Editorial Note by Max Wallis
Pascale Petit’s second poem in Issue One, House of Puberty, moves deeper into the territory glimpsed in My Mother’s Provençal Dress. If the first poem placed the mother within a vineyard sewn into fabric, here the house itself is transformed into a rainforest, a hallucinatory world where trauma finds its truest shape.
A Welsh mining village terrace becomes a jungle of threat and wonder. The living room teems with caimans, leafcutter ants, anteaters, peccaries. The mother’s mind is carried away by insects; her body speaks in macaws and monkeys; her rocking chair becomes a sandbar where the daughter is both witness and unwilling rescuer.
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This is Petit’s method. The imaginative world of the Amazon overlays the ordinary estate, creating a double vision in which madness and survival are inseparable. Termite nests erupt in the carpet, harpy eagles crash through ceilings, tapirs are crushed under logging trucks. The child sits amid the chaos, naming the roadkill as if language itself might stem the destruction.
Petit’s poetics are feral yet meticulous. The ecological metaphors echo the mother’s refrain: “I shouldn’t have had children, shouldn’t have this trans-Amazon highway carved up my belly.” The daughter’s body, the mother’s body, the body of the rainforest are all violated, all resisting, all burning. This is not metaphor as decoration but metaphor as survival; a poetics that contains the unbearable without diminishing its charge.
Then comes the break in the fever dream: “Why did I do nothing? Why did I just sit there / wanting to be normal?” After so much mythical language, these lines fall heavy with shame and longing. The neighbours’ houses stand in quiet contrast, their children relaxed. To want normality is both an ache and an impossibility.
Petit is one of the foremost surrealist trauma poets writing today. Her landscapes are not backdrops but embodiments of psychological states, each animal and tree carrying the charge of survival. The scar of childbirth becomes the scar of deforestation. The rainforest burns in the living room as memory itself combusts.
This poem is not simply about the past. It is a survival text, a myth that breathes even as it burns.
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