The Beautiful, Collected Poems of Michelle Tea
Poetry Review
All of her work draws from her own real life experiences, starting with growing up in working class Chelsea Massachusetts and eventually Provincetown, Tucson, and San Francisco.
She first gained notable success not as an author but as a poet, in San Francisco's then-popular poetry scene of the early 1990's. She organized tirelessly with other self-identified queer poets and gained some local notoriety with her own spoken word performances and chapbooks sold in coffeehouses, bars and bookstore of San Franscisco for next to nothing.
She is also credited with the founding of Sister Spit, a traveling lesbian performance poetry road show which included such poetry greats as Eileen Myles.
Tea's first collection of poetry, The Beautiful, is a compilation of those chapbooks as well as other previously unpublished poems from Tea's early years in San Francisco. Many of the poems allude to characters and people in her other works and in her real life, providing a sense of familiarity.
Ode to Chelsea
In her poem Ode to Chelsea, we read about a familiar story of Tea's early teen years: "I was caught shoplifting lipgloss/in the kmart but never caught smoking cigarettes/in the public bathrooms, smoking was fun Chelsea."
The Beautiful
Tea has been called a voice of the queer urban subculture emerging as gay, lesbian and transgender individuals are becoming somewhat more noticed in mainstream media.
And this is what this collection of poems seems to be primarily about: Tea's relationship with America which is like that of a codependant woman in a somewhat abusive relationship.
In the title poem of the collection, The Beautiful, she writes as if America is a girl she is dating: "can I process/my bad relationship/with America/can we go to/couple's counseling."
Mc Donalds
In her poem McDonalds, the girl America takes her money while offering limited choices for spending what she has left: "I ate the burger/because I only had/two dollars/I had three but one/for the bus."
Tea's poetic constructions get their in-your-face punch from the short-story narrative style of her poems. As with her other works, the poems vividly illustrate her life, tender-hearted and soft as well as direct, brutal, and strongly feminist. Those unused to her style of combining her compassion with her frankness may view her as offensive or shocking.
In her poem Johns Who Don't Pay Are Rapists, she writes about some of her experiences as a prostitute: "but with a gun that flashes/on the mirrored walls and/what do they do they throw me/onto the bed and/it is about consent".
Michelle Tea continues to a be a loud and strong feminist voice for straight and gay women alike.
Tea, Michelle, The Beautiful, Collected Poems, Manic D Press, San Francisco, 226 pages
(IBSN: 0-916397-89-0)
The Beautiful, Collected Poems
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