Pella Felton reviews Super Cherry Extra by Misti Rainwater-Lites. Rainwater-Lites, Misti (2025) Super Cherry Extra (Poetry Collection). Swooncake Press. 80p.
In her delightfully bitter poem “Most Likely To Recede,” Texas poet and future camp icon Misti Rainwater-Lites expertly and correctly identifies the moral failings of MFA poets as a species. Having been herself rejected from MFA programs earlier in her career, Rainwater-Lites compares these poets unfavorably to ax murderers, noting that ax murderers “only kill you once,” while poets torture you forever. Even though I believe her collection does not go far enough in documenting the serial killer-like tendencies of our nation’s MFA poets, Rainwater-Lites is able to get away with this line because Super Cherry Extra is one of the funniest collections of poetry I’ve read in a long time.
It is tempting to see the brilliant, diamond-in-the-rough nature of this collection as accidental. Whereas many poets self-consciously brand themselves as “working class,” or outsider as a form of ritualized performance art, Misti Rainwater-Lites accomplishes this task simply by documenting her blunt, singular, and hilariously mean point of view in verse form. The heightened, cartoonish pleasures of the writing come not from a mawkish or caricaturish portrayal of self, but instead from the loudness and audacity of her transgressive and unfiltered cultural commentary. However, reading Super Cherry Extra as merely the diary of a stunt queen Beth Dutton sells short the craft and slant at work in these poems.
Rainwater-Lites is no dope. She is aware of the aesthetic framing of her persona and clearly has put time and effort into the performativity of the bitch queen she commits to the pages of this volume. Poems like “Basic Bitch Economy” and “How I Start My Day” document the labor behind this embodiment. She lays out the iconography of Costco water, MAC lipstick, and FL Studio to bring an elegant fetishism to the termite art images she plants in our brains (also, MAC lipstick is just better than most designer brands, so she’s correct about that.) She then walks us through the work of social media curation via Canva, Audacity, and other consumer-level editing suites. The juxtaposition of these poems shows the level of time and effort required of many female content creators to achieve the level of “authenticity” which is often ascribed to their male poets’ counterparts a priori.
The real pleasure of this collection is watching Misti Rainwater-Lites yell at full volume at the odd collection of fascists, misogynists, and idiots she is forced to share a state with. She gives us, the readers, the pleasure of documenting real-life examples of every fantasy version of a dumb Texan we as an audience could ever want, while giving them a specificity that provides equal levels of indictment and dignity. In the aptly titled “Who Died and Made You King Fuckerbutt?”, she eviscerates a paranoid suburbanite with “Fantastic Sam’s hair” and a “gluten free diet”. The fact that a man holds violent, delusional beliefs is not particularly interesting, but the detail of the gluten-free diet elevates the encounter to poetic irony. I love reading the specificity of the roasts in this book, ranging from the cousin who “scrambled [her] way / to the top of the garbage heap” in “A Witch’s Promise To My Christian Cousin” to the “Instagram model bitch crew” in “not trying to date your sugar daddy,” whom she advises to “namaste in your lane / with your cocaine boogers” . With the future of many of Texas’ libraries currently under attack, Rainwater-Lites has provided us with a lovely donation of dozens of new reads which I will be recycling in my personal vernacular for years.
Even if Rainwater-Lites draws her entertainment quality from the mercilessness of her barbs, her true character comes through in the moments where she mourns the lack of mercy shown by her community to the bodies who most deserve it. In “Fourth of July Flood,” she centers us in the human victims of the culture of apathy and ignorance as she describes how “little girls drowned believing in Jesus” and a man bleeding to death while trying to save his family. Sometimes this empathic shift happens mid-poem, such as in “Tallest Man I’ve Ever Known,” where the portrayal of an abusive father pivots from comically buffoonish to terrifyingly violent. This unexpected twist perfectly encapsulates the affective nightmare of living with a hair-trigger abuser without sacrificing any of the skill, wit, and velocity Rainwater-Lites is capable of. These moments provide an affecting origin story for the earned bitterness at the heart of this collection. In a world where these injustices and monsters exist, why aren’t we all this angry?
Super Cherry Extra represents a best-case scenario for outsider poetry. It is lucid, well-crafted, and relentlessly quotable. Misti Rainwater-Lites does not torture us with the dourness of human existence; she swings her verses like an ax at it until someone stops the insanity. We have all been this angry at morons, but we have rarely been this entertaining. Misti Rainwater-Lites has tapped into the everyday rage of living in a dumb world, and she has done so without the poetic crutch of moral grace. This book is a much more productive and pleasurable home for misanthropic rants than any Facebook post of equal length and subject matter. Misti Rainwater-Lites did not need an MFA to write compelling poetry. All she needed were a choir of idiots, a Costco membership, and a bottle of Indio.
Super Cherry Extra by Misti Rainwater-Lites is available for purchase here https://www.amazon.com/Super-Cherry-Extra-Misti-Rainwater-Lites/dp/1257867202/
Pella Felton is a poet, performer, and independent scholar stationed out of Northwest Ohio. She holds a certificate in Performance Studies from Bowling Green University and has performed her work at various poetry festivals and events throughout the Midwest including the Toledo Fringe Festival, BGSU Winter Wheat Literary Festival, and the Literary Underground Festival. She is also an accomplished media and performance scholar who frequently presents her research at conferences such as the Pacific Ancient and Modern Language Association, The Great Lakes Association of Sound Studies, and the Society for Media and Cinema Studies. Pella lives in Bowling Green, Ohio.
