The Porpoise in the Pink Alcove by Kathi Wolfe:
Book Review as Elegy
Reviewed by Drew Pisarra

The Porpoise in the Pink Alcove: What Surfaces in the End

When poet, critic, and journalist Kathi Wolfe asked me to blurb her book last year, I was only too happy to comply. I was a big fan of her previous collection Love and Kumquats, filled as it is with poetry that’s so consistently playful. ("I want to smoke / the last crumpled cigarette / at the bottom / of my black purse / beside the rumpled ticket / to To Catch a Thief…." she quipped in “If I Have to Leave.”) Wolfe has a facility for taking cultural references – pop and high-brow alike – and making them accessible via highly amusing phrases like “Whitman is a foot-long sub of grass-fed beef” (from “Tasting Braille”). With her new book The Porpoise in the Pink Alcove, that quirky sensibility evolved even further. And so, I happily dashed off two laudatory quotes for her to consider for the back cover of her latest volume:

 "Judy Garland, Rita Moreno, and Meg Ryan may have cameos in The Porpoise in The Pink Alcove, but this luminous collection's real star is Kathi Wolfe, that rare poet who refashions Hollywood (and beyond) for comedy, romance, slice-of-life drama, and Shakespearean rewrites -- to exhilarating ends."

...and…

"While poet Kathi Wolfe's delicious sense of irreverence is as sly as ever here, this new collection also plummets breathtaking depths, finding unexpected poignancy in everything from Seinfeld to Betty Boop."

Why bring this up now, you ask. Why resurface old plugs for a book that’s now a year old? I suppose it’s because Kathi died earlier in 2024 and I know that she didn’t have the time or the energy to act as her own publicist on this book’s behalf. And I simply refuse to let her book disappear into the ether just like that. She herself vanished so quickly that I now ache to bring her back to life if only here online with this review. I knew she’d been ill, mind you. She’d emailed me as much this past spring: “Unfortunately,  I’m not well now. Nothing life threatening! I don’t get to be Bette Davis in Dark Victory!” What I didn’t know then was that this cheeky aside about her sickness – and her blindness – was far from the truth. It was, in fact, the last time I’d hear from her before she passed away. How was I to know that the book I’d been blurbing with such affection would be her all-too-final collection? Had I shared enough about how much I liked it? Had I shared the book with all of my friends? The answer was basically no. And so, what your reading now is a form of restitution.

Please pick up a copy of A Porpoise in the Pink Alcove, fellow poetry reader. It’s a delightful book with a kind-hearted, celebratory spirit, a book that’s possessed by a joi de vivre even when its author is tackling serious topics like bullying (“This Is Not A Nursery Rhyme”), ableist disregard (“At The Clinic”), and homophobia (“This Is Just To Say”). Perhaps part of this has to do with Kathi’s use of queer icons like Carol Channing (“Sunstruck”), Cary Grant (“Holiday”) and Frank O’Hara (“Papaya”) as survival tools in her verse. In stanza after stanza, Kathi reminds us that art can act as a salve, an escape, a drug, a countermeasure, a validation, a wild card, and an antidote when the going gets tough. Which it often does. By wittily putting our queer forebears to use in her writing, Kathi made the bleakness of reality a lot less bleak. 

Full disclosure: Though we’d never met in person, I’d known Kathi for about five years prior to her passing. Her singular voice – whether typed or telephoned – conveyed a buoyancy that invited one into the gossip that could be “the cable that jumpstarts the divine” (as in “Genesis Rex”). We’d connected shortly after the release of my first sonnet collection Infinity Standing Up, which she interviewed me about for The Washington Times – D.C.’s leading LGBTQ+ newspaper. That was one long, raucous phone conversation, as I recall it; an important one that shifted my feeling about critics from unreliable frenemies to potential allies and, if you’re really lucky as I was in this case, queer kindred spirits who might become long-distance friends. Over the years and a few more phone calls and numerous emails, Kathi and I shared our joint resistance to poetry as a snooty artform; an appreciation for a good punchline in verse; and an attraction to imagery that came from the movie palace more effectively than from the ivory tower. 

As someone who sometimes feels that he’s had his most life-affirming relationships with dead authors – specifically, Jean Genet, James Baldwin, and Gertrude Stein – my friendship with Kathi was a first of sorts, an unseen but ever-present confidante-correspondent with whom I might chat about  poetry and politics at anytime in real time. Looking back, I wish we’d chatted more often, before she’d joined my other writer friends on the other side. (Say hello to Staszek!) Since that’s not an option, I’m currently using The Porpoise in the Pink Alcove as a kind of literary voicemail recording that can bring me back her singular voice. And while I’m at it, might I make an introduction… to Kathi… to you. For what else is a book recommendation?