A piecemeal narrative composed of twenty-nine poems, Alexandra Naughton’s book, I Will Always Be Your Whore: Love Songs for Billy Corgan, is a poetry of slow-cooked, heart-wrenched desire.

Along with the poetry, Naughton offers readers a unique musical dimension in the book. Every poem includes a corresponding song written by Smashing Pumpkins front-man Billy Corgan, which can be played in chorus with the reading of each poem. The formal design of I Will Always Be Your Whore also imitates the arrangement of an LP, with “liner notes” instead of an author preface and a “playlist” instead of a table of contents.

In the collection, Naughton explores a wide breadth of themes from the bonds between pain and pleasure to the inherent conflicts between public and private identity. Though, at the core of these poems, what burns brightest is the narrator’s insatiable ache to bridge real life with imagined reality.

This ache or yearning defines the world of I Will Always Be Your Whore. Often, the language appears overwhelmed with a Freudian desire for not only Eros, but Thanatos too, as in Love Song #4, when she writes, “I want to be your thoughts. I want to be your blood. I want to be your capillaries. I want to be your tendons. Your spit. Your zits. Your food. I want to be that flash of energy when you conceive a phrase.”

While Naughton says she hopes the real Billy Corgan reads this book one day, Corgan appears to signify more a living fantasy than an actual person in her poetry. He becomes a secret thread in her private narrative, a shadow of some make-believe truth and yet an evolving figure with independent agency in the speaker’s world.

In her liner notes, Naughton writes, “I wrote these love song poems for Billy Corgan and a ghost.” Though readers are never explicitly clued in to who that ghost is, it is clear that an innately metaphoric Corgan haunts the speaker’s interiority.

In Love Poem #22, she writes, “loving someone who is not real is like loving someone you don’t know, like loving someone who is a ghost. Like you can’t see them but sometimes you can sense them and you wonder if maybe they sense you too.”

Through lines such as these, Naughton begs a range of unusual, compelling questions: Is it possible to fall in love through the act of feigning? What are the interpersonal limitations of an individual’s imagination? What separates fantasy and fiction from delusion and hallucination, and what separates these realms of otherness from so-called reality?

In I Will Always Be Your Whore, reality appears contained only by consciousness and perception. Part of how she achieves this effect is through endlessly redefining herself. At various surrealist moments throughout the poems, she writes that she is a cat, a laptop, a sponge, a towel, a dirty puzzle, the spit cum crust on bed-sheets, worms and shells, ashes and snot.

Another way the writer stretches reality can be seen in her uncanny ability to blur the lines between poet, narrator and speaker. Readers can never be certain if Naughton is writing in an autobiographical kind of confessional poetry, or if the poems reflect more of a delicately pieced together character sketch, or if the whole work is a form of metafiction commenting on the nature of fiction and identity in relationship to her own self as a writer.

Many of the poems are so intimate, naked and seemingly intended for her and Corgan alone that, for readers, the poetry becomes an act of eavesdropping upon a poet’s private diary entries. There is often a sense that beyond trying to reach Corgan, the speaker is trying to communicate with her innermost self.

click to watch Alexandra’s Cutty Spot interview

While several poems in the collection take on dimension through both literal and figurative space, whether she is writing “sonnets on the toilet” or sitting in a vinyl chair watching Billy “butter his toast,” a great deal of the poetry dwells solely from a place within the speaker’s mind.

Imitative of the various formal behaviors of thinking and thought, Naughton employs endless forms in the book. She writes in verse and prose with certain pieces lasting several paragraphs and others running the space of one brief sentence. She also includes numerous refrains in her work, creating a kind of written record of a tangled consciousness let loose. In Love Song #9, she repeats a couplet (Will I hurt?/Yes I will.) a total of fifteen times.

Naughton’s poetry, also like the mind and the imagination, holds a constant mirror up to itself and the world and perhaps to us, the readers. Her poetry is a self-examination and doesn’t shy away from ugliness, otherness, or illusion, or attempt to isolate them, but rather seeks to unite them with beauty, normalcy, and truth. She seems to want us to see everything, the sacred and the profane, as she feels and experiences it—that regardless of how we read her poems, as maddening, humanizing or fantastic, what counts is that in the moment of her words we lose ourselves as she does, in pure unabashed desire.

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Michael Shufro is a journalist, poet, storyteller, and playwright. Michael is also the host of the Parnassus Revue, a SF literary arts radio program and live show. Michael has worked as the Santa Rosa Correspondent for The Press Democrat, a then New York Times company. His writing has also appeared in the North Bay Bohemian among other publications. He is currently at work onBlunderboar, a play about a depression-era family of circus performers struggling to recover their memories lost in Time. Michael resides in San Francisco. Send Michael an email.