In Aya Kanbar’s ‘The Calf,’ Desire Becomes a Form of Loneliness

Aya Kanbar’s third poetry collection turns desire into a theatrical language of isolation, according to Dagens Nyheter’s review of “The Calf.”

The 22-year-old poet has tightened her formal approach while retaining what reviewer Gabriel Itkes-Sznap describes as an almost eruptive linguistic force. The book opens with lines from Madonna’s “Don’t Tell Me,” presenting a bed as both a final resting place and a helpless slaughtered animal. For the reviewer, that image offers a direct key to the collection’s loneliness.

The publisher presents “The Calf” as a modern lesbian interpretation of Patrick Süskind’s “Perfume.” Kanbar’s own language, however, becomes the review’s central focus. Itkes-Sznap portrays her as a poet guided by her ear, someone who surrenders to the knowledge and uncertainty carried by words.

The book returns to Paris, a setting that also appeared in Kanbar’s first two collections, “Hyperreality” and “Evening Street.” This time, her theatricality and interest in masks and staging take the form of a play. G and Lucia occupy its center in a three-act passion story whose titles come from the world of perfumes.

G appears as an ancient fire held by new brass, while Lucia arrives in a white evening dress on the steps of an opera house. Lucia speaks in a sacred register and offers herself to G as a landscape of silk and honey. Yet the reviewer says readers never become fully certain what happens between the women or why their intense connection breaks as quickly as it forms. One possible explanation is that the connection was never real.

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tell the bed not to lay/like the open mouth of a grave, yeah/not to stare up at me/like a calf down on its knees