Making the Right Narrative: Eve and All the Wrong Men by Aviya Kushner
“You have no idea what happens when you make one creature out of another,” warns the speaker of one of Aviya Kushner’s poems. Her chapbook Eve and All the Wrong Men (dancing girl 2019) makes the brave choice to revisit the biblical first woman so often featured in literature. Unlike other treatments, though, Kushner’s poems focus on transformation of self-in-relation to fully separate self. Her modern Eve refreshes the myth by dealing not with sin or sensuality but the (re)modeling of identity through encounters with the wrong men.
The women in Kushner’s poems share in the female legacy: “I was taught I had no choice/but to inherit Eve’s path on earth.” Eve, responsible for the downfall of Eden and for original sin, set women up as the gullible, subordinate sex. Eve positions us, as women, in an existence defined relative to men rather than independent beings. Rather than accept the limits of this legacy, though, Kushner sets out to find the “wrong men,” responsible on some level for perpetuating the limits women face.
The titular wrong men walk the pages of the book, often overheard at breakfast tables trying to make desirable partners of themselves using whatever tools they can assemble, one being language. Praising everything the desired woman says as “interested, interesting, interest, and oh yeah, incredible,” he hopes to hear himself reflected back in his partner, as the original Adam did of Eve. “Honey From the Wrong Men” finds language manipulated even more insidiously for consumption: “a whole bakery in the mouths of men, /saying anything for a taste.” In hearing the words, a woman knows she equates to transient pleasure, but being a delight “at least for the next hour” can be seductive. At best, these men are irritatingly amusing. At their most insidious, these men subsume the women they pursue, and “take me into how he read/the world.” The goal, then, is to come away from the wrong men with something of the self intact, which mostly happens.
Regret and relief at times collide in intriguing ways for the speaker. In “Perspective,” the speaker sees clearly “The life I could have had/stands in front of me,/wrong as the wrong man.” What was lost and perhaps once longed for becomes clear as “the angle of the wrong,” suddenly sharp and blindingly visible. “Bed” extends this sentiment to the ex married to another woman, and the gratitude at having escaped her fate. Identity, here, comes from the breakaway: who she could have been but did not become so.
When it comes to the women Kushner wants to be, readers find she admires the unsuspecting but authentic female. In “Imagining the Thoughts of the Lovely Eighty-Something Woman with the Vintage Glasses, Who Lives a Few Floors Down,” the speaker lives as unapologetically as any woman can ever hope to live. “I am who I am,” she says, “like the sea is the sea.” While her life has its imperfections (a flaky neighbor whose inattentiveness leaves the speaker to go out in the cold and snow), her soul is satisfied by the view from her window, augmented by her imagination. She first admires these “utterly man-less, there at the end” women in “Men” for the way they don’t want to be her, young and man-seeking. There’s a similar awe, if not admiration, for the “toothless hooker” who attracts a constant stream of men despite her unflattering appearance.
If the collection leaves us wanting in any way, it does so perhaps in the art poems. While David and Venus of Urbino certainly channel themes of sensuality and male/female dynamics, they are static figures in a collection that is constantly moving, flitting from encounter to encounter as it studies the sexual politics dogging women since Eden. Kushner is most successful when spreading gathered detail across the page or starting hard truths in the face.
Ultimately, Eve and All the Wrong Men leaves us with a modern Eve in the form of a woman seeking to reclaim and remodel herself separate from the men who wrote her into the character they wished her to be. Through all her transformations, she has made self-determination out of her inheritance.
