Solve for Desire

January 1, 2018
Bailey takes a sobering look at desire, addiction, loss, and absence in this debut collection of short, lyric poems that are by turns lush and understated, lofty and plainspoken. The work revolves around the intense and ambiguous story of addiction and desire in the lives of turn-of-the-20th-century Austrian siblings and artists Georg and Grete Trakl, poet and painter, respectively. “I remember the first time, your hand cupped/ over the glass and over mine, O charging desire,” Bailey writes, as Grete, in the time between Georg’s death by cocaine overdose and her own suicide: “I knew nothing of loss.” Bailey moves between direct (“Word of your death comes on a Sunday/... The city has begun to unravel into dark filaments,/ your name a rope drawn taut”) and loaded (“Here is the tool I currently find useful./ Snake’s middle, or some callous bulge in the peel”) language, in keeping with the mystery surrounding Georg and Grete’s relationship—as siblings, as matchmakers, and, possibly, as illicit lovers. She performs a kind of feminist resuscitation of the lesser-known Grete, focusing on small moments of quiet, grief, lust, and memory, and fleshing out a story that is still disputed. While Bailey enriches her collection through history, in a sense the Trakls’ story could be that of any close pair separated by death.