Potty Mouth, Potty Mouth by Alex Creece
“Sometimes you have to sit in it, ripe and clinging like … a soiled diaper. What’s my GP gonna do? Tell me to drink water and stop being a bitch? Because I refuse to do either.”
~ Fidget Spinster
To have a ‘potty mouth’ is to be rude, rotten, horny and hilarious. It’s unladylike, vulgar, dirty talk. Alex Creece’s debut poetry collection Potty Mouth, Potty Mouth (2024, Cordite Books), with its sing-song title, embraces all of this, and more.
The collection is organised into six parts, borrowing from the language of psychology: Perceive, Fixate, (Mal)adapt, Interact, Behave, Communicate. It gives space to existential angst, mental health struggles, neurodivergence, queerness and the everyday failures that are part of navigating a capitalist, patriarchal world. With Creece, we spew in psych wards, pick our pimples on public transport and piece together prayers with pornography. As she says in an interview with Archer Magazine: “Potty Mouth, Potty Mouth unpacks what it is to be a ratbag by nature, to be a little grot, to live in a failing way.”
It’s obvious from the get-go that Creece delights in wordplay and experimentation, cheekily and rebelliously exploding the limits of gender and genre. The poems are layered with internet and pop culture references – with titles such as “CH3353 5W34T5,” “Infodump,” “I Can’t Stop Thinking About Jake Gyllenhaal’s Fuck the Patriarchy Keychain” – as well as tapping into a deeper nostalgia for the 90s. Sometimes it can feel a bit forced, with similes such as “trackpants that look like Windows 98.” However, it is often full of funny, surprising and poignant observations about modern life, like “trying to fix things with the same futility / asking Siri for help when she just Googles like a common mortal” and “It says a lot that the Sims universe doesn’t allow for hate-fucking.”
A warning for the squeamish: gird your loins! Creece’s work revels in the abject. Pus, vomit, sweat, shit and spit are just a few of the bodily fluids that make a splash across these pages. The poems are deliberately visceral, foregrounding sensation and physicality – and it is almost impossible to read them without wincing. But Creece does this to celebrate the things that make us human but are often shamed or hidden away, saying “we all contain traits that are gross, perverted, neurotic and messy.” Pimples particularly are seen as a symbol of defiance and resilience. As she writes in “Acne”:
“It’s unprofessional to go to a job interview without makeup, I learned. I ask if it’s unprofessional to have skin and they think I’m making fun of them. It’s a serious question. I want a serious answer.”
Potty Mouth, Potty Mouth is in many ways about failure, or rather, seeing failure as a form of freedom. Creece says, “I hate that a person’s functionality is often assessed around things like social status, compliance and sanity.” This policing can often have a gendered dimension, as seen in “A Voice That Angers Men On Public Transport,” where the oozing assonance and guttural consonants curdle in the back of your throat, intensifying the feeling of nausea and shame at being judged and found wanting by a patriarchal society.
“shame is a scab
of peanut butter mucus
anchored to my gag reflex.”
But defiance is the name of the game for Creece. She writes, “I’m a disaster of a girl, but I refuse to be anything else.” Neat markers of identity are turned inside out and upside down, rejecting conformity and mainstream, palatable versions of selfhood, gender and queerness. As poet Rae White notes in the introduction, “these poems subvert traditional tales of womanhood via dyke culture.”
“Like, call me a dyke, not a fag hag. We can’t all be the type of gay that fits comfortably within a Kmart catalogue.”
The collection also candidly explores neurodivergence, not as a label or diagnosis, but as a vivid, tangible experience. In “Mindblind,” Creece immerses the reader in the disorienting and sometimes chaotic way sensory information is processed:
“It is like a dog ear, inside-out,
A seashell of loudness and lyme,
Or a feeling of wrongness,
Back-to-front
And around-the-twist.”
Another thing to note is that Creece will always hit you with a fart joke just when you least expect it. Humour (especially of the toilet variety) abounds throughout the collection, and I have to admit to laughing out loud in “James Joyce’s Fart Fetish”:
“It’s true, Mozart loved getting his ass eaten.
No, I swear! I’ll look it up right now!
See? – Buttholes have taste-holes.
Huh? Tastebuds, tastebuds.
Like a Portrait of the Fartist as a Young–
Stop, I’m not ready. I’m young.
I’m too young.”
I also love that Creece plays with form and function in a way that feels subversive, challenging the idea of what poetry can be. “Shitpost” is a collage of text messages arranged in the shape of the poop emoji, while “God Wants You to Come!” began life as a collage of pornography and religious magazines – driving home the point that binaries between high and low, trash and art, the sacred and profane, have no place here. With her concrete poems, Creece disrupts the reading experience itself, and it is not unusual to find yourself holding this book sideways, upside down, or turning it in a circle in order to read these poems.
Potty Mouth, Potty Mouth is the kind of book that will have you screaming, crying, throwing up. It is a collection that refuses to conform, refuses to be polite and refuses to give you a moment of peace.
Alex was a contributor to Issue 1 of Aniko Magazine. Read our interview with Alex here!
Emily Riches is a writer and editor from Mullumbimby, currently living on Gadigal land (Sydney). She founded Aniko Press to bring passionate writers and curious readers together, discover new voices and create a space for creative community. You can get in touch at emily@anikopress.com.