Amy Bobeda reviews Julia Cohen’s Freak Lip Essays of the Unsaid
The weekend before the COVID lockdown, we gathered in the Lincoln Building of Naropa’s Arapahoe Campus for a practicum on the sentence. The novelist, Sara Veglan, diagrammed sentences and told the poets, when we asked about our homework, “You must write sentences.” Most of us complained until it was time to spend the afternoon building installations. One classmate built a tower out of blue meditation cushions with an opening wide enough for each student to slip into. Lying on our backs, one at a time, we listened to an audio recording I can’t recall. On the floor of the meditation room, I realized the architecture of a sentence and an installation do the same work: create a reality out of disparate pieces that only transform in meaning when strung or stacked together.
I held this memory as the architecture of the sentence as I entered the world of Julia Cohen’s Freak Lip: Essays of the Unsaid. This spiraling collection weaves and circles around the writer’s question of how to “unleash the sentence.” It is a memoir navigating what happens when a sentence is never said or, in some cases, said too late. Tethered to Gertrude Stein’s poetics of the sentence, Cohen begins with and returns to the theme of inarticulation. What better place to begin an excavation of the sentence than with its ending: a period.
Freak Lip opens with a near-mythic yet, for many of us, familiar story: an adolescent waits for the mark of puberty–menstrual blood. Their classmates talk about their first tampons and maxi pads while the writer impatiently waits. Finally, Cohen’s period arrives, and she is struck by speechlessness. Asking for help or telling a parent about this new development proves impossible. Menarche marks the book’s first memory of inarticulation: the sentence, “I got my period,” stuck between the body and the outside world, drives the writer to spend months stashing used pads and period-stained underwear into the head of a Snoopy mask above their bed. The image and narrative are as absurd as they are relatable; the hook of pre-teen memories that can neither be explained nor forgotten (periods, monsters, fear of dying a virgin on a Virgin Atlantic flight) pulls the reader into Cohen’s desire to write about sentences that “seem like solid bones, that seem like solid masses”. Whether these masses are something to ground into or hold onto, they act as guideposts for making sense of memories. Cohen finally buries the Snoopy mask and the subsequent maggots the period products grew, which becomes an overarching metaphor for the transformation and ultimate disintegration of all the writer leaves unsaid.
The bones of Freak Lip scaffold its architecture: period panties in Snoopy’s head, the writer’s diagnosis of a narrow vaginal canal, and fears of sex that manifest as unsaid sentences. These define Cohen’s adolescent relationships with their body and social expectations. The reader enters Cohen’s fears of intimacy through high school and college as the writer chooses between the two options her pediatrician offers: lose your virginity to someone you know or to a stranger. While these are the possibilities faced when it comes to first-time intercourse and the socially constructed pressure of “virginity” and “loss”, Cohen marks the anxiety and wait for sex with the death of a high school friend, budding romance, and the continued inability to share their doctor’s diagnosis with anyone other than their mother. She in turn worries about Cohen’s present and future with intimacy. The cold, tactless clinician behavior Cohen recalls is relatable and disturbing. From the social anxiety of having a “freak lip” (unsightly vulva) to the difficulty discussing sex and relationships with peers, it can be easy to project my own teenage memories onto Cohen’s text. This is perhaps what makes this text so powerful: by chronicling the unsaid, Cohen builds a constellation of the pressures and expectations put upon the reproductive body. While one might consider Freak/Lip an essay collection on “girlhood,” I would argue Cohen’s quest for what the sentence can do creates a text rooted in the liberation of the self and in defining one’s relationship with social norms, gender norms, and systems at large through bodily experience. For this book in particular, it’s important to remember that the larynx and the cervix mirror each other. By unleashing one, we may finally be able to unleash the other.
Finding itself in the company of other “reproductive CNF” like Chloe Caldwell’s The Red Zone: A Love Story and Caren Belin’s Blackfishing the IUD, Freak Lip relies on the genre-bending work of assemblage through linked essays and text message chains. With the grounding force of Gertrude Stein and other poets, this memoir lives adjacent to autotheory but doesn’t rely on it as a genre structure. The poets arrive as guiding forces, even guardians, to Cohen’s questions as the writer wonders about Stein’s own menstrual cycle. Like other relationships in the text, Cohen’s own with poetry builds as the writer’s career in the field crystallizes, reminding the reader that this is a poet’s memoir.
Distinct yet interconnected, the living and real relationships are balanced with Cohen’s close reading and poetic inquiry. Despite changes in characters’ names and, at times, the merging of multiple real friends into a single character identity to ease the reader’s experience, the back-and-forth of essay and text threads provides an intimacy increasingly familiar to modern CNF. Whether intentional or not, Cohen’s archiving of the digital footprint on the page as a form of narrative structure made me think about the sentence more—those who text with periods, those who use capitalization in text messages, and those who hang on to old-school T9 style syntax. The structure of a text message reveals so much about a character; the closeness of Cohen’s relationships discloses itself in the rapid-fire messages that feel both spur-of-the-moment and deeply inquisitive, in the way that text and instant messaging became a form rooted in the vulnerability of private conversation so easily archived or made public.
As Freak Lip carries the sentence further into Cohen’s life, the early memories of menstruation and sex are compounded by the reality of adult relationship dynamics and their ramifications. Something occurs in this development not unlike the narrative build of Maggie Nelson’s Bluets, when an essay about the color blue and all the people who have ever had anything to say of their affinity for it becomes an essay about Nelson’s pain and betrayal at the hand of a lover. Suddenly, blue–color, blue–sorrow, and something beyond the namable elements of blue engulf the reader in blue as relationship. They can never be separate. This occurs in Freak Lip when the reader is introduced to Oscar.
The narrative of Cohen and Oscar’s relationship builds the desire for a picture-perfect life on unstable ground. Suddenly, a text exploring slowness through the anxiety of adolescent waiting begins to hurry as Cohen and Oscar build a life together despite Oscar’s debilitating heart condition. “Oscar’s heart is baffled. We’re baffled by his heart. There’s a baffle in his heart. He lives with a baffled heart,” Cohen writes as the memoir settles into its center of gravity: the body as sentence, the body has a sentence. The sentence and the body are inseparable; whether said or unsaid, we are tethered. Perhaps in this penultimate section of the book, the unsaid turns toward the unlived and what must be said soon, as Cohen begins to embrace every moment of the couple’s time together, more often in a hospital room than not. Here the tension pulls the reader into each moment, as the exploration of the sentence emerges as a practice in presence and dreaming of what could be—if only Oscar were healthy.
The more present Cohen becomes with Oscar’s health and their relationship, the more this memoir digs its heels into the sand of a familiar narrative: the temporality of a love story. Yet, it is within the hospital trips and dreams of another reality that Cohen introduces the concepts of fault. Each time Oscar apologizes for his heart or another hospital visit, Cohen replies, “Stop apologizing. This isn’t your fault.” Appropriately, this essay appears as a series of facts. “Fact: these stretches of joy are bookended by moments of emergency.” Facts and faults foreshadow the last movement of Freak Lip. What might have been a memoir of self-betrayal, through years of unsaid and unsayable sentences, becomes one of self-actualization when Cohen and Oscar’s relationship ends in betrayal. In the aftermath, the reader can finally find catharsis; Cohen is able to speak at exactly the right time.
Julia Cohen is the author of I Was Not Born (Noemi Press, 2014), a collection of lyric essays, which was translated into German and released by Literaturverlag Droschl. She’s also written two books of poetry, Collateral Light (Brooklyn Arts Press, 2014) and Triggermoon Triggermoon (BLP, 2011). Her nonfiction and poetry appear in issues of The Georgia Review, Southeast Review, The New England Review, Fugue, Heavy Feather Review, Boston Review, and BOMB. She is the Director of Writing Across the Curriculum at Rocky Mountain College of Art & Design, where she teaches creative writing, literature, and composition. She co-curates, with Abby Hagler, a poetry interview series at Tarpaulin Sky Magazine.
Amy Bobeda is a multidisciplinary poet & artist raised on the Amah Mutsun land of the Pajaro Valley. With a background in costume, wig, and makeup design, Amy’s work often focuses on textiles, the reproductive body, and the process of making/unmaking through the menstrual cycle. Amy is the author and artist behind Red Memory (Flowersong Press), What Bird Are You? (Finishing Line Press) and A Blood to Purify the World from Spuyten Duyvil. Amy’s work has been published in The Fairytale Review, Denver Quarterly, Columbia Review, Typo, and elsewhere. Amy serves as Director of the Naropa Writing Center, Visual Arts & Performance, and works as the faculty advisor for Bombay Gin Literary Journal.
Freak Lip is out now from Texas A&M University Press. Grab a copy here. Or order through your local bookstore!
