Love in All Its Contemporary Glory: Strange, Sexy Paradoxes in Savannah Brown’s ‘Closer Baby Closer’
Words by Turi Sioson
Photography by Alfredo Guzman
Photography by Alfredo Guzman
“<< Why is it so hard to take a take a fucking picture / of the moon it never looks right >>,” writes Savannah Brown in “Nightmare stations,” one of the crafty, cacaphonous poems housed in her newest collection, Closer Baby Closer. Reminiscent of chat rooms in form and fashioned in an HTML- font, the poem courses through the undoing of its speaker’s relationship, as memory and observation is chopped up by pound symbols and line breaks:
> Oh my shared humanity # I knew from
> the second it hit
> water # that the flayed red astronaut
> the size of a fist
> was ours >>>>
Delicate, provocative language contrasts simple diction and jarring, punctual reflections of a malfunctioning love. In Closer Baby Closer, Brown raises more questions than she answers and leaves her readers with metaphorical knife wounds in the process.
Much of her popularity began and continues to grow on Instagram and YouTube, where fans and newcomers alike can catch close, curated glimpses into the poet’s everyday life through photos, videos and the occasional poetry snapshot or digital performance. Brown recently established Doomsday Press, an independent publisher interested in “the youthful, the weird, the uncomfortably honest and the genre-bending.” It’s an extension of her advocacy for self- and independently published work that doesn’t quite fall within traditional industry interests.
Closer Baby Closer, Brown’s third collection of poetry, is obsessive and breathless, distant yet stirringly intimate. Intertwining existential musings with everyday moments of beauty and concern, the poet brings us closer to a love fraught with modern-day dangers. Her innermost reflections on the way relationships live, grow, and die with internet culture, technology, and a near-apocalyptic society come to form. It’s a body of work that traverses the way Gen Z loves: paradoxically, with a perpetual edge of danger and disconnection, yet with an extreme attention to detail that sometimes garners more harm than it intends.
The entry “Jeff Bezos’ sexts,” part of which uses only words and phrases from the Amazon mogul’s leaked messages to his mistress, Lauren Sanchez, from 2019, explores what it is to be consumed by desire only for the return to be underwhelming and confusing:
Can you imagine being a medieval peasant
and having the weirdest thing ever happen to you
only catch your breath and hear some magic
glass say a man has landed on the moon
It’s a thought experiment on the amount of time it would take to have one million female orgasms. Long lines and comfortable enjambment give this first section a thoughtful, if not faintly perturbing feel, warming us up for the weird yet familiar text sequence that follows.
In part two, at “Today 02:22,” the Bezos-voice writes, “. love ! . ! . . ! . love . show … love? … love…” before fizzling into silence. The third and final section of the poem contains the only one-word reply to his series of messages: “ok.” Here, desire is more aggressive, clawing its way through the imaginary smartphone screen to a supposed lover who does not return the enthusiasm.
Throughout the book, Brown rips into intimacy in this same vein, bordering on making its speaker sick with it and contrasting the timelessness of love with the relevance of OnlyFans, pub crawls, timestamps and oat milk. Each of the poem’s speakers is strikingly self-aware and speaks diaristically, lending a personal voice to the collection. It steadies both conventionally structured pieces — the gasping “Current events” and the pleasure-grabbing “Shared consciousness of the party girl” — as well as those more experimental, such as the aforementioned “Nightmare stations.”
Echoing the existentialism of her 2020 collection, Sweetdark, and that which characterizes much of her work outside of it, Brown pushes theory into the world of palpable, close subjects, rendering Closer Baby Closer a hushed portrayal of the private workings of a love-remembering mind.
“If you didn’t already know I’m sorry / you have to find out this way (poem),” she opens the first section of “Perspective” with, tender and cheeky in a way that suggests a familiarity between speaker and addressee that we are not privy to. “But / everyone has very small mites living / on their eyelashes,” she follows, redirecting the poem’s first lines to what seems to be the audience. By the second section, in which there is a more prominent I/you interaction, this subtle invitation to her readers extends the intimacy of the relationship to them, as she depicts a domestic scene between lovers:
Before you’re awake
I toss yesterday’s pizza boxes,
headbutt the neighbor’s cat.
Slow morning. You dig in soil.
I argue with you about snails.
Yet, even within this familiarity, there seems to be a sense of detachment from the “you” — a focus on the speaker’s internal monologue rather than the relationship at hand, which other poems in the collection parallel. Soft-tongued and quick-witted, Brown shares an appreciation for the world in all its twisted glory, as she struggles against the experience while simultaneously clamoring to get a closer look. She seems to sit far away from her subject matter but dips so near that she is able to capture just how it feels to live within it. The result is something akin to staring at a muted, detailed oil landscape and wondering how they got the texture so life-like.
In “My god, girlhood ripened” Brown writes, “One teenage / dream rises from the dead / to find her sepulcher full of chirping / webcams.” She continues:
a bouquet
of electric toothbrushes shivering
in the nightstand gives you away
and The birthday girl is finally
allowed to look
in the mirror
Another figure, one poem away, “is vividly sexy and precious and dying / like the coral reef as photographed for Playboy,” living up to the titular position, “THE HOTTEST GIRL IN THE WORLD!!!!!” Mixing sexy fantasy with the overused and overstimulated wording of porn spam bots, Brown writes, “She is moving to a city near you / She is online and ready to chat.”
At once spirited and subdued, Closer Baby Closer looks for and pinpoints intimacy in the most unlikely of places within our modern world. With a desire to be seen yet a recognition that to be so is to be made into what others want you to be, Brown’s new collection is unabashed and unafraid to depict moments for what they truly are: bewildering, beautiful and often absurd.
Purchase a copy of Closer Baby Closer, if you’re in the US or in the UK and beyond.