That Ex, writer and editor Rachelle Toarmino’s debut poetry collection, came out last summer with Big Lucks Books. God, does this book vibe. It vibes way down in the bones of every relationship you’ve ever had, of every love you’ve lost or are afraid to lose. Like the Libra the author is, That Ex is all cool sophistication and casual glamour on the surface while bubbling up with eager tenderness and brutal honesty underneath. Toarmino gives herself and her reader permission to revel in the love poem while never letting anyone forget that emotional apocalypse is around the corner, that there’s something exploitative in documenting your love, that there’s nothing we crave more than total devastation.
At the beginning of the pandemic, I was reading think pieces about anticipatory grief, a term that continues to be thrown around during this period of universal loss. That Ex speaks to that kind of fearful breath-holding: we know something disastrous is going to happen but must push on with living anyway. The speaker’s relationship status is constantly in flux from poem to poem. In “I Wanted to Ask You,” the speaker is in a relationship. In “I Said Okay,” the speaker admits “what doesn’t kill you / makes you mad for the rest of your life” and as a reader, one is left on unsteady ground, looking apprehensively into the future, knowing what has been lost and wondering what else there is to lose. Toarmino references the poems’ speaker as “that ex,” but the speaker could also be the you (or multiple yous) comprising the addressees of these love poems, hate poems, and I-couldn’t-care-less-about-you poems. Either way, even the title of this collection casts every use of the future and past tenses into turmoil: we know this will end, but when? Who is that ex? Will I be next?
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Gion Davis: What makes a person “that ex”? Is there any way for a woman/femme to process her grief or anticipatory grief about a relationship without becoming “that ex,” or is it impossible to escape the patriarchal, misogynistic and contradictory expectations of being a perfect woman even after a relationship has ended?
Rachelle Toarmino: We all know that ex—the one who can’t let go. I wanted the title to nod to a gossipy recognition—we’re expected to know what someone means when they qualify a noun with that—as so much of the book is about having fun with the term’s reclamation. What’s less chill-girl than writing a whole book about your breakups?
I’m also interested in the grammar of that and how it communicates a subject making an object out of something. That is the direction of an outstretched finger—no word in the English language does more pointing than that. But then a magic happens when my speaker, after finding herself on the receiving end of that looking, turns to the reader and yells “Look!” She resists objectification by insisting on the significance of her pain—its power to be interesting, even.
To answer your question, though: I simply don’t care. Our misogynistic culture, in my experience, goes crazy over finding things wrong with the way women process grief, and I don’t think we can ever make ourselves small and accommodating enough to get off the hook from that age-old male bonding ritual of “You know how women can be.” So: That Ex also means fuck it.
We’ve talked before about the distinction between poet and speaker, person and persona. How do you see objectification relating to that distinction?
GD: Objectification is an inescapable part of being femme, like you saying women can’t ever make themselves small and accommodating enough, there’s no way to escape the gravity well of the male gaze and the male experience of femininity. If you’re raised with the societal expectations put upon femmes to receive the male gaze, you are taught to be simultaneously afraid of and attracted to it. You’re afraid of your dad’s friends telling you what a heartbreaker you are as a child, but you also want that version of yourself because you want to be Angelina Jolie. And I had to finally give myself permission to stop being afraid.
I sometimes joke in readings that no one is a bigger sex symbol in my life than me, and it’s a joke but it’s also true. Objectification is a big part of my work because it’s a big part of my life. I have a front I put up who is objectified, and she is me, but she’s also a performance. I want the performance of being objectifiable because it’s one way I can take myself back from men and, honestly, women too. If I can’t stop it, I can control the way it happens and the distance I have from it. And that’s where poetry comes in. I can put those two halves of myself together there and let them play with each other and it’s the truest version of myself.
One thing I love about That Ex is its unapologetic honesty. Do you feel like facing objectification and saying fuck it has created a new relationship to truth or perceived truth, in your poems or your identity?
RT: Totally. I write to get closer to a version of myself and my world that feels true, which That Ex did for me. Saying fuck it has brought me a renewed sense of authority to derive joy and purpose from painful experiences—to create art from them, to turn them into objects. I like Joan Didion’s approach: You use your material.
I’m thinking about what you call unapologetic honesty and how I had practiced crafting the voice of That Ex on social media, a space where shamelessness is rewarded. It’s likely that I learned to perform her persona online—I’ve joked in the past about the speaker of my tweets—before I even started many of the poems. Do you see your poetics at all informed by the activity, performance, or spectacle of social media?
Via Big Lucks
GD: Oh definitely. My chapbook Love and Fear and Glamour is essentially about the longing and anxiety sparked by a romance conducted primarily on my phone, and a lot of my writing is, for better or worse, informed by the constant question of “Will this track on Instagram?” Even just this past year, I’ve found myself writing shorter poems so they’ll fit on an Instagram story, and it’s worked so I’ve kept doing it.
I love what you said about deriving joy from painful experiences, and I think both social media and poetry have helped me with that. Even if social media is a bubble, it can be a place to receive validation and closure on painful things you might otherwise not be able to get, and the same goes for poetry. I love the idea that my poems might get found on social media and really touch someone and help them feel validated in their own experience. And speaking of finding poems on social media, can you say more about Peach Mag and your mission in founding it?
RT: I cofounded Peach Mag with my friends Matthew Bookin and Bre Kiblin in 2016 to build a space for emerging poets, writers, and artists to share their work and discover each other—in both of our homebases, Buffalo and online. We publish two features per week of either one to three poems, a short story, a creative essay, or a visual art series, as well as two monthly special features: “Favorite Books,” a column edited by Sebastian Castillo in which previous contributors and friends of the journal are invited to share their autobiography in books, and a new interview series spotlighting the creative, experimental, often brief, often shoestring, and always underreported-upon projects of indie lit. We also produce print anthologies, organize live and virtual events, and host an editorial apprenticeship for emerging teen editors. Nearly five years and five hundred contributors later, we haven’t lost sight of what originally brought the project together: friendship, the internet, and play.
I agree with you: It’s exciting to think that your poems might be discovered by a stranger who could love them. And online publishing makes that wish more possible, more immediate. When originally imagining the format of Peach Mag, we knew that we wanted to publish online because of the experiences that had shaped our own lives as writers—and the friends and sense of community that those experiences brought us. And when deciding on the journal’s frequency, our hope was that these bite-sized features could be experienced by anyone, no matter how busy their life might be—in a single sitting, we thought, like on a break at work. We were millennials making something informed by being millennials.
Your music writing journal Rhinestone Magazine lives entirely on Instagram. Could you tell me a little about that decision?
GD: That format was one of the main reasons I was so drawn to Peach Mag when I first discovered it and one of the reasons that, when I was starting Rhinestone Magazine, I initially chose Instagram as its platform. I published micro-essays about music formatted to ten slides or less, which demanded condensing the writing down to just the essentials. If your outer limit is 600 words, there’s no wiggle room. It produced some really great writing; it boils it down to what the writer is actually feeling, which is all I ever want to read. And in the vein of objectification, I think any social media platform crystalizes the content into little objects you can observe and like or even want but you can’t interact with in the way you might interact with a book or a song or a piece of art. This content becomes the condensed version of ourselves and the parts of us we allow to be objectified, whether it’s a tweet or a poem or a selfie.
Are there any moments you had with That Ex where you found yourself resisting the impulse to condense a poem for the comfort of others? Any moments where you feel you truly got to be the unedited version of yourself?
RT: Yes—thank you for asking. I had that exact experience during the final formatting of “I SAID OKAY” and “REBOUND (ONE MORE TIME),” two poems that come at the ends of the book’s (unofficial) two parts and that mark moments of reflection, resolve, and clarity for the speaker—on her relationships to love, resentment, interrelationality, possession, wonder, expression, persona, and more. She’s explicitly addressing the reader in these moments; I like to think of her leaning in over a two-person table in an incandescent café when she says “I mean really / can you imagine.” I set these poems in small pieces—really no more than one to five lines per page—over the course of eighteen and sixteen pages, respectively. I wanted to reflect the speaker’s slow, cool, and expanding confidence by allowing her to take her time, to take up as much space as she wanted. Throughout the course of the book I loved giving her whatever she wanted.
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Gion Davis is a queer poet from northern New Mexico where she grew up on a sheep ranch. Her poetry has been featured in Wax Nine Journal, SELFFUCK, and others. She has received the Best New Poets of 2018 Prize selected by Ocean Vuong. She is the editor of Rhinestone Magazine and her chapbook Love & Fear & Glamour was published in 2019. She graduated with her MFA in Poetry from the University of Massachusetts Amherst in 2019 and currently lives in Denver, Colorado. Gion can be found on Instagram @starkstateofmind & on Twitter @gheeontoast.
