Hemorrhaging Want & Water by Emily Marie Passos Duffy
Perennial Press, 2023
Hemorrhaging Want & Water by Emily Marie Passos Duffy settles deep beneath the skin and explodes like an orgasm on the tongue. Complex and tender, Duffy explores the human condition and its alchemical rhythms through the kaleidoscopic lens of longing and pleasure. Multiple cities act as backdrops, and place is a main character alive with possibility.
A gem-studded shapeshifter, the speaker dances amidst cultural and familial histories, intimate hungers, and expansive griefs. Duffy’s poems paint a panorama of life in 21-century cities through the eyes of an ever-evolving woman and artist. She tangles word and flesh with dauntless vulnerability, wrapping readers in the glittery residue of ecstatic experience.
The speaker is a flâneuse who wanders with curiosity and self-awareness, attuned to the chords that resound and move within a city. In “Alias,” Duffy writes, “Once you’ve been in one city a map starts to grow inside of you. / Once you’ve been in one city you’ve been in every city.”
Cities come alive at night. When the sun goes down their secrets start to peek around corners and invite you in. The streets undress each golden hour, and moonlit paths pulsate under feet. Alongside the speaker, readers traverse countless avenues exploring thresholds of desire and embodiment. Tendrillar and amaranthine as a city, we too unfurl and flourish alongside the speaker in sinuous ruas and musical becos.
Throughout the collection, the speaker interacts with another character, an eponymic persona called Alias.
In the poem titled “Alias,” Duffy writes:
Time is a luxury, like space.
She (the experiment[er]) self immolates at least twice a day.
…Who is she but the embodied need to disappear
indefinitely only to return, put together, on a street
corner, surrounded by friends and wearing a
matte lip stain.
Who is she but your best self staring back at you—
Here, the speaker ruminates on how to navigate sex work and transactional intimacy through the use of the personae—and in turn, leads to new becomings and discoveries about herself.
Holographic ads, street art, and sidewalk oracles materialize in cities like Lisbon, Hong Kong, Salvador da Bahia, Setúbal, Valença, and other stretches of land (and memory) across mapped boundaries.
In “Companion,” Duffy writes:
I’ve perfected my grieving
Now it just looks like something it’s not
And smells like burst pipes in a hotel hallway
I leave stains everywhere I go
The speaker leaves behind traces of herself across various time zones—stains from menstrual blood, sex, tears, sweat, chrysanthemums, poems. She shows us that humans and landscapes contain multitudes, often overlapping and bleeding into each other.
Hemorrhaging Want & Water soothes and arouses, like a body dancing in a watery current. It’s neon manicures, stilettos on cobblestone streets, secrets hidden in sheets hung out to dry in the Lisbon breeze.
While remaining porous and open to the world, Duffy’s poems always return to the deeply rooted intimacies within the self. She punctures the space between story and sex, “the only two things that really exist,” as she writes in “Epiphenomenal.” She reminds us that pleasure is a vital form of knowledge, and desire is what keeps us alive—that we are made divine by our embodied experiences.
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Sarah Alcaide-Escue is a writer and artist from Florida. She is the author of Bruised Gospel (The Lune, 2020), and she received an MFA in Creative Writing and Poetics from Naropa University. Her work has recently appeared in Mud Season Review, The Literary Review, The Meadow, *apo- press, Always Crashing, and Reliquiae, among other spaces.