’t give what you don’t have.” We might rebut this with a “Lacan moment”: “Love,” as Lacan says in Seminar XII, means “giving what you don’t have to someone who doesn’t want it.” Sinking into the stakes of having or not having (Love or certain sized titties), I searched the book for a “Spurlock moment” and landed on this: “I came to this party to be introduced to a man so bisexual / he could cure me… He doesn’t want me. I’m cured.”

The brilliance of the statement “I am cured,” is in its failure, its theatrics, its petulance, its metaphysics of empathy: don’t recognize me. This “cure” rings with the cruelty and relief of a joke. Cured of what? The burden of gender, or the burden of being desired? The imperative to the burden of proving it, of turning over evidence to prove oneself, and one’s gender, as (as if it was possible) ontologically legitimate? If the Other’s desire involves inevitable misrecognition, is the best we can hope for gorgeous invisibility?

Winner of the 2023 Other Futures Award, Spurlock’s debut book of poems starts with a debate around the status of the trans body’s relation to description and ends with the trans body’s relation to metaphysical & material administration. To put it simply, the trans body poses a problem: logically, medically, linguistically, figuratively, formally. In terms of the latter, the book quickly gives way from argument into other poetic forms: the lyric, the concrete poem, the epistolary, the riddle, automatic writing. We may formulate the opening provocation as such: what responsibility do words and their utterers have to describing the body—titties, pussy, etc? “Are my titties an image?” asks the speaker. “Perhaps.” “My titties certainly have a spectral existence. / If I describe them to you, I am both extending / And negating the imagined space that they fill.” And later, when the speaker’s friend says, “Well, my pussy doesn’t quite get hard these days,” the speaker responds by saying: “— It is important that we extrapolate no fact / — About her body from this word.”

Description only mystifies. Spurlock so brilliantly says it and then invites us to imagine otherwise. What if the body owes the word nothing, and words owe the body everything? “I love my friend’s pussy because a word was made different in response to a need,” Spurlock writes. “I love my friend’s pussy because I cannot speak its name without getting free.” This book is just that: “words made different in response to a need.” Not as solutions, but as a means to freeing the body from the burden of evidence. To the speaker, her titties are and aren’t an argument. If gender is an argument, can poetry solve it?

Yes, but more importantly no. But even more importantly, Spurlock argues against the notion that poetry ought to offer a solution—political, social, emotional—to the gulf between bodies and language. As the bullet points of logic are massaged into lyrical address, the section “A Dream Phrase Vanished” offers a litany of political worry interwoven with hope. The lines are literally braided, the syntax only beginning to make sense through scanning between multiple lines. Marked with both anxiety and calmness, the poem gently tumbles down the page until it pools at the very end. This is one way of thinking about a solution: one thing dissolves into another. The poem responds to the “emotional science project” of Bernadette Mayer’s Studying Hunger. But Spurlock’s version of an emotional science project is marked with a repetitive concern: “what if I can’t think my way out of my body with love”.

One of my favorite lines in the book returns us to the opening fairy tale, where we must confront the fact that even fairy tales can’t escape the claws of exchange: “Remember how the Tooth Fairy taught us we could sell our bodies.” As if we could get rich off loss, win by losing, trade bone for metal, bodies for resources, evidence for recognition. This line jumped out at me while Spurlock was reading the poem “Voice Polish” at her book launch at the Poetic Research Bureau in Los Angeles. On the page, the words of the poem appear in a cacophonous traffic jam: some words are underlined, others appear bold. The page is a crowded, loud, unrestrained deluge of contradicting thoughts, as if to exhaust every possible angle of the problem. No corner of trans discourse is left unturned, including one of its most fundamental questions: how can transness be rendered politically and metaphysically legitimate in general without making an individualizing appeal to a predetermined gendered body? How do our narratives—that are both coerced and freely given—allow for the indeterminacy of the trans body?

Out loud, Spurlock performs “Voice Polish” in the style of “spreading,” or “speed reading,” a technique in the competitive debate world where the speaker makes their argument by speaking as fast as they possibly can with the goal that their opponent will fail to respond to all the arguments posed in one’s speech in the allotted amount of time. The velocity of Spurlock’s “spread” is thrilling, breathless, and physical. Like screaming in the mirror with equal fury, incoherence, and desperation: “And I’m just going to say this every time, fucking transition and stop this nonsense.” Let there be light.

In order to answer the implicit question of the book—can the speaker transition through writing a poem?—Spurlock enacts (in lieu of the question) a poem’s transition from one form to another. If a book can have a volta, it happens in “A Pawn Upon A Pawn.” Here, we find the exact same language in “Voice Polish” unraveled into a dazzling, gentle lyric. The “transitioned” poem is bridged by “The Unseduced,” where the speaker traverses the gendered acuteness of “having two birthdays.” When we read “Love’s lilting tears blessed the pleasure desert,” we find ourselves far from the eightfold bullet points that opened the book, but placed squarely back in the question of love, home sweet home in the lyrical form. Spurlock’s ability to traverse the drastic spectrum of form draws attention to the material of language as it mediates her own relationship to “birthing” herself. Many poets have attempted the heroic task of denaturalizing the lyrical “I” from coherent self-hood, but Spurlock dares to push it further: giving the same content a new form.

Spurlock teaches us, though, to know better than to think that a poem can offer refuge for “an afternoon spent / confronting the infrastructure / which comprises & compromises so many lives.” She stands against the idea that a poem ought to offer redemption, solution, or cure to violence, longing, or self-hood. Even if the poem literally can transform, the poet can speak her own transition into reality, the poem and the speaker remain not only uncured, but fundamentally incurable. Like the discourse of psychoanalysis that promises no cure from our suffering but only the working-through via traversing—in language—the symptoms we repeat, Spurlock brilliantly enacts the repetition that could help her find a form that makes life more livable.

Where Spurlock began with the body theorized, we end with the body spiritually administered. Trying to explain the “spiritual effects of estrogen,” the speaker reaches “towards the unification of sensation and emotion.” No stranger to historical materialism, Spurlock sees the administered body in doctor’s office waiting rooms fondling fake ferns in the hands of Marxist theorists, where we must think of “nothing but the means of production my body a mere conduit.” But the dialectic offers no solution either, just another turn in the argument, with more insight, tantalizingly, just around the corner, if only the body—or the poem—could make the proper argument. Instead, Spurlock demands, “I know I prefer my opiates administered metaphysically / I don’t want to know where it’s coming from I want to know / It’s coming from nowhere.” The metaphysical assertion moves us beyond the political frame, and returns us to the infinite (im)possibilities of nowhere: a world without argument, without evidence, without solution. The ending returns us to the beginning—as the other epigraph attributed to kari edwards invites us to tilt the book’s formal rhyme of 8 onto its side into ∞ (infinity), and we are left “searching for an endless solution...”