Jenny Rockwell’s debut collection, Vultures, published by Dead Bird Books, is centred around rage. There are moments of tenderness and poems about joy (‘My Dad Asks Me What Queer Joy Is’), but in gothic style, rage against men, against the church and those in it who would deny queer rights, beats at the heart of this. The poems ask stringent, pertinent questions:

‘How come the most holy women in it
are recognised for miracles involving their bodies?’ (Questions to the God They Taught Me About / on Conversion Therapy’)

‘after all, is there anything
more cannibalistic
than holy communion?’ (‘Body of Christ Stuffed in Bras’)

Rockwell’s dark imagery creates a sense of heaviness within the text, which belies some of the simpler repetition used for effect. ‘Love is an 80s Horror’ evokes this with aplomb:

‘they are not glow worms
in the dark, wet soil, only yellow
droplets of light, pooling in from the wet
suburban lamppost. do you want to see
my fishhook palms?’

The rage is fierce, tender, lamenting, incandescent and at times loathing, especially toward men. Queer rage spills throughout the collection. But there is a sensibility and forgiveness toward family which is appealing and more nuanced, especially when it looks back on the narrator’s childhood.

‘My mother is just a girl. I am reminded of it as I grow
older. I see it, in the way she looks over at us kids laughing
about something she does not understand.’ (‘Für meine Mama’)

But the largest, outward message that pours through this book is encapsulated in the last line of the last poem, ‘A Limp-necked Blackbird’: ‘I AM NOT SORRY’.

For Nat

sitting in the bath
legs prickly, bellies rolled
laughing into the orange light

(we have known each other before)

not only a hot wet city intersection glance
but a fully fleshed-out, life-together love story
we have tended a garden with our dirty hands
have washed them clean together in the fountain

(at night)

have sat together many, many nights as the sky
turned slowly pink
crickets humming in the dark
have held each other’s sticky palms
i have soaked your wounds in salt

(and you mine)

intertwined our bodies in every possible way
one leg here, one arm over
noses pressed together
sharing our breath
in the cool, soupy night.