Notes on “Experience More Than Clean” by Christina Brannon
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It's not often that I am forced into experiencing an ad and enjoy it, but I absolutely love the voice, energy, images, and internal madness of "Experience More Than Clean." I imagine this speaker asking, "what does that dumb tagline even mean?"—maybe getting tired of forced positivity and toxic gratitude. I imagine the performative, overly upbeat commercial voiceover playing in their mind—or from the waterproof radio—as they shower, furiously washing away the past rather than sitting with the darkness that is alluded to in the small moments that expand the poem's world and history, like "your last gift to me" and "the memories marked safe". The balance of intrigue, impossibility, wishfulness, and surreal discomfort of "experience original sinlessness" and "your celebrity crush’s tongue down your throat" lands just right to conjure the sterile, fluorescent vibe of product marketing. Better yet, this tone holds fast through the poem as we reel through cherry-picked, sparkling-clean, nostalgic-naive images of a time we know was just not so.
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Notes on “Experience More Than Clean” by Christina Brannon
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“Experience More Than Clean” absolves us right away. “Experience original sinlessness,” she tells us, a promise that later dissolves into “the reality of Santa,” a pivot that reveals the speaker’s wry interrogation of belief. Brannon’s poem offers the impossible perfection of a psyche seduced by advertising: “the iconoclast’s iconoclast,” a state of being beyond even our most outlandish expectations. We are suspended in her language of hyperreal idealism, a dramatic rupture from the ordinary, as the speaker showers ritualistically, bathing herself with “the loofah of remembrance and all time.” Brannon deftly equips her reader with the hollow assurances of both shampoo commercials and organized religion, overlaying the flat banality of mass-produced hygiene with a radiant veneer of innocence. “I hear it,” her penultimate line insists, reiterates, demands, as we are left inert once more, hung in abeyance, closeted like everything else we have ever dared to love.
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