WWJD and Other Poems by Savannah Sipple

Abstract

Reviewed by: WWJD and Other Poems by Savannah Sipple Jessica Cory (bio) Savannah Sipple. WWJD and Other Poems. Little Rock, Ar.: Sibling Rivalry Press, 2019. 74 pages. Softcover. $15.95. Savannah Sipple's debut poetry collection WWJD and Other Poems is a manifesto of self-acceptance, self-love, and the difficult passage in embodying these notions amid a society that conditions us to feel shame about who we are. But make no mistake, this collection isn't all feel-good inspiration. While there are plenty of beautiful and hilarious moments throughout WWJD and Other Poems, Sipple includes plenty of middle fingers and heartbreak to balance them out. From domestic abuse and toxic masculinity to church on Sunday and mountaintop removal, this collection engages with the complexities of the region and the self while still [End Page 106] maintaining a strong authorial voice that's wholly queer, Appalachian, and unapologetic. From a technical standpoint, one of the details that strikes me about Sipple's collection is her obvious attention to line integrity. She uses line breaks and spacing in a very determined way in order to create specific (or a multitude of) meanings. Sipple also utilizes a variety of forms, such as a BINGO board for "EVANGELISM BINGO" and a numbered list in "A List of Times I Thought I was Gay" to literally queer how readers visually identify poetry, stretching the boundaries that decide what shapes the genre can take. Sipple expands the boundaries of the Appalachian imagination throughout her poems' content as well by unabashedly embracing rural queerness. These aren't poems about the queer urban experience, and it's this precise difference from which the poems derive their power. There are guns, trucks, four-wheelers, and cheap beer. There are soup beans and green beans and fatback. By using the imagery of her surroundings, Sipple is providing ever-important representation to the rural queer experience. She's saying "girls who like girls don't just exist in NYC and Atlanta and on TV. We're at the local IGA. We're your next door neighbors canning peaches." This collection does focus on self-discovery, however, and Sipple's speaker refuses to shy away from the struggle of realizing she's queer, as the opening poem, "I Wanted You To Fuck Me," ends with a pleading: "please bang me straight" (15). As the collection progresses, though, we see the speaker step into her truth by engaging in erotic moments with women and no longer denying her own identity. Sipple furthers the queer rural identity through her use of dialect, rooting the poems in a regional place. In "Cant," for example, the speaker notes that "Men call girls sis here, women too, / even when they want to fuck them," a pronoun [End Page 107] usage most folks in Appalachia are quite familiar with. Additionally, phrases like "You take what you want / from me, say you're full as a tick burrowed in a hound" (33) and "I couldn't give a rat's ass about lures" (39) locate the collection in a rural environment that, evidenced by their usage, shows how proud the speaker is of her home region and how determined she is to remain within its space. In addition to exploring queer rural identity, this collection also serves as a cultural critique, rejecting the fat-shaming that's constantly on parade in contemporary American society. Sipple's poems illustrate the binaries of self-hatred and self-love of the body. Sometimes the speaker is celebrating: "Pass whole milk, pass the milk fat; pass chocolate, also bad for my face; pass brie" (37), seeing her body as "sycamore solid" (30), and exploring the ways in which "boxing makes me feel beautiful because muscles contract under my / backfat ripples" (37). Other moments in these poems are much more stark, such as when the speaker recalls her seventeenth birthday: "the end of a liquid diet, I celebrated / with a baked potato, no sour cream, no butter" as her mother warned "Be careful so / you don't gain back the fat" (37). These juxtapositions work to not only maintain the speaker's identity as a complex human with her own struggles rather...