In “The Laugh of the Medusa,” Hélène Cixous’ manifesto of écriture féminine, revolution in language is a question of futurity: “The future must no longer be determined by the past.” Sarah Sgro’s debut full-length collection If the Future Is a Fetish devours theorists like Cixous, Lee Edelman, Julia Kristeva, and Jacques Lacan and churns out a futurity compost. Sgro’s book is a Gorgon praxis, an ode to the hybrid and the monstrous (let us not forget that “monster” means “to show”). By sketching out connections between queerness, reproduction, the grotesque body, and poiesis, Sgro asks us to confront the rhetoric of futurity as it crosses the corporeal body, the body politic, and poetic production.

The Gorgon eye in Sgro’s book is the symbol ({}), which appears throughout the collection as a floating signifier, an absent presence, a fetish object. ({}) migrates through the text, sometimes erasing or redacting, sometimes splicing disparate parts together. At the beginning of the book, Sgro explains that the symbol “signal[s] fracture, fragmentation, opening...the body as expanding & hermetic, shameful & vainglorious, an ornate door enclosed between parentheses,” language that reminds me of Joyelle McSweeney’s reading of the ampersand as “a kind of broken Moebius, a kind of upended, interrupted, distended contiguity.”

For example, the prose poem “When Falling ({}) Emits A Sharp Thud” begins with the claim that “Sarah was born a closed system.” As the poem continues, the images of bodies become increasingly porous: “Sarah loves perpetual rebirth. She eats small frequent meals & shits constantly. She hates whatever’s sitting in her gut. The ({}) won’t allow itself to be possessed. You cannot suspend the ({}) in a jar.” In this poem, ({}) feels material and abject, an unvoiceable signifier that nevertheless gives meaning to the entire system. Though it is an utterance that we cannot fully decode, the entrance of the ({}) breaks the enclosure of both system and syntax: “A gentle spreading all her loved ones entering. Sarah was reborn Sarah is an open system Sarah spreads.”

With its joyful exaltation of open systems and permeable, grotesque bodies, If The Future Is A Fetish creates a gripping dialectic of void and excess, often in conversation with the concept of reproduction or artistic production. The sequence “[S arrives in disarray]” exemplifies this dialectic. The initial prose poem that opens the sequence pits a predatory, institutional voice that invokes Edelman’s concept of reproductive futurism against the character of “S”: “this would not ordinarily confuse except for your refusal to believe in a redemptive future...we understand surrender is an easy-sounding quest especially when you are tired especially when everyone has left this is why we are prescribing you a child.” Later in the sequence, Sgro’s speaker proclaims an ecstatic relation between excrement and reproduction, which rebuffs the mandate of reproductive futurism with a Bataillean kind of “nonproductive expenditure”:

I love to eat so many salted nuts at night
that my stomach swells like I am pregnant
I love this human body for what it contains
I love to shit for its terminal release
The exodus of one thing grows a blossom
like a rose stem or a bloody head
My ecology is all consuming
My revolt is unforgiving
My body a delicious boundary

The point of convergence for both biological and artistic production in these poems appears in their invocation as solo acts. We encounter parthenogenetic cells and mosses “made for the boundary layer / species have evolved / without gender / without a male in sight.” We are reminded that “[t]o remember is to reproduce” and that the line between procreation and poiesis is productively tenuous: “What is a generative act? // I dream of solitary procreation. I dream that I am moss expanding into other moss.”

I am thinking again of Cixous, who writes, “Let us demater-paternalize rather than deny women, in an effort to avoid the co-optation of procreation, a thrilling era of the body. Let us defetishize.” If The Future Is A Fetish too ends with a kind of release, a defetishization which unlocks the future’s horizon line from both the idealized figure of the child and that of the poem: “If my child is healthy she will grow. If I am generous & recognize you thirst for things I cannot know. I will reassemble. I am branded by no letters. If they leave. I let them.”