The Body Divided Beautifully: The Visceral and Lyrical Poetry of Aimee Seu in Velvet Hounds

Aimee Seu’s debut collection of poetry Velvet Hounds took the Akron Poetry this year and its easy to see why. Seu crafts a beautiful balancing act through out the collection between high-poetic diction and visceral imagery, the body dissected and made whole again, the interplay between generational and personal trauma, and the sticky impact of past on present.

Raw and openly personal, the collection explores dysmorphia, family relationships, romantic relationships, and a journey of personal healing. The collection, framed in four parts and capped with an epilogue, presents the life of the speaker as they look back on their experiences growing up working class as a now-academic, ruminating on a sixteen-year old self “in a headdress of lit cigarettes” (Seu 25), untamable and dangling with her best friend over a reservoir “like bloody steaks […] over a lion pit” (Seu 20) tempting them to jump in. The nostalgia in these sections cuts in the sweetest way nostalgia can; the past is framed as both beautiful, unobtainable, and colored with a new wry knowledge that comes with years, as the speaker admits “I think now we were miserable/ & didn’t even know it” (Seu 21). First loves, first kisses, are examined in disorienting, beautiful, and monstrous detail that reminds the reader of the frantic, hungry, and awe-inspiring terror it was to be young, inhabiting a body that is just now experiencing these sensations for the first time. The teenage body is “electric chair/berserk” (Seu 14) “a monster covered in eyes” taking in a lover’s body for the first time.

And its also a place, often, in which we feel dangerous, or our consciousness is pressured to become a danger to. As the collection moves forward, the tone of work darkens, the world darkens, as it does for many as they approach adulthood. Seu weaves a complicated narrative through out the pages especially in terms of the speaker’s relationship to mother, father, and to body. The speaker, having been in the womb when her father’s affair was discovered by her mother wonders: “What hormones does betrayal release in the body? […] What was I, when most defenseless,/ doused in?” (Seu 40). Earlier, the speaker wonders at her mother’s ability to “love the anvil/strapped to her as she sank” (Seu 38) in reference to her own self as a fetus.

This generational trauma feeds in to a spiral of personal trauma as the mother soothes the speaker as she vomits, and we enter shortly after into a surprising and raw exploration of eating disorders, where Seu deftly weaves in the myth of Persephone. The myth reoccurs periodically with Seu referencing it being either only “summer or winter” with the speaker—growth or dying. To which the speaker replies “These days I’m a fox/ orange coat patchy from scraps./ I can’t have children because/I can’t be counted on/to say life is worthwhile./ I walk circles, patting down/the brush, eager to sleep” (49). And yet, this collection doesn’t take us in a circle. While it enters into the darkness, it doesn’t leave us there.

Seu’s speaker breaks loose, even managing to explore a tender forgiveness of her mother, resolution with the past, and even beauty in the fragmentation and dissection of the body. At the end of the collection, scars become “a shared affinity” (Seu 99) and the speaker begins to find her body in her lover’s body, free for a moment. Seu, rather than just use the dissection and visceral meat of the body dissembled, turns it into something beautiful by the end of the collection, allowing her speaker to find peace both coming together and being taken apart.