A Review of Rachel James’s “An Eros Encyclopedia”

“Click in like a seatbelt” Rachel James prompts us. Click in between the ideal and the real, release and regret, secrets and consequences, dessert and the desert, confession and restraint, pleasure and pain, aphorism and negation, the intellectual and the general intellect. Make yourself at home in the conduit between thinking and craving that is An Eros Encyclopedia (Wendy’s Subway). It is a discomfiting pleasure to be there. After all, as James writes, “It is really embarrassing to want things.”

Published as a part of Wendy’s Subway Passage Series in September 2022, Rachel James’s debut book of poetry strips any skepticism about the expressive limits of sex and death with dissident and magnetic indulgence in the peculiarities of desire. A fluid, polysemic subject in this book, pleasure is teased out: cataloged, chased, and pondered. But it would be far too tidy if the pursuit of pleasure were the point. James torques us far away from pat epiphanies with mental effort aimed at things both intensely felt and elusive. Over and over, she injects unexpected and idiosyncratic turns of language and thought right at the moment it seems an idea, narrative, memory, or an hallucinatory imaginary might satisfy itself. With each discovery, a new space for questioning unfolds. Summation into meaning here is slippery. Expectations sabotaged. We are left with an infinite number of why’s.

James’ swerves into the unexpected, the bound up desire and pleasure of why in action:

One year the school tried three ways to solve the recess

playground problem. First, they put bales of hay down.

The space of pleasure is the problem. One shown here to be made of messes to be contained and covered. But why?

The poem continues without explication:

Within a day the hay was soaking wet and within a week,

moldy. Second, they took the hay away, the temperature

dropped, and the puddle became an ice rink. We were

instructed to bring helmets to school or we were not allowed

to go out for recess. I never felt like going out because I

felt tired. But I enjoyed recess outside. Finally, during a

warm spell, they filled the yard with gravel. Whitish grey

rocks of a uniform size. I did not have the language then

but the mass-produced quality of the rocks disturbed me.”

The space of pleasure progresses from moldy and repellant to slippery and so physically dangerous that authorities must make rules to condition the nature of engagement. Finally, the mess of pleasure is negated through the lumpy imposition of a homogenization that is as unsatisfying and as it is disturbing.

Here James orients us away from analogy into a direct interrogation of the inherent, uncontrollable separateness of bodies and the impossible desire to fulfill conscious and embodied connections with others:

I wonder if anyone else felt this way. Joan asks, “Why

does it matter?” I wonder if anyone shares my feelings

and thoughts. Why? Because if no one does I’d like to

know. Why? I might feel differently about my self-worth.

Why? Because either I would feel connected to others or

I would feel permission to excel in my uniqueness. Why?

Something about not knowing, ever, the consciousness of

another, scares me. Why? It makes me feel trapped in a

singular, uncontrollable, mind and body—one I did not

choose. Why? OMG stop. Why? No one needs to hear

this. Why? You’ve already gone too far. Why? I fear I will

lose the little energy I have to keep going. Why? I have

suffered from extreme fatigue since birth. Why?

James has us understand that the bottomless pleasure of demanding why of oneself over and over is the point and the fact. The exhaustive progression of the poem’s language—and the physicality of that exhaustion—is as ever present as the desire to keep asking. James’ preference for the sensations of questioning and its ability to draw her audience into ever more intimate relation is key.

Herein is the delightfully unorthodox buffet of An Eros Encyclopedia: the needs for intellectual, emotional, and sensual stimulation vie for equal consideration in a space of inquiry. James writes “Butler describes desire particularly. That it only functions / in contradiction.” This line, and even more so the hinge space of its break, are a discrete codex for the mapping of desire the book creates. Contradiction runs straight through the book lending as much weight to Dickenson’s message to her lover that “To / miss you is power” as it does to the “strangers drawing in a room to collaborate” on an anime porn that catalyzes the solitude of self-reflection: “I / sit alone, think alone, touch alone, rest alone, no other to mother.” This is followed with the pleasure of another contradictory discovery: “He fingered my 16-year-old ass and I felt instant / regret my ass hadn’t been fingered for the past three years. [...] I thought: it must take another person to / show me things I’ve already got.”

There are oppositions in the construction of a contradiction. But isn’t the less-than-defined space between functioning poles sexier? Isn’t the anticipation in the space of the line break sexier still? Don’t you want to hang out and feel lost between oppositions a little longer?

The futility, the desperation to make some final sense out of a torrent of wants and cravings, an admission of the never-doneness and disorientation that comes with pleasure work, is precisely what makes this book so compelling in the first place. An Eros Encyclopedia is an effort to catalog, to contain the broadest range of individual sensuality, along with a simultaneous admission that the encyclopedia will be impossible to complete. It has to keep going.