Wound

Richard Scott’s ‘Wound’ takes an unflinching look at the knotty roots of sexual desire from a strikingly original perspective. Artistry and honesty reinforce one another. These poem reveal a powerful new voice, unpredictable in its angles of attack, and ruthless in its pursuit of difficult questions about identity and desire.

Suppose you could travel back, in the obscure regions of memory, to the origin of desire? For Richard Scott, and perhaps for all of us, that beginning point is a wound – an occasion of harm, a lack – that forever after shapes our sense of what it is to want. For the martyred saints on display in the parish church, “devotion is a perpetual hurt.” Scott’s poems chronicle violation – in the van of the unforgettable fishmonger among “the stopped hearts of bivalves pickled in brine/…resting on clouds of ice,” or at the hands of the butcher’s apprentice: “Oh to be your prey!/ Hang me up…” Brave and aching poems, yes, but not merely so; Scott’s resonant language veers between the plain and the rapturous, testifying to the persistence, no matter what, of pleasure.

Mark Doty