By Diego Báez
Fabulosa by Karen Rigby | June 10, 2024 | Jackleg Press | Pages 76 | ISBN: 978-1956907094 | $18.00
Twelve years after the publication of her prize-winning debut book, Chinoiserie (Ahsahta Press, 2012), described by Adrienne Su as “nuanced and strong, wild and grave, [...] delicate [and] indelible,” Karen Rigby returns with a stunning collection of incisive, sensual, and alluring lyrical delights. Drawing on her multinational, multicultural heritage (she refers to her father’s “German/English/Peruvian/ / Spanish/Panamanian/American tree / and my mother’s Hong Kong harbor”), Rigby seamlessly navigates diverse domains of knowledge, such as fashion, fine art, architecture, cinema, and myriad forms of choreographic art. A preoccupation with the thrills of fame undergirds Rigby’s multidisciplinary approach, which evokes a golden age defined by opulence and elegance, undercut by threats of simmering peril.
A prominent thread throughout the book is the star-studded cast of cameo appearances by performers either long past or who have perhaps crested a wave of popularity. These include figure skaters Johnny Weir and Carolina Kostner, silent film star Gloria Swanson, contemporary burlesque legend Dita von Teese, and French designer Christian Dior. Take, for example, “On Marion Cotillard’s 2008 Oscar Dress,” which begins with an energetic, if deceptively straightforward, description of a gown: “Glamour is a mermaid silhouette: Jean Paul Gaultier / in scalloped lines, X-back sweeping to a fishtail hem.” The poem concludes by posing a question that threatens to dispel the gauzy mystique of Hollywood:
What’s in a dress? Stitch. Scaffold. Silver edge.
A piano hammering notes pure as jet.
The best dress I ever wore was forest green velvet
tapered to a bee’s waist. The skirt hung like a bell.
Glamour is muscle made movement. A body turned salt.
The fleeting biblical allusion to the story of Lot’s wife, fated to saline annihilation as she was, transforms the descriptive-meditative setup of the poem into a bold act of ekphrasis, informed by religious myth. In other poems, Rigby embraces a more traditional practice of ekphrasis as applied to visual art, whether by way of Dutch painter Hendrick Avercamp’s “Winter Landscape with Skaters,” Austrian Expressionist Egon Schiele’s “Mother and Child,” or Polish portraitist Tamara de Lempicka’s “Young Lady with Gloves.” Frequently, Rigby focuses her poetic ekphrasis around sartorial concerns, which can excite the imaginative senses in new ways to the original artwork, heighten narrative tension suggested by the paintings, and implicate the poem’s speaker in fascinating ways. “Lady with Glove” takes its title from the eponymous painting by French Academicist William-Adolphe Bouguereau, a starkly tantalizing portrait of a woman whose pose balances between espionage and domesticity. After remarking on the subject’s attire (“Color of ginkgo, maybe / citron: puffed sleeves”), Rigby’s speaker winds her way through an intriguing line of inquiry:
Picture the coup, the lure
of unfinished action.
No necklace.
No background.
Except for the black sky
or unlit parlor, who knows
where this is happening?
I’m doing what history warns us
not to, inserting myself
in the frame, so that her
bloodless smile has little to do
with neoclassical beauty
but the second before,
or after, a crime. She regrets
nothing. I regret less
and less.
As much as Rigby’s poems are about style and dance and fashion and burlesque, they are also risque, seductive meta-reflections on the art of poetry per se. “Why My Poems Arrive Wearing Black Gloves” provides a perfect case in point:
My gloves pantomime moods so thick
you could ladle gravy. About my first book
a critic wrote I’m a little bored with the aesthetic.
If that isn’t damning, what is?
[...]
A poem is a diamond heist.
Tell the critic no one watches a woman enter a room
to look at her hands just like no one’s reading
this poem to picture my life. But a black glove.
Peeled down the avenue of my arm, what wouldn’t you do?
Rigby’s poems often pose open-ended questions in direct address, or questions impossible for a reader to reply to in the moment. But that doesn’t mean these are simply rhetorical exercises. In fact, Rigby dares readers to partake, to indulge, as her poems flirt occasionally with the line between story and apostrophe, as in “Kissing Booth,” ostensibly situated at a suburban county fair or parking lot carnival:
It’s you I want to crash
into, and your zipper
I’d like to untooth
In its imaginative reconfigurations of fine art and fashion, Rigby’s second book redefines notions of femme fatality and fame, interrogates relationships between reader and writer in endlessly engrossing ways, and explores fabulosity in all its many guises.
Diego Báez is a writer, educator, and abolitionist. He is the author of Yaguareté White (UAPress, 2024). Poems and book reviews have appeared online and in print, most recently at Freeman's, The Georgia Review, and Booklist. He lives in Chicago and teaches at the City Colleges.