‘Learned’ Explores the Kinky and the Intimate in BDSM
Canadian scholar and poet Carellin Brooks’ autobiographical Learned is a nostalgic depiction of the 1990s that doesn’t include Tamagotchis or butterfly chokers. Instead, we can expect toys more erotically charged, and neck jewellery a little less innocent than what teens of the era would wear. Brooks writes about her younger self, as an exchange scholarship student at Oxford University in England where she is determined to immerse herself in more than one new culture as a visiting foreigner.
Disinclined to separate her academic and sexual identities, Brooks devotes herself to an unconventional research project that baffles her tutor yet fascinates her readers. She operates as both a participant and archivist as she conducts a thorough investigation of BDSM paired specifically with the exploration of women’s physical pleasure: “Leaned closer so eager was I to kindle—My vision. / Keen to read about write about women. / Dilated: Characters, sex, / how they discover themselves that way. / The acquisition of knowledge. / The bildungsroman, yes, / but a sexual one.” Her subsequent findings are presented in the form of Learned, a freestyle narrative poem that challenges its audience to consider this: how far can the human body and mind push themselves in their joint pursuit of knowledge, individuality, and euphoria?
Brooks is refreshingly honest about the fears and insecurities she felt as a newcomer to the BDSM community: “Neophyte, ingenue, first-timer I can here to learn maybe I / forced to the floor don’t breathe.”
The narrative is written in a stream-of-consciousness, at times interrupted by episodes of blunt dialogue between Brooks and her friends or various sex partners: “Another warm sip / of middling red, voice rising / over her moans. / Oh, is that really where you get/ the best leatherwork?/ Fingering blackened collar spike / short of breath (again)/ buckled almost too tight.”
There is no rhyme scheme and no diameter, just a heady intimacy between Brooks and her reader. The collection also frequently features footnotes that perform as small provocative poems of their own rather than as afterthoughts or supportive annotations. Brooks may even be exposing more of herself in these isolated sections than anywhere else in the book: “absurdity of it, impossibility/ we could ever be naked to each other. / like that. Hilarious I tried.”
Potential readers who do not engage in BDSM may find the text too explicit or just simply not to their taste. But Brooks reassures the reader that there is no cause to dread a disconnect. Brooks’ voice and poetics are approachable rather than preachy. She has not penned a manifesto rallying her readers to embrace her radical sexual philosophy in the manner of the Marquis de Sade, who in the eighteenth-century strove to ignite an entire revolution based around his fetish literature. What Brooks has produced and published is instead a down-to-Earth and elegant account of her own experiences without an overbearing political agenda. Abiding to the rules of BDSM, Brooks respectfully invites her reader to participate in her story. The relationship between narrator and reader is therefore an entirely consensual one that allows the reader the privilege of opting out whenever they choose. At no point does Brooks shame her reader for the possibility that her kinks may not be something that arouses or even attracts them.
What Brooks does ask from her reader, though, is their understanding and empathy as they accompany her on her journey through sex dungeons, through city streets and parks, through the dormitories of her school, and through the sensations of her own body. Ultimately, Learned is a memoir of personal triumph. Brooks succeeds in reclaiming the delights and pains of sex for herself in the way she knows best: as an ardent researcher.
Thank you to Book*hug Press for providing Shrapnel with a media copy of Learned, which is available now for purchase at Book*hug Press's website and in bookstores across Canada.
Price: $20.00 CAD
ISBN: 9781771667876
Genre: Poetry
Pub date: November 1, 2022
Book Review
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February 20,
2022
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5-minute read
E.R. Zarevich
is an English teacher and writer from Burlington, Ontario, Canada. She has been published previously in Understorey Magazine, Living Education Journal, Wild Roof Journal, Dreamers Creative Writing, Prepare for Canada, and Women in Higher Education.