Anatomical Venus

 What struck me in finishing reading the book of poetry by Courtney Bates-Hardy is the parallel between her experience of car accidents and chronic pain to the life and art of Frida Kahlo. The cover of “Anatomical Venus” is a work of art. The woman on Bates-Hardy’s cover evokes an ancient woman, centered between pillars and columns, ruin is at first felt out especially the broken and crooked column running up the length of the woman’s cavity, exposed and juxtaposed, I was reminded of Kahlo’s 1944 painting, “The Broken Column.” Painted shortly after her spinal surgery, Kahlo is known for the perseverance and undeniable drive she held in creating art throughout a life of chronic pain and disability, all stemming from a traffic accident when she was 18 that left her bed-ridden and physically disabled the remainder of her life. Pain and suffering are an apparent theme through Kahlo’s body of work, but also an explicit theme in Bates-Hardy “Anatomical Venus.” The wonder I gleamed from this body of poetry that creates a subtle interconnectivity with Kahlo is the overarching reality of the existence of art through this pain and suffering of endurance and resilience.

Surrounding Bates-Hardy’s ancient woman are ceremonial bowls lit with a sacred fire, her trance-like eyes pull us in, she is priestess and spiritual being, she is chorded with holy hair and matching teal eyes with wet teal fingers, like blood on her hands, and, what she emotes for me is what women collective have seen with our eyes and written with our fingers, despite the broken column of our spines in worlds designed for men, we survive and thrive with our art. Despite breakage and pain, the column still stands, structural integrity is not compromised. Indeed, both Kahlo and Bates-Hardy are women who never gave up.

“Anatomical Venus” is a repertoire of self-portraits that highlight the role of art as a healing process. Art serves in this style of portraiture to allow Bates-Hardy to express her innermost spaces, the agonizing procedural journey of learning to live with chronic pain yet the body of work in and of itself is revolutionary in challenging societal norms while honouring imperfection as sacrosanct.

The definition of disability branches out conceptually and viscerally to show the congruency of disability to chronic pain and pain to disability. I see this body of literature on English University syllabi of studies in aging and disability. The intersectionality of disability and pain in art informs the artist’s identity and artistic expression. Representation and visibility for individuals with disabilities in literature is necessary.

Courtney Bates-Hardy has published two prominent pieces of literature thus far, “House of Mystery” by ChiZine Publications (2016) and her chapbook, “Sea Foam” by JackPine Press (2013) which laid the groundwork for “Anatomical Venus.” Her poetry has been published in Grain, Vallum, PRISM, and CAROUSEL, for starters. Her accolades include being listed in Best Canadian Poetry 2021 (Biblioasis) and she has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize. Bates-Hardy is queer, neurodivergent, and disabled. She works with a writing group called The Pain Poets. She lives in Regina, Saskatchewan.

In moving through a chronological understanding of a life-change after a roll-over accident, I was drawn to the deeper layers of dialogue with the construct of femininity and the archetype of monster in literature that seeps through “Anatomical Venus.” Womanhood is explored of the pressure on the Mother in patriarchy and that living as a woman in Western society is a morality play. Ultimately, the Mother tries to warn us of what is to come. There are forced timelines of recovery from medical and insurance institutions. There is disruption of life and the writing process due to pain. The path of healing is not universal. The woman’s body positioned within such systems and processes becomes in Bates-Hardy’s reflections historical, something mythical and inevitably, monstrous. In the poem, “A Warning of Monsters” atmosphere and tone of almost carnival horror displays the female body as a freakshow, the monster in literature plays well with a conversation of Venus in Canlit as harrowing. Canadian female characters are neglected and isolated women, women the reader would have disdain for and perhaps pity, their monstrosity and atrocities have been lacking respect of the boundaries and borders of the female body. The monster is terrible too, “she is terrible in her distance.” In “The Birth of Medusa” female figures are mythological and within this story these women hold on to a female rage. There is cycle and process, a priestess and goddess story of movement between life and death, birth and rebirth. “All monsters scream/ when they are born,” there is, in turn, a birthing of monstrosity. Yet, should a woman in pain, a writing woman working through her pain, be considered a monster?

Bates-Hardy flushes out this concept of women vocalizing pain and confronts this dynamic further, I found, coming through the other side of this narrative in the light of reclamation. The systems that plot women’s’ bodies along timelines do not contain language and concepts of the monster and otherworldliness pain can dredge out within the human body. The soul could be left in a web, caught, spun out, ready to be consumed. But, Bates-Hardy snaps the anchors of this web from the frontline. In terms of genetic disabilities, the author speaks of having inherited disorder from her mother, yet, there is a reclamation of the warrior woman archetype here, despite living with chronic pain. “I don’t know what she’s apologizing for,” the author reaches a peak of her reflections of her mother. She does not permit definitions of physical lineage to cancel out the fact that she has inherited from her mother “stubborn wills” and a “get-shit-done attitude.” She is proud of this inheritance, she does not blame her mother. Reclamation and re-imagining of the power of the body is cooled down and applied like balm in an ending poem, my favourite peak of the collection. “What if I grew a garden/ in my bones?” The body becomes a space of healing and source of herbal remedy. This rich imagery let me envision a woman’s body with chamomile running through her veins, “to soothe the flames/ under my skin.” Her body is regeneration, a calling back of a woman’s connection to nature and the healing powers of what can be found in nature, not in systems of Western medicine.

Bates-Hardy contributes a narrative of Venus in Canlit to a woman of ancient vibrations carving out space to vocalize an authentic voice of surviving and striving to heal from a physical accident, when the pain of the female body runs longer and deeper than a singular experience. Something more collective and prolonged is broken open with the unidentified source of wounds of a roll-over. Womanhood in patriarchy is a roll-over accident and the series of events thereafter, the physical, psychological and spiritual painful layers that cannot be identified and articulated by systems designed to hold us. Ultimately, we are cadavers of study and scrutiny, the pockets of love we seek that would listen, to absorb and provide sustenance, are not to be found in pedagogy of Western infrastructure.

I respect that “Anatomical Venus” is steeped in the historical rendering of the female body in Western scientific and clinical medicine. ‘Anatomical’ as relating to bodily structure and the scientific study of the physical body and how it is arranged. Bates-Hardy digs deeper, she evokes a time period between 1780 and 1782 when the ‘Anatomical Venus’ was conceived, a beautified cadaver was created, a replica with a real string of pearls and human hair was affixed to a fake human form with anatomically correct layers that a student could pull apart and study. There is also a book by Joanna Ebenstein that traces an era of the study of female anatomy, the title of the book of poetry is taken from the first chapter of her book. There are references also to “The Birth of Venus” by Botticelli from 1485. In the poem, “The Birth of an Anatomical Venus” the cycle of death to rebirth is hinged from the personal to a collective experience, there are hundreds of women who are Venus, “This is no Botticelli,” because the artist is in control, creating the mold and Venus, she is “open to study.” Her body is wax shaped with wire and she is stuffed, “adorn her with pearls;/ from the sea, she will rise.” Will she? We want her to.

The Endnotes of the poetry of the “Anatomical Venus” shows women in medical study, there is a catalogue of primary sources that informed the writing which gives the impression that the collection of poetry was not a supreme and finite personal representation of disability and chronic pain, like a memoir, but in fact, the sources that informed the body of poetry show a collective and historical library. A probing study, the woman as a specimen of analysis, disconnect. There is inadequacy of medical and Western scientific field of medicine. A field that is not looking in the right places to find the source of her pain. Writing and the act of writing and tools of writing tap into pain, the body and oneness of flesh as the written page; a story to tell. Even writing is unsuccessful to identify pain, pain in body, pain in the writing, pain disrupting the act of writing, “I am tired of writing/ my body.” “This work is sacred,” to be dismembered, writing pain, we face pain, but we expect to live loving, waiting for love that cancels out and alleviates our pain. We yearn for and seek pleasure. The “Sum of Her Parts,” surfaced an Einstein quotation, Bates-Hardy’s language of “spilling and filling,” the woman is polarity, a spectrum encompassing pleasure and pain, but, we are all of it, we experience all of it. And, the final reclamation is for the author and this book of poetry the transcendence of queer love, of finding love in another woman, in another female body. This love makes Bates-Hardy revolutionary, like Kahlo. “Anatomical Venus” could be a classic.

Thank you to Courtney Bates-Hardy, River Street Reads and Radiant Press for the complimentary copy in exchange for an honest review!