Broken Pencil Issue 23
Greentree’s second collection, Go-go Dancing for Elvis, begins with an overly simplistic framework that juxtaposes two sisters (the pretty, exciting one versus the boring, domestic one) and devolves to self-flagellation. It’s dead dull.
One sister travels the world as an "exotic" knee-high boot wearing go-go dancer for an Elvis impersonator. The sister who stays home to renovate her house and play with power tools (both literally and figuratively) describes herself as a crippled Deborah Kerr from An Affair to Remember and spews long, Harlequin-worthy passages about vanilla sex with an emotionally distant lover.
With a clunky writing style that neglects fussy matters such as flow, word choice and rhythm, Greentree toddles between seriousness and idiocy: "the day I realize I will die alone the only thing to do is go/ shopping," she writes in her poem "the apples I will add."
The effect is rather funny in "my breasts and I" with, "I didn’t like to be on top because my breasts swung wildly for reasons that had nothing to do with prudery and everything/ to do with television." And in her steamroller approach to poetry, Leslie Greentree manages to flatten an otherwise vivid image of a daydream comparison between the sexual techniques of Jean-Luc Picard and Hawkeye Pearce.
What’s unfortunate here is the poems that stray from Greentree’s over-arching themes of sibling rivalry, jealousy and household renovation are actually quite engaging, as though the collection's framework prevents her from full expressive capacity.
"Fargo’s, Whyte Avenue," for example, is darkly sublime: "I watch the solitary drinkers/ the waitress/ the way your hair falls over your eyes/ you look up to ask/ which is more phallic - / to be shot/ or stabbed."
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