A Review of Philip Sorenson’s Solar Trauma

Solar Trauma by Philip Sorenson is an irreverent, visceral, and thought-provoking book of contemporary poetry that describes the gross phenomena of being human. As a reader, I’m usually drawn to Sorenson’s kind of poetry. Poetry that defies convention, creates discomfort in the reader, and still finds time to pose great questions in a unique voice. The experience begins by simply looking at the book’s design and presentation, which have been used expertly to create a more immediately tangible representation of some of the themes Sorenson uses in his work.

The book itself is split between two sections which are denoted by the covers. There is something to be said on a craft and design level concerning Sorenson’s choice to format the text this way. First off, the two covers are magenta and green, which aren’t colors that immediately evoke the idea of sunlight or solar energy. Granted, green might conjure the idea of radiation and/or radioactivity, but that seems a bit of a stretch within the immediate context of the earth’s yellow sun. The reading of the text itself isn’t contingent on a specific ‘part order’ (The acknowledgements and publishing information is printed in the green half of the book, so it could be argued that the green half should be read first since it’s the ‘true front’) between the two halves of the book, which isn’t always the case with split books (At least, this format doesn’t always loan itself well to other texts). In contemporary poetry, there’s more room for this kind of experimental and subjective reading and in the case of Solar Trauma, its functional because the magenta cover is more prose and story based as opposed to the conventional poetry form in the green half of the book. There’s also a page in the very middle of the book (At the end of each section) that’s just a black page with a tiny white circle in the center (There’s also a tiny circle, which represents the sun in astrology, underneath each page number in the book). This is particularly interesting and clever choice on the designer’s behalf because it creates a more solid visual nod to the motif of the sun and solar apocalypse and creates a mental cue that the sun, what it represents, and the possibly inevitable lack thereof is the center of the human universe. The absence of a sun (Both as a literal sun and the sun as a symbol) would cause damage to life on earth, and Sorenson explores these throughout his poetry.

The title itself, Solar Trauma makes the reader think of what damage the sun can inflict and/or is already responsible for. For the time being, the sun is responsible for warmth, light, photosynthesis, certain eclipses, sunburn, and how early humans came to conceptualize god(s). Solar apocalypse is something of an inevitability (If and when the sun goes supernova, the earth will be destroyed), albeit a far off one, but it’s not as common of a thought as nuclear apocalypse (Given the various advancements in nuclear weapons and the resulting political consequences) so it’s a bit weird to think of the sun being responsible for the end of the world. The result of a star going supernova is sometimes a white dwarf star or a black hole (This can be reaffirmed with the use of the black hole page in the center of the book). The latter is important to the context of the text because Sorenson uses different kinds of holes throughout the book.

Holes as a motif in Solar Trauma is effective on a few levels, the most important of which are arguably the function of different holes and the actual word ‘hole’ sounding like ‘whole’. Sorenson chooses to describe the human condition via human orifices and their uses, the most used being the anus and defecating and the mouth and vomiting, the latter being the more important of the two. Sorenson writes “everybody/ should be throwing up all of the time” (21) first in the magenta half of the text, as opposed to ‘everybody should be shitting all of the time’. Throwing up in and of itself means the literal act of purging the body of waste. The body can ingest and regurgitate nourishment, toxins, and waste, respectively through every single orifice. The mouth can breathe, emit gas, eat, spit, and of course, vomit. The mouth is also used to communicate, when used in conjunction with the aforementioned uses of the mouth, facilitates a figurative use of the mouth, ‘word vomiting’. Consequently, to imply that everyone should be throwing up all of the time could mean that either people shouldn’t restrain themselves from saying whatever they want or ‘word vomiting’, or that they shouldn’t feel ashamed to purge their bodies of whatever proverbial toxicity is in their bodies. In the case of Sorenson’s dystopia, people should be throwing up because of the futility of human existence and the inherent selfishness of what modern humans chose to communicate. In conjunction with this, the speaker implies that they are ‘thinning to nothing’ (22) which could be construed as they are throwing up so much that their proverbial internal being is dwindling away because of the constant expulsion of whatever is inside the body. The idea of waste and the removal of what no longer serves anyone is common in the text. Sorenson uses this to toy with the idea of the inherent lack of dignity in the gross maintenance of the body.

Apart from the body as a whole, Sorenson notes on ‘skin’ many times throughout the book. The sun can burn skin, skin dies and regenerates, and of course skin sheds off. This could be his quick abstraction of the superficial, material self and the amalgam of pretenses and coping mechanisms that humans use to exist in a simultaneously hyper-sexual and pretentious society. In essence, the skin needs to be shed when it’s grown old or unhealthy, and so must a body shed old or obsolete material in order to continue surviving and coping.

Sorenson uses ‘bodies’ as a symbol throughout the text which, like holes, is functional on a few levels but the most prominent of these being the idea of a body as an institution and the discourse on bodily autonomy and integrity. The human body is not the only kind of body discussed in the text, but it’s not beyond reason that the audience would think first of the human body when the word ‘body’ is shown. Sorenson uses the word ‘body’ liberally throughout his work both for its intrinsic value and the phenomena of being disembodied in one way or another. A particularly compelling use of this is in e in the green half of the text. The poem as a whole implies that a body doesn’t equal life, or even human. Bodies are vessels for life and some kind of ideal to be wished for, “bodies open and bodies embodied/ bodies closed and bodies imagined.” (30) Bodies create other bodies with reproduction, but to reproduce, a body must be considered desirable and/or viable to a mate. This poses the question of what is made of a body that is undesirable or inviable. Sorenson doesn’t answer this question directly in this, or any poem, but he does highlight that all bodies perform gross functions, desirable or otherwise, “its mouth is covered in milk/ its anus is cleaned it does not smell/ we wash the shit/ we disappears.” (30) In simply cleaning feces, ‘we’ disappears because the ‘we’ is performing a function that isn’t glamourous or dignified. This idea is furthered when a ‘Thing’ shows ‘us’ what the body can be apart from a ‘container’ (31). The ‘Thing’ encourages us to believe that the body is just a single head of a hydra that communicates with itself, which could mean that humanity is just a fleshy, disconnected abstraction of the universe (Or perhaps God, if the audience wanted to have a more religious reading of the text) experiencing itself.

Poetry is literary art and Sorenson is Salvador Dali in that he uses the surreal and weird to evoke immense thought and emotion on being a modern human. He uses lots of specific sounds, images, and themes throughout Solar Trauma which creates an unnerving but enlightening experience for the audience by highlighting the primal duality of human dependence and complacency on a disturbing and primal level.