We Thought You’d Died

“WE DREAMT OF / Flowers and listening to women / Still, every time / we go to bed / we go to war.” Thus begins the titular poem in Cristine Brache’s latest collection, Goodnight Sweet Thing (2024), a rich, layered, lyrical meditation on mortality, embodiment, womanhood, and the various performances therein. It’s a poem I […]

The post We Thought You’d Died appeared first on Los Angeles Review of Books.

“WE DREAMT OF / Flowers and listening to women / Still, every time / we go to bed / we go to war.” Thus begins the titular poem in Cristine Brache’s latest collection, Goodnight Sweet Thing (2024), a rich, layered, lyrical meditation on mortality, embodiment, womanhood, and the various performances therein. It’s a poem I heard Cristine read for the first time at New York’s KGB Bar in late 2021, when our friendship was new, yet somehow still familiar. Now, several years and many conversations later, when I read “Goodnight Sweet Thing” to myself, I hear my friend’s voice in my head—“Sleep / drowns in the arms of a fallen angel. / Maybe she’s been nauseous since January / like me”—and am reminded that listening to women is not just a gift but a source. Of friendship, yes, but also of art.

Cristine is a multidisciplinary artist whose visual work has been exhibited internationally at galleries and institutions such as Berlinische Galerie and ICA Miami and critically reviewed in places such as The New York Times, Artforum, The New Yorker, and, of course, the Los Angeles Review of Books. Goodnight Sweet Thing is her second collection, but it includes her debut, Poems, previously published by Codétte in 2018. I spoke with Cristine about her artistic practices, the influence of Playboy Playmates, the intersections between visual and written work, near-death experiences, and adapting Goodnight Sweet Thing to performance art, on a blanket in Central Park on the last temperate summer day in New York. I hope you enjoy listening to us.

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ALLIE ROWBOTTOM: Let’s discuss your relationship with Playboy Playmate Dorothy Stratten. She plays an important role in this book and is influential in your visual art as well. Where did the fascination with her begin for you? How has she made her way into your poetry?

CRISTINE BRACHE: I had known about Dorothy as a cult figure representing lost potential, because she died so young. And because she was poised to be the first Pamela Anderson, who started with Playboy and successfully transitioned to Hollywood. Dorothy was supposed to be the person who could represent Playboy as a truly feminist enterprise, where the women are all treated well, and there’s some upward mobility. She died super young, which was also fascinating to me as well. But I got really interested in her when I found out that she wrote poetry. In the documentation of Dorothy’s life, she’s always smiling, but then the words she’s writing are sad, self-aware, full of pain and disappointment with Hollywood. That duality is endlessly fascinating to me. On top of the fact that she just wrote good poems.

In Dorothy’s poem that functions as the epigraph of your book, she equates people with games. Which makes me think of what you were saying last night about near-death experiences, that studying them on YouTube has made life feel more like a game to you.

When I was 13, my friends and I would take Freon out of the central AC unit in my house in Florida. We would fill whole garbage bags with it, tie the end with a rubber band, and inhale. My lips would turn blue and I would pass out. The passing-out part is what remains interesting to me because I realized later that I was having near-death experiences, especially because I remember that my periods of unconsciousness felt very long. I would be in darkness, but I had an intuitive knowing that I was talking to entities. It felt like I was standing before a tribunal of three judges or deciders. Each time I would go, they would have to convince me why I needed to go back to earth. And they would replay potential scenarios of my future. It was almost like a VHS cassette, with them rewinding and forwarding, going through brief moments of me running around a pool with one of my neighbors, laughing. The reasons were not profound. When I woke up, my friends would be huddled over me saying, “Oh my God, we thought you’d died.”

When you were with the tribunal, did you want to go back to earth?

I don’t remember having a strong feeling of yes or no. I didn’t answer your question. What was it again?

I didn’t really ask one but I meant to! What relationships do masking and games have to your work?

Well, all the world’s a stage, and all the men and women are merely players.

Shakespeare was, like, highly evolved. He was like his last life incarnation.

Totally. He was like, “Alright, now I’m on my last life, it’s time to write it down.” I remember the first time I heard that quote, I was in fifth grade and I was just like: Damn, it is a stage, isn’t it?

In Dorothy’s poem, the use of the word games has a negative connotation to it. There’s this implication that she’s being played, but when we talk about near-death experiences and spirituality, I’m thinking about it like, if this plane that we’re on is a kind of fractal of the unison that we experience on other planes, then life as we know it is simply a slower way to process what the beauty of oneness is. It’s not really about how much you achieve materially, but how much you can enrich your sense of presence. I don’t know, I feel like I’m rambling.

No, that’s cool. Because that feels like the point of poetry in some ways. To enrich one’s sense of presence.

I see a poem as a snapshot of presence. Poetry ties the outer world with the inner world and points at extremely specific sensations that we all experience in life.

Most of your poems do seem to explore the relationship between tangible, material elements and the emotional, spiritual, conceptual realm.

I’m a very emotional, very classically confessional poet. I see poetry as a space where I’m really holding my own, where I don’t have to account for anybody. It’s a very protected space for me where I feel I can express myself without feeling bad about what I’m saying or thinking or how other people might feel.

Do you want to talk a little bit about the relationship of your older work to your newer work? Placing them side by side as you do in this collection makes for an interesting exercise. I have observations about the differences that I see.

I’m curious to hear your observations.

Should I tell you now?

Yeah.

It feels to me that in Goodnight Sweet Thing, there’s a heightened sense of dissociation at times, as if we have a disembodied speaker who often observes herself from outside herself. But in Poems, we get more visceral embodiment, comparative to the first part of the book. There’s more sex, for example.

I wrote the first book, Poems, when I was younger. Those poems were more directly about my immediate experience, whereas the poems in Goodnight Sweet Thing are more existential for me. I started writing Goodnight Sweet Thing during COVID-19 lockdown. And I was contemplating death in a way that I really hadn’t before. I also think having some distance from my youth allowed me to reflect more on what is all this. Generally, the new book is about the meaning of life and aging as a woman. And then also notions of performance, which for me is often filtered through the lens of being a woman.

Culturally, we’re enamored with youth, so when you’re young, it’s easy to perform certain kinds of ideal womanhood (even if you, the performer, still feel like a girl). Then you get older and start to see yourself from the outside more; you start to examine that performativity.

One hundred percent. Which also goes back to Dorothy’s poem, and this notion of lost potential, or a false promise. In Poems, my earlier work, the question was how can I reflect on my own youth when I’m still young? But in both books, a fraught relationship to objectification persists. There’s a poem in Goodnight Sweet Thing where I’m like, the only thing I’ll miss is my skin.

I remember you saying that in conversation before. I think you said it on New Year’s Eve. When we were leaving that party, remember?

I probably wrote it down the next day. One way I come up with lines is through conversation. Others start as tweets. Years ago, when I lived in China, I would just tweet one line at that time. And then go back and build poems around those lines or combine them. That’s like the best use of Twitter. I wish more people used Twitter that way.

Yeah, now it feels like people are just on there for the hate. I would like to hear you talk a little bit about the relationship between your poetry and the performance you recently directed of Goodnight Sweet Thing.

Last year when I was starting to put my book together, I was like, I want to adapt this to theater. It felt like a fun exercise. And then I thought, Well, performance art is sort of like the poetry of the stage. And then I was like, Well, what would my poetry look like visually? And I had these flashes in my head of two women mud wrestling, and of Victorian psychoanalysis and the medicalization of women’s emotions, and of hypnosis and mesmerism. So I reached out to Sigrid Lauren, who is an amazing performance artist, and she co-adapted the book with me. She choreographed the performance, and we co-directed it together. I broke apart the book, the poetry, and recontextualized it as dialogue for the performers. So basically 90 percent of everything they said was broken-up poetry, recontextualized to suit what the performers were doing onstage. For example, the two female Jell-O wrestlers became two parts of the same mind. One of the characters expresses the part of the self that is dutifully performing to survive in society and culture. And then the other performer is the part that believes it’s insufferable to perform because you’re betraying yourself. And then the male referee, who later became the mesmerist, plays the part of the patriarchy, the arbiter.

Have you experimented with hypnosis and mesmerism yourself?

I did get hypnotized once. I had gotten really into past life regression. So I went to see this acclaimed past life regression lady from Toronto. It was fucking expensive, like $400, and she didn’t even give me the full hour. I thought it was a rip-off at the end.

Did you have a past life memory?

I don’t know. I did have memories, but how can you tell what’s real or not? I find it interesting that there’s this exploitative side of hypnosis. You can take advantage of someone but what you find in their subconscious could also be true. I like that duality where you don’t really know which one it’s going to be, and that duality shows up in my artwork a lot. Because I feel like in navigating culture, or just interpersonal relationships, you often have directly opposing needs. It’s fascinating to hold space for both of them and not just write them off.

Tell us a little more about your visual art and maybe specifically your recent work influenced by Dorothy Stratten.

I started working in encaustic work. And I made a series inspired by Dorothy Stratten and, more broadly, Playboy Bunnies. I was looking for candid images of them, and then also images of them in relation to men. These images tie to the themes that we’ve been talking about throughout this entire interview, conceptually, and practically, and—what’s the word?—materially. The candids were done with a thicker encaustic process. So the women in the images look like they’re stuck under a frozen lake.

If you had to pick one poem of yours to pair with your paintings, which would it be?

Last Night I Felt Afraid to Die

Remember to turn off the lights
wherever you don’t want to see.

Remember, I am a feather in love
and this world is a thief.

How sick must it make us?
Mop me up and send me the bill.

In another life, I find my fantasy
where the void respects me forever.

What hope is there, if feathers
can no longer fall to the ground with grace?

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