If you’ve ever caught a glimpse of your mother’s intricately layered bush as she applies Jergens lotion (or the Equate brand knock-off) in the mascara-speckled bathroom mirror. If you looked at your own child body’s bareness and cried at the difference. If, when you finally started sprouting thick, black follicles, you taught yourself to shave them sideways and your pelvic skin became an itchy, crimson minefield. If you learned to stand in the mirror in full naked glory and utter a thank you to your mother or any mother, then you need to devour Katie Marya’s Sugar Work.

In her first collection, Marya constructs and deconstructs a speaker-self in relation to others: a mother, a distant father, an ex-husband, lovers. We glean that the self—plus its body and its desires—becomes sculpted by the actions and inactions of those around it. As the speaker dances in and around relationships with her unruly empathy, this fact is both empowering and traumatizing. 

In “Daughter of an Atlanta Stripper,” Marya’s speaker watches her mother rehearse at the club—a routine that includes Madonna’s “Material Girl,” tights, and glitter. The speaker observes: “A mirror unfolds behind her / making it hard to choose which side to admire.”

While the reader is still entranced by the mother’s many angles, the child speaker puts down her chicken nuggets to explore backstage: 

In the back I snoop through drawers
of sequined lingerie, tubes of glitter
lipstick. Mom catches me, lets me pick
a scrunchy, lets me apply the lightest pink.

In this tender moment of bonding, the speaker moves from a place of observing the mother’s hyper-femininity to dressing up in its allure. It’s almost as if she’s figured out how to step through the mirror. This is catalytic for the speaker; she learns that her desire for intimacy is something that can be actualized and rewarded. While she adorns herself with her mother’s beauty, her mother wears the same adornment as a strategy to survive in a vicious, capitalist world. While the poem creates a safe space for the speaker’s desire to be expressed, the male gaze and masculinity, as always, are attempting to invade its frame.  

When I was in the fifth grade, I used to steal my mother’s makeup. She was never that into cosmetics, but she had the standard items tucked away in our rickety bathroom drawer: mascara, eyeshadow, concealer, tweezers. I stole them because I was a kid filled with shame, especially when it came to beauty. I’d been taught to revel in my “natural” appearance, but I couldn’t form a mental image of a natural self. I could picture my mother perfectly: green eyes, nearly white hair, bright blue eyeshadow with a darkened outline. I’d coat my little lashes with Maybelline Great Lash—the one with the hot pink and lime green tube—and know that its gunky, black permanence would follow me from mirror to mirror: bathrooms, car windows, powered-off TVs, and my mom, working her Sunday shift at the Menards cash register. 

But this technique didn’t last forever—they rarely do. There are always forces attempting to invade these spaces. In “The Crisis Is Not Knowing” Marya writes: 

Either I was touched       or I wasn’t 
But I cannot remember my legs 
bathing age five   with my grandfather.

As I’m reading these lines, a mirror opens to me in solidarity. I don’t enter it—my trauma and the speaker’s trauma are different. But I’m sitting with my palm to the glass. There’s no easy way to say that sexual assault alters, indefinitely, your relationship to your image, to your desires. All of my angles became smeared, lackluster glass. Opaque. I couldn’t see myself, so I let those around me look instead, especially lovers. I noted what they said: pretty eyes here, too much fat there. My sense of self became tethered to how much they wanted to fuck me, how much value my body could provide them. I lost track of my mother-made self. I lost track of all of the women and people with their palms up against my glass. 

In the poem “Cento in Which I Lay the Line of My Body Next to the Women I Love to Address the Court of Men,” Marya writes: 

The charcoal found its way from your hand
into the bones of daughters breaking—
sometimes the whole world of women 
seems a landscape of red blood and things: 
the color of daylight, cigarettes, ancient
bicycles, widows, motionless air. Desire
is a woman awake over a bowl of ashes. 

There are so many women, queer people, nonbinary people, and even men that I love. Mother, sisters, lovers, friends. I have held each of their red blood bodies as patriarchism, an unrelenting, incinerating force, altered their sense of self forever. We bounce back—because we have to—but never with quite the same perception of the world. Our bouncing becomes off-kilter. We are formed by and in opposition to this abusive force. 

How do we even begin to cope? Where does the cycle of abuse begin? Is there a way to end it? Marya twirls these questions and their possibilities in the poem “Father Sends Adult Child Recurrent Text Message:” 

The adult-child
sometimes wishes the father would be ash
already so that a peach tree could be planted
and fertilized in his honor and then the adult-child
could prune unruly limbs, press satin blossoms
against the face, take a peach into the mouth—
add, instead of remove, flesh from the body.

There’s no way to remove ourselves entirely. If the pain is as a peach, then at least it weighs with the sweetness. Marya’s poetry reminds us that we are a powerful force in our own narratives. The women and people that I love have shaped me, too. Remembering this connection is how we can attempt to peach-ify our pain. We have to fight against so many forces to get there, but that’s the nature of Sugar Work. 

I imagine all of us, in our full naked glory, dancing over bonfire ash, eating Georgia peaches by the boxful — juices slipping down our chins while we laugh and howl at the stars — our collective reflection shining back down at us. 

Now, when I look at the image, I see
a thing the river made. I forget the artist. Moon after moon, I forgive.