KRISTINE ESSER SLENTZ Breathes New Voice into Her “Amended” Manifesto, Exhibit: an amended woman, depose
by Becca Downs
Anyone who has endured trauma or major grief knows finding one’s voice in the aftermath is no easy feat. It requires space to breathe, to recollect oneself, to survive, and to have time to reflect and understand one’s experiences. And still, trauma finds a way to haunt through it all. To write a book takes even more effort and understanding, and often the author must find their voice again and again, taking different shape each time.
In her newly-released book published by FlowerSong Press, Exhibit: an amended woman, depose, Slentz amends her original manifesto with new and edited works, pushing the conversation about a woman’s strength even deeper and challenging the status quo. This collection calls for change when it comes to how we — as a society, under a system — treat survivors of sexual violence.
The collection sets a sharp and unforgiving tone by opening with a blackout poem in which the annotated words “PLEASE” and “LISTEN” border an official document, presumably about a “sexual violation,” two of the few words not redacted from the document.
We also are introduced to woman 1, in “EXHIBIT,” who is clearly worn down by a person? a place? society? or any unnamed entity we can project onto this nameless woman. Woman 1 and woman 2 converse in exhibits throughout the book, interspersed among blackouts, free verse, and annotated poems.
As the book progresses, the reader is often invited to slow down, particularly with poems that are heavily graffitied and annotated. About mid-way through the collection, a document is nearly entirely blacked out but for the words “limited resources provided.” The rest of the document is covered in a jumble of numbers and scratches, along with the numbers for 9-1-1, Planned Parenthood, and Planned Parenthood in Seattle. The effect is an intentionally unsettling feeling of desperation.
A few pages later, another blackout poem is graffitied with words and drawings reminiscent of teenage musings – a mix of rainbows, X’s and O’s, and all-caps pejoratives like “WHORE” and “SILLY LITTLE HOE.” The contrast is chilling, particularly to those who recall the transition from childhood to womanhood. And having to turn or tilt the book to catch each word in these graffitied poems encourages a slowness needed to properly sit with big emotions — grief itself cannot be rushed, after all.
The arc of the book follows a chaotic and confusing grieving process — the speaker’s thoughts jumble, question, and pulse between angry, exhausted, resentful, and, ultimately, resilient. In “knot running,” the speaker ends with, “that she will tell / in voice, vision, / and vindication / not from him / or your sorrow, but from knots / of passed ancestors / from living elders / and us who have gone now.” This looking outward — to the past and the future along a string of knots connecting — achieves an advanced stage of grief one might reach when they have the capacity to carry, even briefly, the grief of others.
In EXHIBIT: an amended woman, depose we find a queer woman at first so stifled she can hardly put her feelings to words. Jumbled fragments, collaged scribings, blacked out formal documents — these are how the speaker first hints at her feelings of helplessness and frustration.
But as the book unfolds, we hear her voice grow. While messy, fragmented thoughts continue to nudge the reader throughout, we find moments of clarity and ease with fuller phrases. In the poem “movement, gentlewoman,” the speaker ends with “think room stopped mega moons time’s up / turn forever heat-lamp constellation colors / the sky is sickness, me too, it’s her body’s space now.” Amidst the chaos, confusion, and grief, the speaker ends with a phrase of reclamation.
Slentz’s form-related choices develop the theme of finding one’s voice, of being “on exhibit” and having to fight a system that wasn’t built for everyone. A moving example, as described above, is the use of blackout and graffiti, often utilized together in Slentz’ poems.
Slentz takes formal documents, which symbolize a structure and system built by and for straight, white, cisgender men, and blacks out everything except the words her speaker wants to, or must, say. This is a way of attempting reclamation. Or, at least, a search for her own voice. And when the poems in a blackout are brief, Slentz shows us there isn’t much here for people like me.
The power, then, grows through the use of graffiti and doodling on such documents. Adding in addition to subtracting. Bringing informality — or, humanness — and voice to something stifling, stale, and even callous.
The speaker’s identity as a queer woman puts her at odds with a straight, patriarchal society. The power struggle is most profound in the blackout poems — places where, even when Slentz shows only a few words, the structures built by straight, white, cisgender men intentionally punish others. In one poem, for example, the page is nearly all black except for the words “do not survive” and “on account of her sex,” which allows room for interpretation, and the reader’s own projection, about society’s damning of a woman’s sexuality.
With this collection, Slentz seems to reach out a hand in solidarity with others who exist in the margins, not just by literally writing in the margins, but in poems with more traditional forms as well. In her poem “I Live,” the speaker shares, “I’ve lived with ancestors of colonizers, the colonized, and the lost / I’ve lived with green cards, citizens, and those undocumented.” The speaker shares her perspective while recognizing her place in the greater system—a system in which folks of various identities both struggle and live.
And while the themes of disenfranchisement in this book have been relevant for a long time, EXHIBIT: an amended woman, depose comes to us during a time in which a growing group of Americans shake off their apathy for political affairs, domestic and international. Slentz’s book accompanies those who are not just finding their voice, but sharpening it.
KRISTINE ESSER SLENTZ is a Maltese descendent raised in the Chicagoland area, who is also queer, a cult escapee, GED holder, and author of EXHIBIT: an amended woman, depose with FlowerSong Press 2021, 2024 and a forthcoming collection, face-to-faces, with ThirtyWest Publishing House in 2026. Her work can be found or is forthcoming in The Saturday Evening Post, TriQuartly, Five Points, a TEDx Salon, and more. She is the co-founder and organizer/host of the monthly experimental artist series, Adverse Abstraction, in New York City’s East Village. You can follow KRISTINE’s art on her substack, Carnations & Car Crashes.
Becca Downs (she/they) is a writer, editor, educator, and poet who earned her MFA from the Mile-High MFA program at Regis University. She’s the author of Acid Rain Epithalamium (Beyond the Veil Press 2024), and her poem “Burning Age” was nominated for the 2024 Pushcart Prize. They lead creative writing workshops throughout Denver and read poetry submissions for The Rumpus. You can find them at beccadownswriting.com, or on Instagram at @beccad___.
Next Page (A review of Katie Kalisz’s Flu Season by David Cope)