Eric Schmaltz of Lemon Hound took on the task of reviewing Divya Victor’s Things To Do With Your Mouth. “With intent to interrogate the long history of fear of women’s voices,” Schmaltz observes, “Victor employs appropriation and the cut-up technique as her modus to produce a perceptive poetic critique of the systemic discourse of control over women’s vocal and corporeal powers.” Eventually calling Divya both a “demon” and an “exorcist” in her writing, he remarks:

Like a surgeon who uses a gag to hold open a patient’s mouth, making vulnerable the tongue, teeth, saliva, larynx, and flesh, Victor opens wide the mechanisms of patriarchal discourse that has overpowered women’s linguistic expression and silenced them, as subjects, for too long. Victor attacks patriarchal inscription using appropriation, redaction, word replacement, and blank response forms to de-contaminate oppressive institutional and quotidian discourse and to re-signify that language : “Cutting the vocal chords can be a joyous moment in a person’s life. Being able to symbolically break the link from the internal world to everyday life” (102).

Read more from Schmaltz at Lemon Hound.