On In This Distance by Brooke Sahni

by Tyler Truman Julian

Brooke Sahni’s second full-length collection, In This Distance, is a sensual deep dive into desire and the relationship between those we love and the person we wish to be. Deeply personal, the poems, explore universal themes through the lens of sex and relationship therapist, Esther Perel, and feminist philosopher, Audre Lorde. Sahni lays bare some of humanity’s most vulnerable and private moments as her speaker searches for closure and self-discovery. In This Distance is a tour de force and a continuation of Sahni’s meaningful contribution to contemporary poetry in its interrogation of the self.

The collection frequently relies on unconventional and prose structures to reinforce the narrative form of Sahni’s poetry. Nowhere is this clearer than in the collection’s opening poem, “Notes on Desire, on Distance.” The poem unspools as almost flash fiction, alternating between a narrative of the speaker and her mother finding a dead deer on their property and reflections on sex with a new lover:

When I get even closer, there is a wound so cavernous it appears infinite, an endless
maw that stays open, almost as if the dead could allow, say, yes, to the flies and
wasps who want so deeply to harmonize inside the flesh.

Because we’ve been apart longer than we’ve been together, we word our desire
out of distance. When we’re ravenous, we say so. When we want it raw, we say
so. When we want to devour each other’s mouths, we say so. When we want the
nighttime tenderness of soft limbs, we say so. Cock. Spit. Night. He says, Kismet. O,
you. So much want, we are becoming made of words.

This poem establishes a relationship between pain, love, and words that Sahni readily illuminates across the dark vulnerability of the body. In This Distance explores the power of words and the meaning we give them, interrogating what Audre Lorde means when she writes, erotic, and what desire-dripped sexts imply for her speaker separated from her lover. In “Knowledge Deeply Born,” Sahni’s speaker listens to a recording of Audre Lorde reading one of her essays and reflects,

my favorite part is when you say Satisfaction doesn’t have to be called, god, marriage,
man, afterlife—I love
how much room that leaves, how much endless space for the most essential things
to grow and yet remain unnamed, so in this way I do understand the comments on
the screen, women writing So, what is the erotic? Does anyone know what she’s really
talking about? A mutual confusion spreading through cyberspace. And there are a lot
of things I don’t know, but I think I get this: something deeply rooted, and therefore,
always, unnamable, unspeakable, I think of how my lover loves to call me a witch and
I pretend to take offense—but really, I know he is trying to put a word to this thing
brewing inside me, this thing I don’t dare try to name.

As Shani’s speaker explores the power of words, she reinforces that there is an element of holy mystery to them. This mystery is present in the desire she feels, the sacredness of the sex act, and ultimately in her concept of the universe, as evidenced in “A Case Against Omitting the O in God”:

            I’ll admit it: sometimes I do like it without the o.
            Not out of respect, the reason some of my Jewish kin write it—g-d—
            but because I like the way it looks. G-d.
            So wholly unfinished, incomplete like the term itself,
            so opposite of ardent, fever, or cock, ache
            honeysuckle or even moon or bloom, with their double o’s
            so much like breasts. God,
            so incapable of getting at what’s most holy and reverent—
            it doesn’t even sound nice like horoscope, willow, bewitch,
            catacomb, or languid.

            But really, I love the o,
            the letter, the sound, the shape.
            How it makes me think of fullness,
            the body’s ecstasy cresting at the mouth
            in the shape of an O. O-pen, ode, orgasm, you.
            Because if we are going to assign a word
            to all of the multiplicities,
            it should at least have its center,
            circular like the sun and moon and the earth,
            circular and never-ending,
            so when people see it on the page
            they might be reminded of life—
            and there is so much life.
            Remember how good it felt to sup on the beloved?
            Or to sit alone, needing no one, and autumn?
            When autumn was bursting
            all around you?

Grappling with her understanding of God, the speaker’s reverence is mirrored in reflections on her previous lover, the grief of losing him, and the beauty and challenge of putting desire into words:

You, with three letters and an o in the center,
like god.

Like god,
there’s worship.

Worship the distance
that keeps you in our lexicon,

us saying, more of you, o, you.

Or sometimes just you. You as a declaration,
you as longing, of course, as longing,

you as an elegy, all the parts of you
I don’t know—to say no to you,

to say fuck you, how are you, keep you
maybe one day to be done with you,

to say I don’t need you—

            But first let us meet again
            to sigh yes, to say you.
            O, to say you.

(“An Ode to You, For You”)

There is a tension between all-encompassing desire and a reassertion of the self evident in “An Ode to You, for You.” This same tension flexes through the poems of the collection, as Sahni’s speaker wrestles with God, loss, and new love. In “An Ode to the Minutes Before You Touch Me,” the speaker more clearly articulates this tension:

For now, I am everything and you are everything.
The gift of the imagination is this:

I get to see myself how I want to be seen; I get to build myself
within the architecture of our desire.

We have not touched one another, or eaten together,
or danced, or laughed hard,

we haven’t felt pain in the same vicinity or talked
about our childhoods. And still

I have been joyous under your gaze and words only,
you have lived a life inside this distance

Sahni’s collection begs questions like how does one keep themselves amid desire and how does one see themselves once that desire is consummated, either well or poorly? These questions recur throughout Sahni’s poems, as in “An Ode to the Minutes Before You Touch Me,” and “Carve,” a poem in which the speaker dreams she is the first woman, Eve, in the middle of a sexual encounter with Adam:

                                    I do not tell you how I was born knowing my femaleness, how I
                                                know every
                                    crease and fold. That when I share that part of myself with you, I
                                                never mistake it
                        to be yours. In the dream, I look down at your mouth there,
                                    my brown, earthen self becoming animated. Normally I would
                                                call out.
            But here, in this latent passage, I surrender. You have important work to do.

Sahni’s speaker asserts herself, seeking and phrasing pleasure in a way that serves her needs. Desire and pleasure are wrapped in Lorde’s understanding of the erotic, not as pornographic but as knowledge and power. Even in “Politically Incorrect Ode,” a poem in which the speaker would “like to forget about feminism” and “these poems— / the endless search for my autonomy,” she asserts her personhood by owning her desire and pleasure, the gift of herself to another:

            Today I want to dissolve
            into the creases of your words; I want to escape
            into the Edens of your flesh.
            I do not want to eat
            but be eaten.
            Today I am the sacrament, not the altar.

It is in this same understanding of self that the speaker declares, “Holy is the way we look at one another in order to see ourselves anew,” which reflects Lorde’s claim that “the erotic is the divine within ourselves” and Perel’s belief that “an affair is an attempt to recover some lost part of ourselves” (“On Contemplating the Future of You, I Pull the Warrior Rune and it Says Divine”). This context furthers the ideas in “Politically Incorrect Ode.” Sahni connects holiness with desire and self-discovery throughout her speaker’s efforts to parse out what relationship means, and this connection is challenging and beautiful, but also frightening as her speaker sacrifices a stable relationship for a new, uncertain one. Still, the attempts to understand desire and love are where the speaker develops her autonomy, finds herself. It is the search that matters. Without it, she “would no longer be granted the thrill of a lustrous beginning or a devastating but beautiful end, but the perpetual middle ground of a long and lonely book” (“Perhaps if we understood desire,”).

In This Distance is vulnerable in its hunger, its carnality. The work is also shocking as it plumbs the depths of connection, desire, and whatever sacredness exists between these two words. Sahni has drafted poems raw in their subject matter and bracing in their structures, detail, and message. Beautiful and stimulating, Sahni’s work is a must read. Anyone who has ever loved can place themselves in these poems; however, in doing so, they’ll come away tasked with necessary self-reflection.

In case you missed it—check out Sahni’s poem “The Sensuous Woman by J.” in Issue Six of The Shore