Unbound & Branded (review)

If one defines a chapbook as a tightly themed exploration of a single subject, then Christine Stewart-Nuñez's Unbound & Branded is the perfect chapbook. Like her previous collection from Finishing Line Press, The Love of Unreal Things, which explores the life of St. Catherine of Siena, Unbound & Branded takes the life of a woman as its subject, this time supermodel Kate Moss. Stewart-Nuñez shows her versatility in this jump, taking as her muse not just the woman herself but Moss's role as waif icon through an exploration of the September 2003 issue of W magazine. This issue, which features a portfolio of Moss photographs and paintings, is Stewart-Nuñez's canvas. Taking selected portraits as the subject for her poems, Stewart-Nuñez attempts to dissect and unravel Moss's mystique, and, in the attempt, loses herself: "I'm no closer / to knowing her than / when I first traced my name / across her lips." Unbound & Branded is an incredible collection of images and pop-culture iconography that ranges from the witty to the brilliant.

With the skill of a self-confessed "lepidopterist," Stewart-Nuñez teases Moss like a modern-day Lovelace with an enigmatic Clarissa. She seems confounded by Moss's ubiquitous presence in our world, her inability to extract value from Moss's flaunted reticence. As she quotes in the Alexander Bolomolny epigraph to "Geometry of Moss," the model belongs to the realm of "pure abstractions, creations of the human mind." Moss is what you make of her, and this slipperiness is what both infuriates the poet and drives Unbound & Branded, as the oxymoronic title implies. In "Obsession," a masterfully crafted sestina that plays with Moss's work for the Calvin Klein perfume ads, Stewart-Nuñez focuses on the way Moss's beauty affects Anne, a thirteen-year-old girl gripped by Moss's spell. Simultaneously predictable yet clever, Stewart-Nuñez turns the nature of the obsession around, from that of lovers to that of the young woman mercilessly self-destructing to fit Moss's ideal. The poem touches on the ever-raging controversy over models' emaciated bodies (epitomized by Moss). She is described as "a mere whisper—the perfect model." Yet Stewart-Nuñez does not simply cater to a feminist sensibility by echoing the large body of work that discusses the silencing of girls vis-à-vis their silent models. She crafts a metaphoric relationship—grounded in sharp syntax and clear images—that defines Moss's power over the imagination in just that which makes her so detestable to her critics. Anne desires Kate's "hollowness of body," a phrase that refers not only to her physical proportions but also to her status as vessel. In the envoy, Stewart Nuñez writes, "Anne joins Kate on the wall, fills blank spots / as the one girls long to be. They'll look / at her body—a perfect, two-dimensional model." The poem is a departure in that, unlike the other poems in the collection, it does not focus on a portrait from the W retrospective of Moss herself, but rather on a Steven Klein photograph of a room (perhaps a young girl's room) covered with photographs of Moss. In many ways, this poem is the heart of the collection, taking Moss's influence away from the public stage, as Klein does, and into the private world of a young girl alone in her room with a glossy magazine, scissors, and tape.

At the same time, Stewart-Nuñez is able to connect herself to Moss's subversive abilities. In "Red Light District," a restrained series of couplets based on photographs by Michael Thompson, she draws Moss

mouth parted

as if she meansto speak. Instead,

the camera flasheslike a punch,

sealing wordswithin her.

What would Moss say if allowed to speak unmediated? We never know; the brutal "punch" of the camera always silences her and imposes its own meanings. Moss is a victim in this poem, "black / and crimson," a "cluster on her neck / like a bruise," her...