Book Review: “Salt & Metal” by Sallyanne Rock
Written by Sophia-Maria Nicolopoulos
If I feel physically as if the top of my head were taken off, I know that is poetry. –Emily Dickinson
Sallyanne Rock’s debut pamphlet published on April 7th reminds me of what walking across hot coal on a summer day would feel like. It’s unapologetically raw, a strong punch in the gut, a visual diary of domestic abuse, going through trauma and navigating the crisis of identity. It reminds me of what Emily Dickinson claims about poetry—after reading Rock’s work, you feel like your head has been chopped off because of being thrown in emotional turmoil and unnerving questions that peel your skin and bones off bit by bit.
Rock’s chapbook is terrifically bold and honest. It features a series of free prose poems that navigate the deep seas of domestic abuse in all its forms. Her imagery is sharp and tiesin with references to medical terms, and to what is going to happen if the persona won’t ever leave her abuser. The narrator practically tells us that she’s been through shit for so much time, getting in and out of hospitals, terrorized in her own home, which is why she knows how she’ll end up. Sheknows that she’s part of a toxic relationship yet, she can’t find a way to get out. This chapbook is her final plea for help.
In Charles de Gaulle Airport security check, the persona confesses:
“Wait for divers to weave through the wreck of you/ allow them to sift the detritus of your fingers and knees”
Rock uses foreshadowing to directly tell the reader that victims of domestic abuse don’t often survive in the hands of their abuser. The upsetting POV of someone else poking through your body to see if you’re alive, to note down all your cracks and bruises is further explored in poems like in Workshop manual for a date where she writes:
“Lay me on a tartan blanket/and crowbar open my ribcage/Latex-glove your hands/and rummage in my chest/like a giftshop bowl of painted eggs/Lift out the heart with one hand/and slice it like a bread roll/Scrape away the darkest cells with a Stanley knife or similar”
Wow! The poet weaves the shocking image of the your body being inspected and dissected within your home by an intimate person using cutlery—a highly disturbing but raw truth of what it feels like being trapped in an abusive relationship.
In my favorite poems of the collection, the persona confesses the time she needed to realize that she’s being abused. At the same time, she draws a sickening psychological profile of the abuser. You only took photographs of me from the neck down goes like this:
“It is impossible/for a woman with no head/to look you in the eye/and isn’t that just the way you like us?/Conveniently guillotined/from our beach holidays/and your bedroom collection /A cockroach can live for nine weeks after its head is removed/It was fourteen years before I noticed.”
What we’re reading here is pure uncensored trauma re-appropriated as the power to move on, to get up, headless and soaked in blood, and gathering what has remained of you, toget out.
It’s interesting to see for a bit the abuser’s profile. He is an excellent tactician, for he knows how to trap and violate the narrator, great at picking weapons and limiting the safe space of the victim, as shown in the Workshop poem, a potential murderer who keeps trophies of the women he has mistreated, as described in the Cockroach poem. He fetishizes the femalebody, keeping relics to watch at his pleasure, a sexist and misanthrope through and through.
In Corrasion (per the dictionary, the mechanical erosion of soil and rock by the abrasive action of particles set in motion by running water, wind, glacial ice, and gravity) he gaslights the persona thus, Rock focuses not only on physical abuse but also verbal and mental too. She writes,
“you had plucked one feather every night/whispered/you are not a bird”
An amazing feature of this collection is the experimentation with forms of poetry, something that I’ve seen lately by newly published poets. Rock, nevertheless, has taken me by surprise with her open-ended poetry, as if she invites other victims of abuse to fill in the blanks with their own experiences. In her untitled passage that starts with the sentence The man is a jealous thief the persona unapologetically condemns the abuser by warning readers (and potential victims) of the psychological profile of such men:
“He will say lie every time your parents tell you they love you. He will ____ you every time he thinks you might love yourself/He will hear you sing and stuff your mouth with __________/He will take the books from your shelves and the art from your walls and leave it all outside overnight in the ______.”
By making her poetry universal and asking us to fill in the blanks with whatever scenario we might choose, Rock is genuinely interested in poetry that takes the reader by the hand and asks them to create with her, to write lines for her, to give life to a shared vision of poetry that hurts with its truth but liberates with its passion.
In another attempt at experimenting with different modes of narration, her poem Watermark combines a vertical form of poetry to mimic the motion of being held against your will under a lamp. The narrator states:
“hold me up to the light / see the shame / flecked and delicate / handle me with gloves / easily degraded / cannot be restored / i like to imagine / getting pulped / starting again / flat and bare”
Readers literally must turn their head to read the words just like the persona was forced to turn her own per her abuser’s commands.
On the other hand, the poet’s interludes, small prose passages amidst the long free prose poems, reveal the abuser’s controlling mechanisms like number V (a little saline on a teaspoon offered regularly with the illusion of choice?) or number VI (steep the skin in a warm salt bath; excavate carefully with a needle) where we see, once more, the distorted body image of the victim from the abuser’s point of view. He wants to cause her pain, bruise her ego, pulverize her whole existence.
In poetry like Improvised weapons found in and around the home, Learning from Nigella Lawson, and Trauma Kit and the home life is seen both as an invasion and a liberation. Even if the persona suffers from domestic abuse, it doesn’t mean that she can’t reclaim this space and redefine it as safe, healthy and emancipated.
Truthfully, this is where the power of the chapbook lies—in its redeeming quality after going through trauma and experiencing severe loss of identity. Losing herself in the most horrific ways in order to ask for help, gather her pieces and move on, painfully aware of the past but gloriously accepting change and moving forward, the persona, on the last page of the chapbook, claims that:
“This meal will not be thrown against the kitchen wall/You will not be thrown against the kitchen wall/Pour a drink – wine, or water/Sit and eat.”
She’s finally free to enjoy the simplest things in life, the ones she couldn’t appreciate and take pleasure in because of the cannibalistic monster that slept next to her for so long.
Sallyanne Rock’s pamphlet, with its plainsong style, emotionally and physically charged imagery, is proof that contemporary feminine poetry can cause a long-lasting effect in the global poetry scene—the terrifying theme of abuse and neglect, is surgically added page after page, to sensitize, alert and invite the readers for poetry that is cooperative and asks for their help.
The poet has managed to pave the way towards free verse that’s gut-wrenching but deeply communal—a feminist manifesto. She’s speaking truth without compromising; she’s telling you what you don’t want to listen because you’re afraid and at the same time, she’s hugging you, whispering soothing words. One debut collection that is unforgettable and unafraid—a must-read by poetry lovers across the world.
Published by the magnificent Fawn Press. Get the book here.
SOPHIA-MARIA NICOLOPOULOS is a Content and Publishing Editor from Greece. She's also an aspiring writer and poet. She chooses to see her writing as the kind Ophelia would write had she navigated a world of boundless horror. She’s currently writing and editing a series of folklore horror short stories and her first chapbook. In her free time, she removes cat hair from her clothes.