God Was Right
by Diana Hamilton

Reviewed by Katherine Preston

“I was wrong, when I wrote that, and I’m probably wrong / still,” realizes the speaker of Diana Hamilton’s God Was Right. But if Hamilton’s speaker was wrong, who’s right?

We don’t actually have to wait until this moment to know Hamilton’s speaker was wrong. Hamilton’s title tells us: it was god—not the speaker, not the poetry, not the reader (nor the reviewer)—who was right all along. By placing ‘rightness’ with god, Hamilton relieves her readers of trying to be right, trying to find the right reading of God Was Right. Instead of feigning airtight arguments through familiar tricks of language and form, God Was Right plays with our expectations of what writing does and welcomes the reality of being wrong repeatedly. If we release ourselves from the pressure of being right, we can recognize each of our own idiosyncratic approaches to the text as one among many possible readers and readings. So how can I review God Was Right? The title's premise, along with the poetry’s looping revisions of itself, makes it impossible for me to produce any wholesale, singular evaluations of the work’s meaning. So, while I can share just a few of my experiences of this text with you, this review cannot be ‘right.’

God Was Right, Hamilton’s third book, traces the development of complex, sometimes contradictory ideas and feelings through repetition and revision over time. Looping and associative, these eleven long-form prose poems contemplate gendered interpersonal and interspecies experiences, the processes of thinking and writing, and ethics. The book grapples especially with questions of poetry’s particular qualities, capacities, and limitations. God Was Right critiques assumed relationships between form and voice: Hamilton defies notions of poetic voice as always particular and subjective, in contrast to prosaic voice considered universal and objective, or even nonexistent. Even at the level of the titles of her poems, Hamilton subverts the boundaries between poetry and prose by combining academic, conventional, and impersonal writing forms with emotional, personal content, such as “Five-Paragraph Essay on Third Heartbreak.” God Was Right thereby reasserts the relevance of highly personal experiences and feelings to the development and validity of sometimes abstract, theoretical, and ethical arguments. In the case of God Was Right, these feelings are sometimes painful, sometimes inarticulable out of context or in language, but most often they are feelings of love for friends, books, and animals—especially for cats.

God Was Right is explicitly interested in relationships between readers, writers, and writing itself. Closely connected to these relationships are questions of what writing, and specifically poetry, might be able to “do,” or what its relationship to the broader world might be. Engaging longstanding academic debates about the (ir)relevance of the author to her work, Hamilton argues that “writing is inextricably tied to subjectivity, and to the body, no matter how many times a computer writes a poem.” And not only is writing tied to the body, but so is the experience of reading – Hamilton compares the experience of reading to being touched: “They [readers] won’t let women’s writing touch them. / They may even have gone to too much grad school to remember that books can touch them…” In thinking about poetry’s ability to “touch,” Hamilton rearranges the relationship of a reader to a text from one of defense or mastery to one of intimacy and willingness to change through interaction with another.

God Was Right recognizes that if poetry can “touch,” it can also hurt. In both “Essay on Bad Writing” and “Second Essay on Bad Writing,” Hamilton meditates on the way poetry and criticism can perpetuate sexism and racism, and the relationship between poetry and politics more broadly. “Essay on Bad Writing” shows how seemingly disinterested evaluations of content and style can be contingent on gender and perpetuate sexism. For example, women’s writing about their own lives might automatically be called “silly” without regard to the actual execution of a poem, while writing about “Men or Money or Going to Work” is more likely to be uncritically considered “Serious.” But while Hamilton shows the reception of poetry to be politicized, she also resists the impulse to then treat poetry like a political instrument or exaggerate its political capacities, particularly through its form alone. “Second Essay on Bad Writing” is skeptical of the “hope / that some specific ‘new’ form [of poetry] will be political / even if the poet doesn’t bother to fill it in / with anything remotely having to do with politics.” Hamilton comes to terms with the tension between poetry’s politics and its artfulness in the lines:

 “Of course, I think we can care about all the aesthetic descriptions that add up to an individual justification of a ‘good poem’ while caring about whether the poem is violent, and while caring about the fact that the place to fight certain violence is largely outside of poems, as it requires a more violent strategy than poetry normally offers.”

  Yet consistent with the book’s project of continuous revision and development, “Second Essay” extends this question of poetry and politics further and through a new lens. At the end of this poem Hamilton considers the extent to which the act of writing poetry could be considered “a ‘political’ decision” in its relationship to capitalist production, as writing perhaps becomes a job or, perhaps instead a way of “shirking work.”

God Was Right is especially compelling in its interrogation of questions of gender and sexuality. Hamilton exposes sexist expectations and explores the ways these expectations and desires can seep into the psyches of the people they oppress. In “Expository Writing on Some Kisses,” a woman asks another woman to kiss her “[as] if I were a man.” This interaction raises a question about gender’s attachment to desire, especially the desire for the performance of gendered hierarchy, violence, and exclusivity. We might also recall how “Essay on Bad Writing” critiques and attempts to correct a mode of reading that automatically ascribes “badness” to anything a reader detects to be part of a coherent category of “women’s writing.” The poem grapples with how both the poet’s own performance of gender and her representation of gender in her poetry become paradoxical and overdetermined. The woman writer faces an impossible and “painful need to exaggerate / or reject outright or caricature or ignore / or sexualize or otherwise modify / the poem’s performance of gender, / without recourse to a dumb ‘natural’ way-of-being.” 

“Autobiography of Fatness” newly registers these anxieties around the connection between personal identity, the body, and group representation in contexts of fatness and transness. Nuancing questions of identity and the body at the level of the individual, the poem also clearly rejects the equation of identity to biology. A similar concern around claims to identity when identity slips into representativeness appears when the speaker wonders whether they are “gay / enough to talk about queerness” and reflects on the terms (or perhaps simply the linguistic term) of their bisexuality: “(you know its not queer / when the vernacular for your sex life is like / ‘hey let’s double down on this shit! I like both / there are only TWO things to like,’ god damn it).” By extension of this moment, the book here offers an opportunity to reflect on the binary modes of thought and argumentation that it sometimes employs through invocations of good and bad, right and wrong, and constructions of “was” and “was not.”

God Was Right elsewhere explores the inadequacies and failures of language as a suitable medium for thought, experience, and communication. “Persuasive Essay For Sex Ed” explores the ways language can be manipulated to cover over violent experiences. In this poem, which works like a short story, a student first looks for “recurring / structures” in sentences like “they quit resisting” and finds how easily both word choice and syntax can obscure systemic, agentive, and gendered violence. The poem shows both how language can fail to accurately represent lived experience and how people fail to use language in emotional contexts: even when given language to describe the very predicament she later finds herself in, the student experiencing an uncomfortable sexual scenario fails to tell her partner how she is feeling because of the couple’s particular context and relation. The limitations of language and the difficulty of using it then produce additional harm: the partner blames the student for not telling him she is in pain, and she can only fail again to explain herself in language.

While it contemplates the problem of capturing feelings in language, God Was Right is highly emotive, sometimes unexpectedly through its most “expository” writing and particularly in its silences. The experience of the couple described in “Expository Writing on Some Kisses” explores the uncontrollability of emotions and their (un)predictable consequences. In this poem, a pair’s ostensibly objective “research” into various kinds of kisses “of course, makes them fall in love.” But “one day,” individual preference intervenes in the experiment, as one woman realizes she “only wants to kiss right after dinner,” a time that the other woman hates. The arbitrariness of this preference only heightens the feeling of tragedy, as the tension between the couple seems irrational and unnecessary. The couple end up fighting, which reduces them to a single kiss—the make-up kiss—which both ends and begins another fight as one partner also “realizes she hates to kiss and make up.” The poem concludes that the couple is secretly happy to be “stuck in this loop” because “it puts off one kiss they don’t feel ready to try / A woman wants to be kissed goodbye, for example.” The silence at this ending is particularly heartrending.

As God Was Right explores the relationship between people and writing, the book also connects itself as a text to other texts. A range of citations and references, both academic and popular, appear throughout God Was Right. These citations become occasions for Hamilton’s speaker to critique the presumption that elite academia is the only site of new ideas and the primary authority on art’s meaning. Hamilton’s speaker denounces paternalistic approaches to literature as she dares her readers to “tell me / what I’m saying, have fun quoting a line / almost certainly contradicted somewhere on the next page.” Hamilton expands the range of meaningful subjects of discussion to include the popular, romantic, and domestic. While God Was Right does sometimes make references to canonical ‘high theory,’ the book recognizes more popular works as serious theoretical material too; Hamilton cites and performs extended meditations on sources like Jane Austen, A Song of Ice and Fire/Game of Thrones, Elena Ferrante’s Days of Abandonment, and Maggie Nelson. Moments of irony and great humor lighten the intimidation readers might feel in the book’s references to debates on discourse and ethics. Along with its constant self-revision, the book remains generous toward the ideas it critiques and open to a range of readers.

God Was Right offers fresh, nuanced perspectives on some of the most compelling questions posed by poetry and critical theory. Yet while it engages with many literary and academic sources, the book remains remarkably intimate and accessible. God Was Right invites and models productive disagreement rather than passive reception or combative judgment. The book is provocative, funny, and earnest, particularly in its depictions of interpersonal experiences and emotions. God Was Right calls us to read and reread again and again, always in conversation with whatever else we are reading at the moment. For me, God Was Right’s insistence on revision and emphasis of the personal take up the ethic of Audre Lorde’s essay “Poetry is Not a Luxury,” where Lorde proposes an embodied poetics. Perhaps Hamilton has been in conversation with Lorde, who tells us “there are no new ideas. There are only new ways of making them felt.”