Vacuuming and fangirling during a climate catastrophe
In 2007, disgraced pop princess Britney Spears opened her infamous VMA performance with a lip-synced cover of Elvis Presley’s Trouble, before staggering cheerlessly into a new song called Gimme More. Moving through a choreography that evoked a robot mimicking human dance, it is a performance that has gone down as a crucial, infamous piece of lore in the Britney Spears mythos. Hyped as a comeback, prior to the release of her long-awaited fifth album Blackout, the performance meant to signal Spears’ return to the spotlight after years of media surveillance and tabloid scrutiny, in which her personal tragedies came to be the defining, blistering spectacles of her public character. “My team was pressuring me to get out there and show the world I was fine,” Spears recounted in her 2023 memoir The Woman in Me. “The only problem with this plan: I was not fine.”
In a poem called “it’s britney, bitch,” poet Deirdre Camba zooms into the celebrity of Spears at this particular point in time, mingling the train wreckage of her public persona with the physical, godlike skill of her onstage presence: “she, still / alive, luminous, and blonde / after two failed marriages, a clinically diagnosed / emotional breakdown… navel / exposed to every burning / gaze.” There isn’t a trace of scrutiny or pliant sympathy in the speaker’s voice, but a luminous reverence that positions Britney Spears’ creative efforts not as tragic or grim, but aspirational. The poet, transfixed and “weeping over the / futility of words,” sees in Spears an ultimate inspiration capable of transforming catastrophe into catharsis: “Pull out of words / their most wretched / simplicity; do not be / afraid of finding nothing / there.” Out of the howling throb of nothingness, Camba bursts open the work of poetry.
“it’s britney, bitch” is the first poem of Camba that I encountered and it is reproduced in—and opens—her debut collection a chain is a house to sleep in. It’s a poem especially instructive for understanding Camba’s approach to language—like Spears’ Gimme More, Camba pulls from the jagged corners of desire, picking up fragments of a self lost to mysterious, sometimes violent forces, to come up with something all-consuming and specific.
The collection contains three parts that chart Camba’s engagements with fandom, pop culture, and religion, towards meditations on climate collapse (or as she calls it, the “Instapocalypse”), family, and her hometown of Marikina. These seemingly disparate facets of Camba’s poetry find cohesion through a speaker that’s darkly humorous, quick-witted and, just like many of us, perpetually scrolling. “super hot ghost” imagines the speaker’s funeral, fueled by the one hope that she looks irresistibly alive: “Make me sunburnt / and juicy, like I just had / an impossible night’s / sleep…” But what undercuts all this fantasizing is the very real, increasingly possible threat of death itself: “...I don’t want to die / necessarily. But we’re floating / the idea in case / everything else sinks / in my fringe of the city.”
Flooding, typhoons, ungodly climate all seep into the dark comedies and heartrending romances of Camba’s poetry. The poem “sewage as epilogue” opens with a passage from the K-drama Record of Youth: “I want to get rained on.” Elsewhere, Camba name-drops Park So-dam, of Parasite fame, and also one of the leads in Record of Youth, in the unbelievably titled “la mesa dam vs. park so dam.” One might argue that Camba’s one great subject is the weather, this phenomenon of place and atmosphere—which also makes sense as the interior weather as well: depression, grief, lovesickness.
All over this collection, Camba seems to be working through these aspects of the weather in real-time. Thematically, “me and my vacuum, doing better,” one of the great, longer poems in this book, oscillates between the mundane tasks of daily life, capitalist critique, and depressive ruminations. Our speaker can’t quite see beyond the “turd-shaped holes / in the cheap cathedral / gelatin of [her] grief.” There’s a soft and inviting, albeit self-deprecating, quality to these reflections that resemble the way routine and repetition can hold us during depressive episodes: “The best thing about me is I never / know what I’m cleaning, but I always am.”
a chain is a house to sleep in holds us, too. Reading Camba’s poetry, at a time when language often fails to capture the gross neglect and political injustices that have brought about climate catastrophe, when it is often subsumed by media structures meant to keep us on a dopamine hamster wheel, is a resounding comfort that refuses to shy away from the messy, even funny passages of adulthood.
