Book Review: Anatomical Venus
Hannah Salzer
Anatomical Venus
Courtney Bates-Hardy
Radiant Press 2024
Anatomical Venus is a meditation on living with chronic pain. In this unrelenting collection, Courtney Bates-Hardy restages car accidents, spinal trauma, surgeries, and hospital visits. Bates-Hardy’s poetics of pain is strikingly candid: “I am looking at pain, / my world brittle edged and bright, / my body a meditation on shards—thoughts, incandescent and ecstatic.” As if turning a kaleidoscope on pain to better examine it, Bates-Hardy contends with pain’s irreducible and cyclical nature. Her inquiry invokes mythology, monster stories, witchcraft, and eighteenth-century histories of medicine to locate a specifically feminine pain within patriarchal legacies.
Repeating cycles structure this collection. There is the inaugural impact of a car crash described in a series of prose poems and then the replay of traumatic memory: “I jolt awake every night, / trapped in a car on tumble dry, / the cold blast of ice and glass.” There are reprises of failed treatments and infinite appointments. In “Things I Have Tried for Chronic Pain,” Bates-Hardy lists homeopathic remedies, Western and non-Western treatments, wellness tips—all futile. All that remains is a fog of exhaustion and rage: “Dissociating from the pain. / Breathing in to the pain. / Accepting the pain. / Using the pain. / Ignoring the pain. / Screaming at the pain.” Given the insufficiencies of healing practices, Bates-Hardy asks: how does one live with and be generous with the body in pain?
Doctors appear as hubristic and inept: “A condescending doctor / tells me I’m healed / without reading my x-rays.” “Eventually the medical systems declare me ‘healed’ and I stop attending physio, only to come back less than six months later.” These dismissals register as gendered within a long history of Western medicine’s objectification and exploitation of women. Bates-Hardy speaks from the perspective of female patients subjected to invasive medical practices. In “Autopsy,” a disembodied spirit witnesses a clumsy autopsy of her corpse: “They’ve sawed open my skull, / and I watch them poke at my brain. / Even if I knew what was wrong, they wouldn’t uncover it.”
Bates-Hardy recasts the Anatomical Venus—an eighteenth-century wax model with exposed intestines designed to teach anatomy—as a figure in revolt. Reclining on a cushion and adorned with a string of pearls, the model bore an uncanny resemblance to Botticelli’s Venus—a symbol of feminine perfection for the male gaze. Bates-Hardy writes:
She will not lie on this table to be taken
by feminine rapture; she will not settle
for one string of pearls when she could
have the whole colon.
In bestowing subjectivity to the Anatomical Venus, Bates-Hardy forges a resilient and resistant feminine subject in the face of medicalized patriarchy. The Anatomical Venus is accompanied by a defiant cast of feminine monsters and mystical figures including Medusa, Eve, Sybil, and the Bride of Frankenstein. Their rage is palpable—rage figures as both uselessly self-destructive and as a source of resistance. From “The Birth of Medusa”:
This rage turns
against me. It roils up inside
and spills over the dam.
I spit it out and it rises;
I eat it like bread
and it sustains me; I expel it
and it returns to me.
I breath it in
like smoke in my lungs,
a burning in my guts that corrodes
my uterus. Snakes
erupt from my skull.
All monsters scream
when they are born.
While it is a mark of strong poetry to transform personal experience into relatable content for readers, at times this reader questioned Bates-Hardy’s universalization of the monstrous female subject. Invocations of “all” —as in “all monsters”— risk collapsing difference. What comes to mind is Western medicine’s historical and persistent anti-Blackness and the specific ways in which Black women in particular have been exploited in the name of medicine since slavery. Not “all” humans (or monsters) exist on the same historical plane.
There is also Bates-Hardy’s Bride of Frankenstein who “does not exist / except as a reflection of the monster’s desire,” and her Sibyl who laments that her pursuer “believes / I’m an echo of his own lies.” Feminist scholar Luce Iragary argues that Western philosophy forgets sexual difference; Black studies scholars have, in turn, argued that Anglo-American feminism forgets anti-Blackness (Calvin Warren’s writings are particularly instructive here).
Bates-Hardy desires a redemptive and heroic monster—one that is feminine, chronically ill, and queer—who might alleviate feelings of shame arising from chronic illness and queerness. Shame, for Bates-Hardy, is the result of “someone telling you how to feel” and it is the feeling of returning to the physiotherapist’s office having “failed” the exercise therapist. Out of shame, the poet’s “glorious monster” rises transcendently:
The glorious monster embraces
her rage and rejoices
in her iniquities.
She will not be punished for queer desire,
though many will try. Once, men
would have locked her in a padded room
and scooped a piece of her brain
from behind her eye,
but now they are pinned
beneath the force of her gaze.
Bates-Hardy reminds us that most patients lobotomized by doctors were women. We can locate her desire for a “glorious monster” to triumph over the male gaze within this history—yet we should also be aware of the ways in which queer ideals of transgression, transcendence, and resistance have served to reinforce Western values, as scholars such as Jasbir Puar have argued. We might ask: what are the offerings and what are the limits of queer desire in transforming the world?
Taking a surgical approach to writing, Bates-Hardy’s poetics peel back the body to examine bodily trauma. Repeated images of dissections, wires, and knots convey the tedium of pain, but become somewhat predictable and threadbare throughout the collection. A headache is described as “an exhibit laced with thin wire / pulling the skull apart”; the trapezius is “a muscle that plunks like piano wire when out of tune”; the spinal cord is “a burning wire of muscle and nerve / from skull to scapula.” The difficulty of writing on tedious, unrelenting pain is that the work risks losing intensity to sustain the interest of the reader.In this case, I felt that the cadence and imagery did not offer enough variation to remain compelling.
For readers interested in the poetics of pain, Anatomical Venus offers material to inspire important questions: How does one write about unresolvable and irreducible pain? How does one approach living and reliving in pain? And, how does one contend with the patriarchal (and colonial) legacy of Western medicine? It may remain that such pain cannot be fully translated—no single poem can speak pain in its entirety, but can only offer a partial image of pain in its daily ubiquity.