The girls in the red house are singing
by Tracey Slaughter

Tracey Slaughter’s new collection of poetry is gothic, grimy, sexy, textured and devastating. It’s heady, informed by the philosophy ‘more is more’. The cover (a brilliant design by Axel Deventer Olsthoorn) suggests late nights: karaoke, drinks, ciggies, thigh-high lace-up boots, unexplained bruises. Poetry books should be a whole package experience – it’s art, not just words – so the thoughtful and cohesive design is appreciated. The poems of the girls in the red house are singing had me choked up, sucking my teeth, feeling hollow – and feeling love and possibilities, caught in waves of sensations that grow bolder and bolder.

Slaughter doesn’t hold back and she doesn’t look away: in fact, she forces herself to look wider and deeper. This creates an overwhelming, totally visceral reading experience. The book is set in four parts, each with a distinct narrative, dilating and pollinating the other parts.

The book is dense with sensual and sensory details, and each poem has the crackle of old power lines in the rain. The first section, opioid sonatas, begins with a car crash, setting the reader up for a deep-dive into navigating and surviving pain – trauma, grief, guilt – and a painkiller addiction. There are awful yet exquisite lines like ‘Sunlight / belts you to the ambulance’ and ‘Detangle your hair / from the wheels.’ These poems examine hard feelings and the lengths we go to try to forget, even for just a moment. The burden of memories appears to be the central theme to this book, and the lingering residue of ghosts that can be dimmed, but never erased.

In a book that examines bare bodies in different situations, the second part, psychopathy of the small hotel, describes an affair. There is a musky smell to these poems: of sex, of decay, of pain. Every image is heavy, dripping: ‘Later you held my hair like / it was so much rope. I picked off each cufflink / like a headstone’. Here, there is the unpacking of another kind of regret – of sin – and an exploration of how we get into these dark spaces. Slaughter’s voice is powerful and certain, but she stands in the mosh pit with the reader – not above them, on some moral high ground. She doesn’t clean the house before you enter; she just invites you in, welcomes you to see it all and pick around the mess. There is a twinge of nostalgia in these poems – a longing for simpler times, real or imagined. This is from ‘yellow poem (see you at the next funeral)’: ‘Do you remember the sound of opening a love note in an empty classroom? / I’m swallowing it with chardonnay like a crushed pill or a soundless shell / the kind collected by children on their knees in the sand who don’t know that / summer has gone.’

Slaughter teaches creative writing at the University of Waikato, and some of her poems suggest exercises or prompts. Despite the heaviness of the subject matter, there is a magical playfulness here – of form, pace and language. She skilfully shows her love for, and mastery of, the English language and poetics. In the prose poem ‘bullet points: a descant for mistresses’, Slaughter uses nouns as adjectives and mashes up clichés (‘He’s a chip / off the old love, a kiss on thin ice’ or ‘There’s no such thing as a free mistress’), creating the disconcerting effect of conflicted feelings. Music is both theme and device – composition styles, markings and tempos serve as clues, or instructions on how to read poems. The word ‘descant’ has three possible meanings: an independent treble melody sung or played above a basic melody; a discourse on a theme; or to talk tediously or at length. Perhaps here it is all three.

the girls in the red house are singing demands time and commitment. Slaughter is the hook, and she pulls you into a deep, viscous pool. I often felt underwater – powerless, being carried through. This is a testament to Slaughter’s talent for building up emotion and tension – her words are eerie, magical chariot horses galloping higher and higher up the stormy sky – and her control over the reins. In ‘lifetime prescription (for the chronic)’, the speaker explains the side effects of medication: ‘The blue ones have your children. The blue ones have your children. / Side effects will include black lullabies.’ In ‘quicksilver drumroll suicide pretty please’, I felt as though I was riding a turbulent roller coaster with an antagonising clown: ‘but it hurts to wake up but it hurts to wake up / true dat suicide, let’s take a handful / what have you got that the night can’t swallow / a lingerie letter to slipknot a lifetime / can you tie a noose from knicker elastic?’

The third part of the book shares the book’s title. In her acknowledgements, Slaughter credits Mark Prisco, a recent Waikato graduate – and his collection easter everywhere – for the title. Prisco’s collection appears to be unpublished, so I’m still wondering what the red house connotes for Slaughter. The book is dedicated to ‘for all who write from the red house’. Is it the house of grief and pain? Is it the house of violence and injustice? Is it limbo? Does it relate to lust? Strength? And what is the singing? Birdsong is mentioned a few times in the book, and sometimes it sounds like something to be feared.

In this third section, Slaughter rewinds to childhood and the teenage years, and chronicles sexual violence and abuse. In ‘possession of objectionable material’:

This is the scar where all                    the dolls’ eyes push–

this pink mind             dressed in glitter

& led to him already crowned            in lacy psychosis

In these vivid, visceral poems, the writing stuns and shocks. The word ‘rape’ alone is enough to shock, and Slaughter uses it more than once: three of the poems form the series ‘the rape mosaic’. But while this work confronts violent experience it expresses hope as well as despair:

                                                    If tomorrow
there was a decree to erect a statue to any woman
beaten or raped or assaulted or murdered
on the land where they had fallen, industries would grind
to a halt. The system would be brought to its knees.

The final section, nudes, animals & ruins, is one long poem, set during one of the Covid lockdowns. It details loneliness – the kind where you feel imprisoned, when existential dread builds and erupts without warning, like a ring of active volcanoes. Slaughter’s speaker walks around her neighbourhood, sits at home, feels something like anger, or frustration – but those red feelings are linked to her loneliness: ‘You have to decide—is this an orchard or a graveyard? / Mosquito in the jar where you left your joint: nothing / is free of ash. There are magnolias all along my bus route, but that doesn’t / change facts—everyone on board is dying.’

the girls in the red house are singing is for women – the lonely women, the hurt women, the horny women, the party women, the nostalgic women, the mothers, mistresses, wives, the middle-aged, the child. Its recurring shell imagery suggests one way to perceive Slaughter and her writing – a hard and shiny shell, masking the soft flesh within. After the opening’s car crash the book offers the sparkling smashed-glass glitter detritus of a different kind of crash – one with opioids, eyeshadow, jars, insects, lingerie, liaisons in hotel rooms, red fur, sad children, smoke, violent men, flaking paint, dirty flies. The speeding vehicle keeps moving, unable to stop, taking in all of the gorgeous and painful sights with wide, kohl-rimmed eyes.