EARTHBODYBOAT

A nonbinary soul wrestles with the past and connects with nature in this kaleidoscopic meditation.

Sipowicz, a visual and performance artist who identified as a woman for 50 years before adopting plural pronouns and embracing genderfluidity, examines their multidimensionality in poetry, family reminiscences, political advocacy, and art. Among the threads in the tapestry are the author’s identification with their pagan forebears in Lithuania; their shame-ridden childhood and tense relationship with their mother; and their communion with Baba Yaga, the legendary crone of Eastern European folklore, as a model for mature femininity. (Sipowicz includes the script of their Baba Yaga performance piece.) The author also addresses their explorations of landscapes around their New Mexico home; their relationships with their Native American ex-wife and Hindu guru, which were complicated by Sipowicz’s angst over their own “Whiteness, causing so much suffering and dis-ease / in my own Body, in this world”; and their citation for public indecency for exposing their breasts during an anti–Donald Trump protest, the incident that inspired this book. The author includes self-expression exercises for readers as well (“Let your lips curl back to show your teeth,” and “Make sounds of growling or screeching like birdcalls of warning,” they suggest in a section on “Embodiment Tools for Being with Anger and Grief”). Sipowicz’s vibrant art is one of the volume’s most arresting features. These images are mainly manipulated photographic self-portraits with blurry, distorted faces and features washed and streaked with bright colors that shade from pastel to almost neon, set against backgrounds of gnarled branches and root systems, pebbly soil, or crinkled granite. The union of throbbing, ethereal color with tangled, earthy textures aptly conveys the theme of spirituality embedded in organic life. Sipowicz’s poetry sounds a similar note, with militant overtones. (“It’s not depression / But an inheritance of oppression / that does not value Earth Women Body Openings / Earthwomanbodyopenings / Earthwomanbodyopenings / You are God woman!”) The author’s style can be heavy going at times, but when they speak plainly about pain and loss (“I didn’t go to my mother when she was dying; I was too angry with her, and frightened that she would try to take me with her. Since, I’ve been haunted by the feeling that she had a lonely death”), their writing is emotionally rich and moving.

Murky mysticism and woke soapboxing are redeemed by gripping confessional prose and luminous artworks.