“This is now a pious wife account,” the poet Rachel Rabbit White recently declared on Instagram, alongside a portrait with Nico Walker: the veteran turned convict, the author of Cherry, the co-conspirator in their mutual infatuation. To those familiar with Rabbit White’s work—exhaled verses that draw on experiences with orgies and Adderall—the “wife” part is an about-face to her past and a nod to the future. “Consider this an engagement announcement,” she writes in her three-day wellness diary, below, which includes a full-swoon photo shoot in Brooklyn’s Green-Wood Cemetery.
“Nico always jokes that I’m so goth,” Rabbit White said by phone last week from Oxford, Mississippi, where Walker is currently on parole. “I feel like there’s just a romanticism in acknowledging that death is what gives everything meaning.” The friends who drove her down from New York assured her she’d go crazy with nothing to do. “But honestly,” she said, “I feel very domestic and cozy.” The Christmas tree is decorated with glittered elephants and butterflies; a tote bag on the nearby wall reads DOUBLE SUICIDE OR IT WASN’T LOVE.
The couple connected this time last year, shortly after the launch of Rabbit White’s poetry debut, Porn Carnival. (“If there’s anything more hedonistic / than a poem / I’ve yet to feel it,” she writes in “Interlude,” though her launch party gave poetry a run for its money: a bacchanalian mashup of literary types and sex workers, with Rabbit White presiding over all in her Lucite platform heels.) After Walker—to be played by Tom Holland in next year’s adaptation of Cherry—reached out with words of praise, he and the poet struck up a writerly back-and-forth. Before long, they were aflame.
The new edition of Rabbit White’s poetry debut, above, inspired a perfume.
Designed by Paul Glover.If the past months were tumultuous (at one point Walker slipped from a halfway house into court-ordered rehab), the emotional hurricane bore fruit. The new Porn Carnival: Paradise Edition—a riff on Lana Del Rey—comes with a series of fresh poems; there’s also a fragrance created with perfumer Marissa Zappas. “Jasmine, to me, is incredibly sexy, though I feel like it’s hard to do a white floral because it gets so heavy,” Rabbit White explained. This one instead is “very fresh, ozonic,” she said—something “that you’d want to wear on those Sunday days where you’re just laying in the sheets all day with your lover, and the sun’s coming in through the window.”
That all sounds like a wholesome prescription, even if the carton of cigarettes in the Rabbit White’s refrigerator suggests a more idiosyncratic definition of wellness. She describes her beauty regimen as an act of self-care—a time to slow down, do her hair, and apply a double set of lashes. “I’m really addicted because I like to sleep with them on. I’m horrible!” she confessed. “I like to think about it as something that’s not just ‘I want to look pretty,’ but in doing this I’m honoring the Venusian within myself.”
But above all, Rabbit Whited added, the true wellness part of this diary arrives in the writing: “For me, the one thing that keeps my sanity is journaling, actually.”
Thursday, November 26
6:50 a.m.: Suddenly awake. I’ve only slept a few hours. I have only one thought:Nico, Nico, Nico. We haven’t seen each other in three weeks, which, when you’re in love, is a crime.
7:15 a.m.: Still in bed, half awake. Less nervous about leaving the true love of my life: New York City. I don’t want to leave New York. Not even pandemic New York. But I am l set to wed the formerly incarcerated novelist Nico Walker, whose federal probation keeps him in Mississippi. Consider this an engagement announcement.
The next three days are my last in Brooklyn for the foreseeable future, so this is a sort of “goodbye to all that.”
7:30 a.m: The apartment is in disarray, and Nico arrives in a few hours. All around me are what remains of the “help Rachel pack” party from the night previous: ashes on the windowsill, wine bottles along the counter, air punctuated with Anton’s Marlboros. Being friends with your ex is sort of like being friends with your mom: They show up to help, but they bring the past with them.
And we didn’t even finish packing!
The problem was we started early, day-drinking, putting things in boxes as we watched episodes of Say Yes to the Dress. Certainly my wedding dress should be sexy … but refined? Surely the shotgun wedding of a literary bankrobber to the “hooker laureate” demands an appropriate dose of glamour.
7:45 a.m.: I clean a bit, finish the glass of Whispering Angel on my nightstand, and pray for a few hours’ rest.
10 a.m.: For someone with a nontraditional life path, I am taking this wedding a bit overly serious. I’ve already conducted an elaborate photo shoot in bridal lingerie.
Begin the madness of moisturizing, double-gluing false lashes. I feel hectic, but this is the soothing part: doing the make-up, the hair, taking a selfie to make sure it’s right. It’s a ritual—it’s spiritual, really.
Unable to decide what to wear to greet my fiancé—the ivory corset or the sheer nightgown—I text him some of the photos: “You choose.”