“Now and in the Future”: Gail Hosking’s review of Amalie Flynn’s FLESH, RIPE, and SILICONE

SILICONE
Alien Buddha Press, 2024
Amalie Flynn
171 pp

Ripe
Amalie Flynn
Alien Buddha Press, 2024
74 pp

Flesh
Amalie Flynn
Alien Buddha Press, 2023
56 pp

The prolific poet and editor of Wrath-Bearing Tree has three new books of poems: Flesh, Ripe, and SILICONE, all three dedicated to “women now and in the future.” These poems could not be timelier, given our country’s battles over the subject of abortion. Flesh involves her own experience of a pregnancy gone wrong, one that the doctor said, “there’s no way.” Turners Syndrome and Fetal hydrops demand an abortion. “Years swallowed that year.” In the background is a husband home from the war, “filling our house with / car bombs and bodies.”  

“There is no place to go with the sorrow.”

Her style is full of images, short in size but powerful in the narrative. The next two books, Ripe and SILICONE, involve a dystopia world with women in “noncompliance camps” and robots as wives. The government has passed “The Implantation Act” and “The Give Birth Now Act.” Men have rights to women—patriotism, power, prayer—with participation in the robot wife mandatory, sexual intercourse mandatory. There is pleasure programing, “levels of dirty talk” with moans and screams, a GPS to track her whereabouts. When reading these poems, one can’t but recall Orwell’s 1984 and Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale with another version of an “apocalyptic nation full of fascism.”

The twist eventually becomes the husband wanting to spend time with the robot, and the robot figuring out how to download things like tastebuds and to insert vaginal nerve endings, teaching herself “how to want.” The government knows and attempts to track her down, assuring the man of a “mandatory replacement within sixty days.”

The story continues with a surprise ending, but one that finishes in hope. Amalie Flynn is not to be ignored. She is to be read with interest and concern.

Gail Hosking is the author of the memoir Snake’s Daughter (U of Iowa Press) and two books of poems Retrieval and Adieu(Main Street Rag Press). MFA from Bennington Writing Seminars. Essays and poems have appeared in such places as Waxwing, Post Road, South Dakota Review, and The Healing Muse. Several pieces have been anthologized. Twice “most notable” in Best American Essays. Several Pushcart nominations.