Disgusting

Every now and then I get a rippling rush of vertigo

like waves of seasickness          or a flashback to
lying down too fast on a waterbed       or

an inner-ear issue

Sorry to talk about this but lately
I’ve been dreaming about intense messy delicious
relationships with romantic hopeless addicts and I am left

with so much longing                                      I want it

like I’m in love with a past version of me

carrying around something heavy and literal in my body

It’s the humidity          it’s making my dreams
grimy and it turns out I’m attracted
to sour sweat               to things I shouldn’t be                      

So much longing
for the disgusting         I yearn             I wonder what went wrong
and when        to give me this psychology      
but I guess

we’ve all got our kinks                         When does what we do
change who we are                 

We should die before we turn bad\
before the soap writers run out of storylines
and it turns out                                   we were the serial killer all along

I kneel to the mess in my bedroom

I kneel to the mess in my past             to the dust       to death
which is incomprehensible      to dangerous longing   not even kidding

I kneel to the internet of vacuous memes        give it praise

I kneel to do up my laces         The dog chases the cat who

chases the fly               it’s all a big misunderstanding

each of their motives aligns to a different reality
and it nearly                            breaks my heart

Jane Arthur
from Calamities!, THWUP, 2023

‘Disgusting’ by Jane Arthur is not ‘deceptively simple’, to use a hackneyed phrase. It is actually simple in the best way. It means what it says, and what it says is kind of awful, which I love to see in poetry. This is a poem that is full of beauty on the level of the phrase but that also wallows in filth and bad decisions (‘it turns out I’m attracted / to sour sweat’, ‘I’ve been dreaming about these intense messy delicious / relationships with romantic hopeless addicts’). Arthur shows a worthy commitment to empathy, but, refreshingly, a commitment to personal change is not proposed. Imagine a self-help book that ends a third of the way through—this is the world of ‘Disgusting’.

I once took a graduate seminar about ‘the abject’—you know, pus and shit and puddles of deliquescing matter and bodies riddled with illness and madness—the kind of phenomena that are hard to look at and hard to look away from. For me, Arthur’s writing in this poem captures the eternal fascination exerted by the abject, which is a subject that many writers avoid, possibly because it induces feelings of guilt. Well, Arthur is a great poet of guilt:

So much longing
for the disgusting        I yearn             I wonder what went wrong
and when         to give me this psychology

The most powerful moment of yearning in the poem is for the sweet release of death. ‘We should die before we turn bad’ is a great line because it’s about moral decay, obviously, but also about rotting (‘turning bad’) like a cucumber in a fridge.

I find most of Arthur’s work profoundly funny, and this poem is no exception. Little throwaway lines like ‘we’ve all got our kinks’ and ‘not even kidding’ have the effect of being taking-you-into-my-confidence asides which humanise the speaker and make her seem charming in spite of the picture she’s painting of herself.

And of course a highlight here is the poem’s ending, which can’t fail to move a reader with its sudden, frank little yelp of despair:

The dog chases the cat who

chases the fly              it’s all a big misunderstanding

each of their motives aligns to a different reality
and it nearly                            breaks my heart

Calamities!, the book that this is drawn from, is a favourite of mine. Some of it is less depressing than this, but don’t let that put you off.

Erik Kennedy

Jane Arthur is the author of two poetry collections: Craven (2019), which won the Jessie Mackay Prize for Best First Book of Poetry in 2020, and Calamities! (2023). Both are published by THWUP and both were longlisted for the Ockham NZ Book Awards. She also wrote the children’s novel Brown Bird (2024, Penguin), which was a finalist in the NZ Book Awards for Children and Young Adults. Jane lives in Te Whanganui-a-Tara Wellington with her family.

Erik Kennedy is the author of the poetry collections Sick Power Trip (2025), Another Beautiful Day Indoors (2022), and There’s No Place Like the Internet in Springtime(2018), all with Te Herenga Waka University Press, and he co-edited No Other Place to Stand, a book of climate change poetry from Aotearoa and the Pacific (Auckland University Press, 2022). He is the poetry editor of takahē and an adjunct fellow in English at the University of Canterbury. Originally from New Jersey, he lives in Ōtautahi Christchurch.