Featured Review: Ekke by Klara du Plessis (Review by Zoe Imani Sharpe)

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ekke, klara du plessis

Congratulations to Klara du Plessis, Vallum contributor and former employee, for winning the Pat Lowther Memorial Award for her book, Ekke!

Ekke by Klara du Plessis
(Toronto: Anstruther Books, 2018, 92 pages, $18.95 CND)

Eeeeeek. Ek. Ekkkk. Ekke. I play around with this word a few times before opening Klara du Plessis’s debut collection of poetry. That I have to say the word aloud, in different inflections, means at least two separate things: one, I do not speak Afrikaans; and two, the word itself contains myriad possible interpretations. Similarly, there are endless possible ways to review this book, which is a marker of its strength and complexity. One interpretation is through the lens of race; another through thinking about modern nation-states; and yet another is through the ways in which languages structure identity for the immigrant, the emigrant, the settler, the traveller, the multilingual:

I eke
out a meaning for my self.

Ek
Ek
Ek
Ek
Ek
Ek
Stottering

Stutter ringing

Du Plessis’s work signals not only how much effort it takes to describe oneself but how that description is multivarious, and therefore mutable, vulnerable to fragmentation. In Afrikaans, the word ekke, as du Plessis’s notes translate, means “an emphasis of I. / A dialect.” In English, the same word is also a sound—of terror, judgement, reaction. The speaker’s sense of self lies in the wide space between names, words, languages.

Du Plessis’s phrasing is startling, dreamlike. “I pluck at juice around the mouth” or “brushing camouflage on stones” are lines that pop. That language itself can be a landscape full of “black line(s) leading tarred to the abattoir,” “subtropical strap-ons,” “pin-pricks of white between grays and browns” is clearly, and beautifully, rendered here.

The second section of the book, “Stillframe Inbox,” is particularly compelling. There is much to be said about technology and ekphrasis, or the ways in which images (emojis and memes, in particular) have become common verse in our languages. Instead, du Plessis’s explanation of the section as a eulogy for her late friend, the artist Dorothea (Dot) Vermeulen, gives the poems an elegiac tone in which one begins to understand that language, like our loved ones, leaves traces:

It’s not safe sex, location is everything and this place
is not the wrong side of the tracks but the tracks themselves
where trains no longer make their elated way
and men walk tracing exhalations in the dust with their boots

If the book has a shortcoming perhaps it’s that I, as a reader, cannot comprehend if the narrative has a definitive political stance. The playfulness of du Plessis’s style, while clever and robust, had me itching for the theme to land on an argument. I wanted more profanity, more messiness in the language. The fact that both Afrikaans and English have been creolized—often by those whose traditional languages were made precarious by the ongoing European colonial project—does not, at least overtly, enter the text. Though du Plessis is careful to underscore the ways in which language continues to mark the landscapes of bodies:

mond oorblyfsels teen die skedel

ancestry perverted as

vertes

…

My language is a secret / secretion …
uncurling its animal muscles when the break is done

Diverging from the boiling anger found within Erin Mouré’s collection of feminist language-overhaul in her 1988 book Furious, Ekke is, on the other hand, meditative. It rides on “brute force.” Concerned with how power operates, the book thoroughly tests what language, as we use it, can offer:

Hunt stands adjacent to hurt
to be protected is to let that person be exposed.
Show-off masculinity and suddenly
there’s a collection of men, a natural history museum right there and
then.

That this “natural history museum” may include language, or a type of language, or a way of using language, are exciting propositions. As a reader, writer, and someone who thinks in words, my own experience of language—the language used to describe me and the language I have used to describe myself—has often felt imprecise. For example, a compound, North American word like ‘mixed-race’ does not come close to approximating or explaining my particular world-view as a mixed-race person, and thus tends to feel dead on the page. In Ekke, du Plessis holds a funeral for the limitations for every overused, empty, inanimate woord.

Are certain languages too tied up with the logic of the nation-state to be accurate representations of place? I am struck by the way du Plessis’s poems reveal the hidden strenuousness of officialised languages and the constrictive rationale of languages of colonial conquest; English, Afrikaans, French. The collection gestures toward loosening these limitations through the exercise of expansion and connection. It uncloaks how each of these languages exhaust themselves to keep themselves in power, and how observant study may allow new linguistic infinities. This is true specifically in South Africa, where the use of language—and the effect that certain languages have on those who use them, what language imbues— has always had political impact:

To reminisce is a ritual.
But to renew
a book at the library or the cells of the skin
or for a nation to officiate one language to eleven
is the hardest doubling act you’ll see
…
in this country.

The speaker “walk[s] across different languages as if they are flatlands.” I’m reminded of Dionne Brand’s assessment that “no language is neutral,” and as du Plessis elaborates, what if (inadequate, at times partisan) language is all one has to find a physical (psychic) closeness to place? If there is “no lingua franca of the mind,” as du Plessis asserts, how does one’s relationship with oneself operate in different locales? What happens right before “decency intervenes and the distance between thrusts / lingers?” How cavernous is the dialect between the “I” of the languages we speak, and the “I” of the physical landscapes we live in? It seems to me the closing of this gap relies on comprehensive study of what we say and how we say it.

 

Zoe Imani Sharpe is a poet and editor based in Toronto. Her writing has appeared in Sang Bleu Maga- zine, Main Street, Lemonhound, The Puritan, and is forthcoming in The Unpublished City – Volume II. Her chapbook, Sullied, was published by Trapshot Archives in 2011.

To view other content published in this issue, 15:2, please visit Vallum’s website.

Featured Review: Obits. by Tess Liem (Review by Domenica Martinello)

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obits., tess liem

Congratulations to Tess Liem, Vallum contributor and former employee, for winning the Lampert Memorial Award for a debut book of poetry for her book, Obits.!

OBITS. by Tess Liem
(Toronto, ON: Coach House Books, 2018, $19.94, 88 pages)

Tess Liem’s Obits. opens with an epigraph from Claudia Rankine’s Don’t Let Me Be Lonely: An American Lyric: “There is no innovating loss. It was never invented, it happened as something physical, something physically experienced. It is not something an ‘I’ discusses socially.” It’s such an elucidating way to enter the book that I must open the same door to begin this review.

But before I go further, I notice my use of the word “enter,” as in “to enter the book”—is it invasive? And now I am aware of my own body, the ways of entering it, ‘it’ being “nothing as a reference / to zero where zero means a vulva,” according to a critical gloss of Shakespeare’s sonnets. The speaker in “My body in three movements (one)” continues wryly, “how nice: / one of my body parts, in being nothing, / is some- thing.”

‘Nothing’ is a symbol standing in for an actual, embodied ‘something.’ Zero for vulva, sound bite for tragic death, and so on. But as the speaker demonstrates, it’s easy to get stuck at an intersection between the two. Throughout her stunning debut, Liem’s self-implicating speaker deepens the reader’s awareness of how statistics, data, news footage, obits, even poems themselves, fail to encompass the complicated and physically experienced ‘something’ of grief and death.

“I was concerned that in writing poems for or about the dead I would turn them into objects or tropes in service of my own feelings of loss or loneliness,” Liem elaborates in an author’s note published on the Coach House blog. The speaker in Obits. asserts that “[s]tories about the dead will be about the dead” in an attempt to unburden those lost of the symbolic baggage often foisted upon them. The book also resists the impulse to universalize this most ‘universal’ of experiences—especially in a world where “some lives count & others are counted”. “Call it” puts it another way:

To speak as if we all share the same loveliness, the same doom,

is not to speak

of the fact that some people have their hands

around other’s necks

Many of the poems in Obits. are centre-justified on the page, giving the impression of making direct eye contact with the reader. Interesting, then, that the speaker worries over the possibility of navel-gazing. In “Aesthetic distance” the speaker observes “how I circle back on myself continually” despite the speaker’s attempts to centre others. A distant but formative aunt who died, Thian Hoei, “steps in & out of my memory again, again, my grief, a timid animal.” The speaker’s sadness is especially acute “[w]hen the object of my mourning is missing” // when no obit. is print- ed.” In the case of Canada’s missing and murdered Indigenous women, not only is there no obit printed; one can even agree on the numbers.

Obits., then, raises the complicated question: is there a line between grief and wallowing, mourning and morbid affixation? Who gets to draw it? Does it have to do with proximity, with kinship? Throughout Obits., the speaker grapples with grief both privately (prostrate on the bedroom floor) and publicly (contemplating Obitsarchive.com while riding the metro), trying to parse its uses and applications. “Aesthetic distance” ends on a frustrated, exclamatory note: “What to make of this sadness! // What does it do!” The speaker wants to use sadness and the experience of trauma to do actual good in the world but is often depressed by the feeling of futility.

That’s not to discount futility on the part of others, often in more unforgivably powerful positions. In the collection’s opening poem “Dead theories,” the news of “forty-nine dead in Orlando” is broadcast in the metro and “a man with platinum hair / & his own TV show / [breaks] down crying reading their names.” Of the forty-nine dead in the Pulse nightclub massacre, the majority were queer latinx people of colour. The man with his own TV show, presumably Anderson Cooper, does have a personal stake in the tragedy. He’s gay—he’s also a rich cis, and white. In response to crying on TV, the speaker again wants to know: “What did that do.” These questions aren’t exactly rhetorical, though Liem’s failure to answer them creates some of the collection’s generative energy.

Also propelling the poems forward is the sense of dailiness created by the backdrop of the metro platform or train, and of course the refrain created by the several “Obit.” poems. Public transportation seems to be the perfect liminal space to contemplate death while implicating the body—crowded in with strangers, touch without intimacy, being moved from one place to another. There’s also the physical proximity to death, as the speaker reminds us while contemplating a poster for an adaptation of Anna Karenina during her commute: “her ending is before you / every morning, every evening, on the platform of the metro.”

Of course, the beauty of Liem’s language (“The mango in one hand, knife in the other, a slick, shrinking yellow sculpture”), the deft motion of her mind, and her keen sense of humour (a self-serious professor who only reads and teaches dead men is, “in the year two-thousand-seventeen, // …still worried about Lady Gaga’s influence”), make a book about death undeniably alive. There is also room for hope and tenderness, a space that almost feels more fraught for Liem than death. The first poem in the book ends, for example, with the speaker admitting: “when I look forward to spring / it feels like a risk,” and the last lines of the book acknowledge: “I’m taking a risk / when I don’t know the dead.” Hope and grief, connected through shared emotional risk.

In fact, I’d say Liem’s willingness to risk failure and implicate herself (and others) so fully is part of what makes Obits. distinct. If there is truly no innovating loss, Liem doesn’t allow herself to simply “[s]tep over the potholed thing” and “[c]all the step a poem.” The speaker in Obits. under- stands that “[t]here is a point at which you must jump into the hole / in order to keep digging,” no matter how dark that hole may be.

Domenica Martinello is the author of All Day I Dream About Sirens (Coach House Book, 2019).

To view other content published in this issue, 16:1, please visit Vallum’s website.

Featured Review: My Ariel by Sina Queyras (Review by Karissa LaRocque)

Congratulations to Vallum contributor Sina Queyras on winning the Quebec Writers Foundation’s 2018 A.M. Klein Prize for Poetry for her most recent book, My Ariel!

How Do You Dare to Publish a Problem?: Sina Queyras’ MY ARIEL

(Toronto, ON: Coach House Books, $19.95, 88 pages)

Sina Queyras’ new collection of poetry, My Ariel, is not obsessed with suicide and death in the way you might expect a book titled after Sylvia Plath’s 1965 Ariel to be. Instead, the obsessions Queyras picks up on in Ariel are those of circularity, rebirth, and repetition: the mythical cycles we find in poetry and in life. The collection is rife with narrative memories and moments that return cast in new light, superstitious circles that we later learn are more like vortexes

The infamous adage goes that Ted Hughes rearranged the ordering of Ariel after his wife’s death, ending the collection with “Words” and leaving the reader on the moment of: “From the bottom of the pool, fixed stars / Govern a life.” Conversely, Plath’s last arrangement of the collection starts with “[l]ove set you going like a fat gold watch” and ends with “[t]he bees are flying. They taste the spring.” The renewal implied by spring and the pollination cycle is what we might call a tone shift from Hughes’ choice of the dark well. Likewise, My Ariel is a cycle, albeit a dark one: stirring, powerfully affecting, and at times violent, if only as a consideration. Yet, like the collection’s namesake, the upswing always comes: the children, the better years, the shoulders straightening underneath the men’s suit. Even in the darkest turns of the collection there is always a way out, and in the brightest moments a shadow. Like the original Ariel, Queyras’ take is not a death wish, nor is it empowering or positive in its resilience—it is more like a circle: phases, seasons of a life, and of the shifting imagined future:

As flanks; steps
Of joy that, like the hours,
We master and release.

My Ariel’s premise may be that it is a playful rewrite of an infamous collection more known for its writer than for its contents, but the collection is an outstretched hand, not a closed one. Queyras emulates Plath in her skillful equation of the outside world and its drama—environmentalism, gender, sexism, aging, death, poverty, privilege—with the microcosm of her family history. Put another way, the speaker returns to herself, her parents, her children, while also considering the larger cultural and historical tides she’s caught in.

If every female poet has had their obsession with Plath, Queyras is the outlier. Her engagement does not read as a personal investment, a devotion to Plath, or as a quest to solve her like a dead mystery. Her engagement with Ariel is more like a conversation, a dialogue, the sparks of glee and relief when one smart, busy, overdrawn woman speaks to another, checking their watch (their iPhone) for when to come home to the children. Given Queyras’ earlier collections Expressway (2009), which draws on the peripatetic Grasmere Journals of Dorothy Wordsworth, and MxT (2014), which uses diagrams and formulas to quantify grief, Queyras’ framing of her own book, quite literally, with Plath’s seems to me another one of her genius and labour intensive conceptual framings. With Plath, though, Queyras is encountering a conceptual framework unlike any other. The world of Plath criticism is bat shit crazy. Given the rabbit hole of the world of Plath studies—a genre which I can most concisely explain by saying that there is a book about books about Plath—there is no way My Ariel wouldn’t in some ways be about the way the public and the academy engages with the confessional or lyric work of female writers. Queyras’ twist is that she adds to the already engaging frame—questions like, what if Plath wasn’t straight, what if she didn’t have a husband, what if she could tweet? These conceptual thoughts alone could make a compelling book and this was the book I was expecting—but Queyras moves to wider ground, penning work about parenting, careers, aging, love, and commitment. If the book feels sprawling and like it is shooting in several different directions all at once that’s because it is—which I don’t mean in a negative way. Rather, I read it as a sharply aware reflection of the conditions of the time—how can a book simply react to another one fifty-two years its senior without including all that has changed, all that we have lost: “I am not a historian but I / bind myself with history, not just my own.”

Another adage goes that Plath’s short story “The Fifty-Ninth Bear”— about an embittered wife seeing her husband get eaten by a bear on a camping trip— was clearly a secret death wish for Hughes. Recently, critics have picked up on Plath’s interest in ecology, environmentalism, and how human interference has decimated national parks. The focus on Plath’s personal drama obscured an interest in nature and preservation, meaning we only got the ecological reading of the story maybe 40 years after it was published. Likewise, on first read My Ariel is a complicated engagement of one life with Plath’s mythos, a triumph of lyricism by a darkly funny and sharp speaker. Yet on second read I realize how I was only seeing the bear eat Hughes: Queyras’ speaker is looking out. Gender is an undercurrent that will make younger readers ask how our contemporary generation is experiencing visibility in a way older generations did not, about how queer parenting is pushed into binary heteronormative boxes, and how men have made writing, teaching, and learning unstable rooms for us all.

The most disappointing and pervasive reading of Ariel has always been that it is just a suicide note. That it is the key to figuring Plath out, a way to get to the real Plath, Sylvia, Sivvy. Put a poem in a tunnel like that, and it will never come out. Likewise, to read My Ariel as simply a rewrite of Ariel is to miss the half dozen other tracks Queyras takes her readers on. Though it is a book communicated through the “I” of the speaker, My Ariel is an empathetic and outreaching movement for Queyras. It is a dialogue with Plath that invites readers to the table too. For the Plath fans, there are plenty of Easter eggs. The enigmatic “The Night Dances, Very Fine is Very Cold: A Sequence in an Old Way” reads like a call and response for the savvy reader, as Queyras drops the first names of Plath scholars alongside now immortalised friends, relatives, and confidantes: Anne Stevenson, Janet Malcolm, W. S. and Dido Merwin, Olywn Hughes. For those who catch her drift, these moments are gleeful and fun, smoothly integrated and rewarding like riddles. Yet, for certain and prolonged moments, Plath doesn’t seem to matter much at all. These poems are strong and sure of themselves in their muscular movement and sturdy grounding, even when sparse they punch you in the gut: “The body knows what it needs to burn, and will.” With My Ariel Queyras has written poems which—despite giving you so much—have the rare gift of still seeming to leave so much unsaid, unanswered, unspoken.

Karissa LaRocque likes to read and sometimes writes about reading. Her work has appeared MUSE Medusa, LOR Journal, The Dalhousie Review, GUTS Magazine, and elsewhere. You can find her on Twitter (@_karissy) or Instagram (@2punk2die).

To view other content published in this issue, 15:1, please visit Vallum’s website.

Vallum magazine is also available in digital format. Featuring additional content such as: AUDIO and VIDEO recordings of selected poets, further poems, interviews, essays, and MORE!

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Featured Review: Voodoo Hypothesis by Canisia Lubrin (reviewed by Julie Mannell)

Today Is a Good Day to Dream: Canisia Lubrin’s VOODOO HYPOTHESIS 

(Hamilton, ON: Wolsak & Wynn, 2017, $18.00, 96 pages)

Review by Julie Mannell

Canisia Lubrin’s seminal book of poetry Voodoo Hypothesis is one of the most artful and influential works to emerge in Canada in 2017. It raises the bar for what can be expected of debut collections. Voodoo Hypothesis reconstructs history as visceral, bodily, and endured as perpetual, intergenerational psychic injury. The poems are a map of historical displacement depicted by Lubrin as mental and physical manifestations that are both purposeful and lyrical.

In the interest of full disclosure, I will acknowledge that I have been good friends with Canisia Lubrin for a year and a half. However, this friendship formed from my involvement in the Canadian writing community: a particularly small community where it is difficult to not have personal encounters with other authors.

Voodoo Hypothesis is referentially thick. It recollects modernism through frequent allusion both to history, canonical texts, and authors/public figures (Dionne Brand, Jesse Williams, Priscila Uppal to name a few). One could venture to call this book an academic’s wet dream because of the depth of research a single poem requires of its reader in order to fully realize the multiplicity of layers and how these layers poetically conspire to render a single multifaceted and rich collage. For the speaker, the body is not ever a blank slate but is born of and into history. “I am a simple child, then, a tilled site of history.” Before their first breath, a person is already a palimpsest of linguistic signifiers that only becomes further compounded by the experiential. Writing (or becoming) oneself is always a process of writing over what has already been written, experience in conglomeration with that which has already been experienced.

Consider Lubrin’s poem “The Mongrel,” which heavily leans against allusions to Haiti: the Creole language and the Nèg maron (creole for maroon or “wild negro” in the pejorative and can also refer to a statue commemorating the Haitian slave revolt against France in 1804), as well as the Shakespearean island “monster” Caliban (The Tempest was set on an unnamed Mediterranean island but has been often set in Haiti in modern adaptations), to name a few. The word “mongrel” itself is a charged word that refers to a dog with no definable breed and has been unfortunately adopted as a slur for someone of mixed descent. The poem interestingly opens with a quote from Nobel Prize winning poet and diplomat Saint-John Perse, who was heavily influenced by Robinson Crusoe (an author who notoriously treated Caribbean characters with a British Colonial agenda), and was the son of plantation owners in Guadeloupe—fleeing to France on the occasion of the election of the first Guadeloupian President. Yet the quote Lubrin has chosen is one of longing and displacement: “There was no name for us in our mother’s oratory.” What follows renders the quote ironic, if one meditates on its context. However, it is not strictly accusatory. It takes the sentiment of displacement and namelessness and reconstructs it as experienced by “the Mongrel”—those whom Shakespeare, Crusoe, and Perse simultaneously benefit from and blame. Here I point to Lubrin’s striking line, “What else reveals us, a species of amnesiacs, cut off from the trembling that tore—our continents apart? And with so much unknowing.” The longing is as enchanting as it is elevated—it is enchanting because the strength of imagery evoked by “a species of amnesiacs” and elevated by its originality. Yet, the speaker is direct in their inquiry and treatment of historical tropes and colonial agendas that have been adopted and taught: “our knowledge of the Mongrel is only fragmentary.” Throughout the poem, not only are the thoughts and the ideas that accompany the Mongrel elevated, but the “Mongrel” itself as a posited identity is elevated through repeated capitalization:

brutality loves us this side of the name, while
only misted, our ears stretch to still the Mongreled
air landing, broken, invented again as history
in the rusted coils of coffee shops, inked
Mongrel skins, whose only escape is one cosmic
blue carbuncle.

While the breadth of information is intimidating, the universality of the many small observational phrases ground the poems in relatable sentiments that render the work immediately accessible. A dangerously thin line that Lubrin navigates well is that of the wise voice and the casual observer. Lubrin draws upon a wide array of research that for many might point towards someone who has aged into stark seriousness—but she is young, and her material is interlaced with quotable, twitter-esque observations. From her poem “Frankenstein Universe” is a favourite of these lines: “today is a good day to dream, it doesn’t matter if it rains.” Another, this one from “Up in the Lighthouse” goes: “You must know, black isn’t always the void” And here is one last one from “Epistle to the Ghost Gathering”: “Today I insist on the tenderness I may soon forget and remind you.” She successfully marries both the prudent voice of a judicious academic with the passive vulnerability of late-girlhood and the final product is pretty cool:

Nowadays I like to say cool
cool cool thrashing my tongue like an iguana

Tonally, poems often shift from reflective to angry and take you on an emotional odyssey in a fashion akin to an album of music: this is partially due to Lubrin’s expert lyricism and perhaps also due to the careful consideration allotted to the ordering of the poems—no doubt influenced by the editorial team at Wolsak and Wynn’s Buckrider Books. This shift is exemplified in the final line of “Fire of Roseau,” which seamlessly moves from indignant to elegiac: “I rebel, I like any nigger with a demand: tell me my thoughts are jagged but never why they bruise.” Little attention is often paid this kind of tonal movement, both between poems, within a poem, and as Lubrin does frequently, within a line. Something that can be witnessed in too many collections of late, is the focus on a central premise—and there is much to be said for how the Canadian grant system encourages this approach—which often ends up treating poetry collections as if they are an essay. The final product of such endeavours is often a grouping of poems of a singular tone around a central metaphor. It is obvious, for example, that an essay could be written on the Caribbean-Canadian experience in Lubrin’s work, the role of allusion in this collection, integrating pop culture within explorations of colonialism, the aesthetic of the emotive in the reflective speaker. Yet none of these is the central concern of the book as a whole, nor do all of the poems employ the same tools or muses. When a poet permits themselves this sort of freedom, the final product has some variance within it and allots the reader room to breathe. This is an integral element in the enterprise of world creation, even if that world is largely internal and confined to thought. No world is any one specific thing (trauma, ecstasy, disappointment, or accomplishment) all of the time, always, forever.

The more literary term for a “turn” in a poem is a “volta,” and these are classically featured in sonnets which often have a dramatic curve in tone. Lubrin has multiple per poem and they never tire, they are strategic so as to keep the reader alert and engaged, evoking suspense:

If proof is what you seek: these doors, clear with fright
and conscience burst at the hinges and turn out all ill this life deposits,

however cosmic the unease, into the black sweater
of nighttime. I can’t tell you what marks the hills that wait

like hexagrams of frost. But behold the sweet, holy reprieve
of a hoodie pulled over the eyes in wanton praise

of the pre-bang dark when the world is too much.
Instead the sun comes up announcing it has touched the parts of us that hurt

In this passage, the speaker employs metaphysical conceit to move from grand existential observations to the specific of a black sweater. The voice switches from philosophically instructional to pragmatic and personal. Then what follows is a transition into something simultaneously reflective and collective, implicating the speaker as part of a larger experience: one who perceives the sunlight as illuminating the historical and individual pains of the past synchronously. All the while maintaining its musicality through creative word choice and graceful imagery.

There is far too much quality material for a single review to adequately cover Voodoo Hypothesis.  I will, however, state that I think this collection is absolutely perfect and wholly anticipate its presence on the awards shortlists in the coming months.

 

Julie Mannell is an author of poetry, prose, and essays. She is currently completing her MFA in Creative Writing at University of Guelph. Mannell is the recipient of the Constance Rooke/HarperCollins Scholarship, the Mona Adilman Poetry Prize, and the Lionel Shapiro Award for Excellency in Creative Writing. She splits her time between Montreal and Toronto.

 

To view other poems published in this issue, 15:1, please visit Vallum’s website.

Vallum magazine is also available in digital format. Featuring additional content such as: AUDIO and VIDEO recordings of selected poets, further poems, interviews, essays, and MORE!

Download the FREE APP and FREE SAMPLE EDITION for your tablet, kindle or smartphone through PocketMags OR iTunes.

 

Featured Review: “Cheer Up, Jay Ritchie” by Jay Ritchie (reviewed by Bill Neumire)

Jay Ritchie’s CHEER UP, JAY RITCHIE

(Toronto, ON: Coach House Books, 2017, $19.95, 88 pages)

Review by Bill Neumire

 

The title of Jay Ritchie’s debut poetry collection is teasingly straightforward, and it begs the question, to begin, why does Jay Ritchie need to be cheered? The book is full of disappointment, especially the disappointment and depression created by deep intellectual engagement and study—this is not the bliss of ignorance, but rather the dissatisfaction of “O I make so much sense all the time.” The war between feeling/play and thought/education is apparent in “Vanishing from Yourself,” where the speaker wants “[j]ust to not / know for a minute.” He remarks, “I drank red wine and coped like an adult” and “I made pasta because / I wanted to avoid the actual / conditions of my life.” As the title suggests, there’s a real effort, though difficult, toward a practiced optimism, a sort of fake-it-till-you-make-it striving to see the positive, which culminates in “Cheer Up, Jay Ritchie,” where he tells himself:

how giving is easy,
how gratitude is free,
how I believe in everything,
how there are omens if I want them

Ritchie’s voice is concise, funny, epiphanic, self-deprecating and simultaneously self-aggrandizing, splintered, and erudite. It’s full of allusions to writers like Richard Brautigan, Allen Ginsberg, Elizabeth Bishop, Anne Carson, Rainer Marie Rilke, James Baldwin, and Toni Morrison. It’s a mind whirring like one of those simulated cyclone booths that we can momentarily step inside. His erudition often leaves us intruding on small glimpses of others’ stories, and then, through non sequitur and associative leaping, we’re ricocheted off into a new scene, forced to use the journey of juxtapositions to form our own tale. His voice is sarcastic but it’s also appreciative and affectionate—indeed, the word “love” comes up in many of these poems. The tone is flat as he pokes fun at capitalism, education, and lit crit. His speaker notes, “‘Here I am’ // using non sequiturs and air quotes” and later, “I try to look impressed, but / it comes off stoic and sarcastic.” As he mentions, he also makes skilled use of quoted material, dialogue, and a staccato, post-modern meta-take, curating little ironies like “[p]eaceful streets / named after violent men” and “The easiest way out is to look for an entrance.”
In This Is Water, David Foster Wallace presents a fish who doesn’t know what water is because it lives in water; similarly, the speaker in Ritchie’s collection is so immersed in a stream of commercial plastic capitalism that he fractures himself trying to escape, to define his condition and to find value outside the stream, as the speaker in “Town of Mount Royal” asserts, “Going outside is the only way // to have anything interesting to say / about interior design.” The speaker—and increasingly books of contemporary poetry are their speaker—is vanishing and reappearing, even “mistaken for fireflies.” He often expresses the self as otherness, as here in “Water Tower”:

When I listened to my voicemail,
I conceived of my body
and moved to St. Henri
as a tower of water

His identity is intimately tied to economy, to money, as he observes, “The stores had changed / and so had I. / We were difference together.” Some reference to money overtly appears in most of these poems, a motif that quickly becomes existential and troubling in passages like this one from “Multi-level Marketing”:

There Is No Such Thing
As Ethical Consumption
Under Capitalism.

I read that on Tumblr
while working at the self-storage,
dizzy with love and disappointment
like my past self in Paris

Desire, advertisement, and debt all play crucial roles in this book, perhaps most trenchantly when the speaker confesses, “I buy plastic to feel / normal.” As a result, one of the strongest subtextual motifs is that of value—if the plastic junk of ads is a false, superficial value, then what is real? How can one possibly not become depressed, inadequate, broken? Indeed, this is ironically highlighted in the Camus-esque “Multi-level Marketing”:

In a Society That Profits from Your Self-Doubt,
Liking Yourself Is a
Rebellious Act.

I read that on Tumblr

The quest for real value begins itself in the negative, specifically, in the absence of money, as the speaker quotes the truism, “A Truly Rich Man Is One Whose Children / Run into His Arms Even When His / Hands Are Empty.” The world of money and salesmanship is absorbed into the building of the self, and the speaker takes this to an extreme as he writes, “Every Brand Has a Story— / Here’s Mine.” This construction is front and center as here, where Ritchie again employs dialogue, a strategy he often comes back to:

The rehabbed
juvenile delinquent said,
Building a house
is just a
series of small
tasks that amount
to something big

This struggle to become whole, to become oneself, is often articulate in lament, as in “I only wish I were myself.” In Mark Strand’s famous “Keeping Things Whole,” the speaker pictures himself as an absence, and Ritchie here also envisions himself in the negative:

Inserted
into a narrative I do not recognize—
I am not that, I am
only what can be articulated
in negatives, a lost item
that is definitely not there

The process of reflection is at its most optimistic in this moment from “Upcycle”: “BE / YOU // TIFUL,” a playful moment that makes, from the fracturing of a word, a larger meaning only possible in language. Language’s effect on identity is truly under the microscope, evident in this moment from “Vanishing from Yourself”:

You’ve made an arrangement
with existence to be
mostly language, and here
are the results: an impossible
demand for expressivity,
cognitive dissonance

It’s a collection that, despite its seemingly inward self-absorption—as amusingly intimated in the book’s title—is so full of brilliant voice that it makes me want to speak with it; a collection whose speaker reminds us that “Oil and Coca-Cola linger / on the poisoned lip of the twenty-first century,” and in this reverberating proclamation makes clear that this is not the depression of a singular speaker, but rather a crisis more universal, a conversation more inclusive and necessary.

 

Bill Neumire‘s first book, Estrus, was a semi-finalist for the 412 Miles Press Award, and recent poems have appeared in The Harvard Review Online and Beloit Poetry Journal. He reviews contemporary poetry for Scout, Vallum, and Verdad, where he serves as a poetry editor.

 

To view other poems published in this issue, 15:1, please visit Vallum’s website.

Vallum magazine is also available in digital format. Featuring additional content such as: AUDIO and VIDEO recordings of selected poets, further poems, interviews, essays, and MORE!

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Featured Review: Gillian Sze’s “Panicle.” Review by Adèle Barclay.

 

Gillian Sze’s PANICLE
(Toronto, ON: ECW Press, 2017, $18.95, 90 pages)
Review by Adèle Barclay

 

“Panicle” is a term from plant morphology—it refers to a branched cluster of flowers. With this in mind, Gillian Sze’s fifth full-length poetry collection Panicle announces the poet’s ever-developing relationship with form. With dynamic curiosity, the poet exhibits a studied yet sly engagement with lyric, prose poetry, ekphrasis, sonnets, and long poems.

Sze is deliberate but not constrained when it comes to her poetry—there’s savvy consideration in her voice. She knows formal rules and literary history well, but she also knows the poetic container is human-made and fallible, and that’s what is more interesting. “Calligraphy,” the inaugural poem of the collection, elucidates this self-awareness: “To write heart in our language takes only four strokes, but so much depends on the first mark. […] In calligraphy, if a stroke falters, you must begin the word all over again.” Rather than crumple under this pressure, Sze allows the poem to embody the drive towards perfection while still opening up:

At least here at my desk I can start again and write:
This is how the beginning sounds. This is my heart. Look.
At least there is that.

Initially this proclamation of “at least” seems like a resigned gesture, but through repetition, it becomes clearly generative. The speaker unblinkingly instructs us to look at the initial stroke of a character and at her heart, and the poem tasked with opening a collection flourishes while carrying the weight of its potential undoing.

Panicle is a conversational collection. Sze often constructs the poems out of quotations and ideas from modernist poetry and letters, art history, contemporary art exhibits, filmmakers. The collection is an active museum. Sze’s voice emerges distinct despite the cacophony of references because the poet deftly balances multiple currents of dialogue. Like any good interlocutor, Sze knows when to hold threads of discussion taut and when to let them loose.

For example, “Sound No 2” deploys an epigraph from German film director Werner Schroeter: “Cinema could be as intelligent and could transport as much message and image and idea as it can with sound.” Sze juxtaposes this meditation on the potency of sound in cinema with poetry’s own powerful ability to zoom in. The quotation provides a jumping off point that Sze adapts for her own project. She writes: “These are things I want to show you, like the empty pause that encircles desire. Or how Klimt knew that a woman bends her neck that far for a kiss only if she really wants it. I want to show you how quiet it gets when you’re in the company of someone who no longer loves you.” This poetic conjuring of heartbreaking silence resounds. The poem enacts an encircling desire—the wish to speak to an addressee about the broiling intense meanings embedded in familiar images and sounds:

But more than anything, I want to show you something smaller: how the smell of winter at night has the same crisp scent as the sound of the word biscuit, the touch of velum in your mouth

The desire to communicate is so strong it engenders synesthesia. Intimate meaning transcends distinct sensory categories. Perhaps this is what the speaker wants to show us—the beyondness of sense in poetry.

 

Panicle is deeply engaged with visual art—classic and contemporary. What’s refreshing about Sze’s ekphrasis is that her awe isn’t weighed down by self-effacement. Her ekphrastic poems are full of inquisition and astonishment—“This is the hand that reaches for God. / This is where you look up”—but they don’t bemoan language’s inadequacy in the face of visual representation. The poet does not surrender power to the visual realm; instead, she creates poetry playfully and defiantly in tandem with the art world. For example, “Musées Royaux des Beaux-Arts de Belgique, 01/06/11” begins:

In the nineteenth century, the romantics ran out of words. They began titling their paintings by the same name. On one wall of the museum hangs La mort de Cléopâtre. Beside it: La mort de Cléopâtre—and beside that: La mort de Cléopâtre.

Words didn’t fail the romantics—the romantics failed with words, but the poet arrives to pick up the slack: “Along the wall, Cleopatra dies, again and again, in French and Flemish.” So much of the collection is concerned with the mechanics of looking—art, film, photography. But it’s poetry that allows Sze to invert the traditional gaze. In “Proof,” the speaker articulates a desire past the camera’s own fields of vision: “There is a way I would like you always to see me when you put your camera down.” Here the speaker sees the seeing and seizes the authority between the two onlookers: “I carry a pair of suns in my head. Take a look: I want you to go blind. I want something in me to do irreparable, irreversible in you.” The poet craves the looking as well as the connection that underpins the two observers.

Sze’s explorations of perception in Panicle are also investigations into how observing connects us to stories and each other. The collection wanders through the halls of high art, not as a way to designate itself as erudite, but as a method of interrogating what visions have come before and enabling poetry to find new ways to see.

Adèle Barlcay‘s writing has appeared in The Fiddlehead, The Puritan, PRISM, The Pinch, and elsewhere. She is the recipient of the 2016 Lit POP Award for Poetry and the 2016 The Walrus‘ Readers’ Choice Poetry Prize. Her debut poetry collection If I Were in a Cage I’d Reach Out for You (Nightwood, 2016) wont the 2017 Dorothy Livesay Poetry Prize. She is the Interviews Editor at The Rusty Toque, the Critic-in-Residence for Canadian Women In Literary Arts, and an editor at Rahlia’s Ghost Press.

This review was published in issue 15:1 Memory & Loss. To see more from this issue, please visit Vallum’s website.

Vallum magazine is also available in digital format. Featuring additional content such as: AUDIO and VIDEO recordings of selected poets, further poems, interviews, essays, and MORE!

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Featured Review: Erin Robinsong’s Rag Cosmology. Review by Alan Reed.

“a poem of objects that live by magic”: Erin Robinsong’s Rag Cosmology (Toronto, ON: BookThug, 2017, $18.00, 104 pages). Review by Alan Reed. 

Rag Cosmology is a meditation on the ecological in personal terms, or the personal in ecological terms. Or it is the work of blurring the distinction between those two statements, presenting the two as mutually imbricated perspectives opening onto a world where the distinction simply does not matter.

The collection opens with leaves falling from a tree, “when the green leaves / have gone back”: the decay of the leaves becomes a reflection on death, their falling and mulching a funerary process, the changing of their colour the words for an unnamed anxiety, which becomes a metaphor that grounds the affective state in an understanding of a broader ecological process.

I would say that this movement between the personal and the ecological, from one to the other and then back again, is emblematic of the work Robinsong is doing with these poems. And with each shift from the one domain to the other she brings something across the distinction between them, knitting the two together in a way where each can offer insight into the working of the other.

Alongside this, or perhaps running beneath it, there are occasional poems in what I would describe as an almost pastoral mode. These are poems about Cortes Island, where Robinsong is from, and her early life experience there. They are about oysters and rocks from a creek, bottled to preserve their lustre, “the knowledge that is around / wrapped in mountains emitting clarity.” They are memories, of a childhood and of growing up with the wild around her. In my reading, these poems are the heart of the collection.

That the scenes they convey are remembered is important. They are past, they are absent, and there is something painful about that absence—“2007 marked the end / I left my home, and could not return / (oh for my bright black sky).” In their absence, however, a trace of them persists. It is a seed unfolding slowly, subtly through these poems: it is the possibility of the ecological perspective the poems work from, and also how personal the ecological is in them. It is, in a sense, the magic animating them:

“What shall I do with my information I’m an animal in an animal in an animal I’m a poem of objects that live by magic I’m every idea I ever had, I’ll just stay here as a person. I have a photographic mouth.”

If Robinsong was a girl who grew up with the wild around her, then in this reading she has become a woman with the wild inside her. And not just inside of her but spilling out of her. She writes: “I was 20, I was a polyrhythmic / rug rat noticing there is nothing that isn’t / moving.” In this I would say there is a sensibility learned in her childhood that has persisted alongside her memory of Cortes Island.

In these poems this sensibility is brought face to face with the contemporary world. From this perspective, Robinsong is able to articulate a subjective space for herself—“Chemist programmer waste management prodigy / structural analyst shamanic kinetic engineer / I’m not. My open palms disorganized dreams / wild chemicals.”

What it is possible to do in this space makes up the greater part of the collection, too much to address here. I want to touch on how she returns to the theme of death. Late in the collection is an elegy to a lost friend. It is bracketed by a pair of meditations on dying. The first is brief – “I read somewhere that we think of death as a taking away of life / but that actually – you die into life”; the second, the poem entitled “Mon. Aft,” unfolds more convolutely and at greater length. It reads, in part: “you accompany / yourself / to what / vast appoint. / without your / face all about / a bond with / the universe / going to / cosmic smith- / ereens.”

Similar to how she treats leaves going to mulch in the beginning of the collection, Robinsong is here concerned with how an understanding of ecological processes can deepen the meaning of personal experience. The ecological perspectives Rag Cosmology grounds itself in offers a way to understand the personal within the context of the broader life processes we cannot but be part of. Reading it offers a way to more richly imagine the natural world and better understand our place within it.

Alan Reed is the author of a collection of poems, For Love of the City (BuschekBooks, 2006), and a novel, Isobel & Emile (Coach House Books, 2010). His short work has appeared in dANDelion, The Coming Envelope, Lemon Hound, and Papirmass. He lives in Montreal.

This review was published in issue 14:2 “Lies and Duplicity.” To see more from this issue, please visit Vallum’s website.

Vallum magazine is also available in digital format. Featuring additional content such as: AUDIO and VIDEO recordings of selected poets, further poems, interviews, essays, and MORE!

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Featured Review: Aisha Sasha John’s I Have to Live. Review by Domenica Martinello.

Aisha Sasha John’s I Have to Live (Toronto, ON: McClelland & Stewart, 2017, $16.95, 160 pages). Review by Domenica Martinello.

In a culture that takes pride in leisure and unrelenting productivity with an equally obsessive rigor, multidisciplinary artist Aisha Sasha John’s third collection of poetry I have to live stakes its claim outright. “I have to live” is a declaration made not so much from the heart or mind but from the stomach: full of blood, hunger, and life force. As the refrain modulates from universal, to idiosyncratic, to even withholding, I have to live churns butter from the pleasures of a fully unapologetic personhood. It turns the common fact of living into its own artist’s statement.

Here’s a sampling of John’s ‘formal’ artist’s statement from her website: “I love activity very much, I love to do things. Thus, it is very important that what I spend my time doing is good for me. My artistic vision is to be relaxed and all the activities I do are in this service.” I have to live abides by this vision right down to the watercolor wash of purple and pink on its cover page. John operates with a relaxed confidence, the way loose brushstrokes require an artist’s faith. In other words, I delight in how John’s chill artist’s statement spits in the face an economy that celebrates—as a recent headline for The New Yorker puts it—working yourself to death.

With the boundaries of work and leisure more blurred than ever before, even living is a commodity. Think of lifestyle gurus, YouTube stars, and other “creative influencers” who hang a decorative tapestry over late capitalism and post it on Instagram. John recognizes the specificity of the consumerist moment she both inhabits and rejects:

When I am dead this time
Will be an object
And I
Will be an object
Too

That’s okay.
Right now I am alive
And
I like it.

There’s also a clear divide between work and everything that isn’t work. I have to live acknowledges labour but certainly doesn’t glorify it. Take all three lines of “I can’t believe I agreed to go to work today”: “That was so dumb of me. / I hate money. / And I hate sitting down.” Another poem outlines the way work gets in the way of the body being a body:

The first time I came here I was late, I was scolded
I was bleeding.
I barely even cared
Fuck, look:
When I start to bleed
I have to eat.

The speaker relishes in the subversive act of being “lazy,” of “hardly [knowing] what’s going on,” and of continuing to attend to her “heart” and “pussy.” The speaker must live in accordance with the rhythm of her desires lest she feel the remorse of having “left prime sweetness / Between the tight teeth / Of some hurried days.”

The prime sweetness of John’s micro-poems is often a morsel of evocative, idiosyncratic thought. Evocative of what I’m not always sure, but as John puts it later in the collection, they seem to enact a “performance called DON’T YOU WANNA KNOW WHAT I’M DOING EVERY DAY!” In short, yes. I am somehow riveted as John ruminates “if it’s even sanitary / To leave the ketchup outside all the time. / At night, even. / And also the hot sauce.” In “I like it when we give the world it itself,” one of my favourite poems in the collection, I don’t necessarily need to know about the origins of the mysterious photograph to love the lines “Hi, God. // I said in the photo’s caption. / It’s Aisha. // I volunteer.”

The collection does move into a place that is intentionally withholding, however. An unusually descriptive poem set in Zagora, Morocco ends with the speaker toying with the audience’s access, concluding: “I get / What I come for. // Do I tell you?” Reading like a letter, “For you and all your siblings and friends and husbands or boyfriends” signs off “Daddy // Page 2 of 2.” Readers don’t get first page of the epistle, though its existence haunts the poem. These instances of intentional obfuscation are a risk because they cast other moments in a different light. Poems that seem guilelessly idiosyncratic and without context are suddenly a little more—what is it—glib?

Yes, we’re being teased. If you’re a reader who is willing to yield your sense of authority, you’ll love it. If you go into books thinking their authors owe you anything, you might not. If you need to exert your intellectual control, though, John is more than willing to cede the steering wheel with a wink, as in “I defer to you”: “It’s great. / I’m tired of always knowing everything.”

Ultimately I have to live is a collection rife with life lessons ranging from how to be funny (the answer is to “never joke”), how to have “the most pleasure,” how to prioritize food over all else, how to relax and “draw something ugly by accident.” You know, the basics. It’s also a reminder to stop taking ourselves so seriously. Take a moment to forget the hustle, forget the grind, forget networking, forget working all together and take a cue from John in “Today I could aspire but I want to nap.”

Some people are interested in exploring the ways
Something is negotiated
In light of something else.
God bless them.
I have to fucking live.

Domenica Martinello, from Montréal, was a finalist for the 2017 Bronwen Wallace Award for Emerging Writers. She is completing an MFA in poetry at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and her debut collection of poetry, All Day I Dream About Sirens, is forthcoming.

This review was published in issue 14:2 “Lies and Duplicity.” To see more from this issue, please visit Vallum’s website.

Vallum magazine is also available in digital format. Featuring additional content such as: AUDIO and VIDEO recordings of selected poets, further poems, interviews, essays, and MORE!

Download the FREE APP and FREE SAMPLE EDITION for your tablet, kindle or smartphone through PocketMags OR iTunes

Featured Review: Catriona Wright’s Table Manners. Review by Julie Mannell.

After-Dinner Poetry: Catriona Wright’s Table Manners (Montreal, QC: Véhicule Press, 2017, $17.95, 88 pages). Review by Julie Mannell

Molecular Gastronomy is a concentration of food preparation focused on the creative physical and chemical transformation of ingredients at a microscopic level. This concept is alluded to in “Gastronaut,” the title of the first poem in Catriona Wright’s debut poetry book Table Manners. The poem reinvents the term, instead suggesting the opposite, a scientific exploration of consumption as it relates to the external. A photo of “barbecued tarantulas in Cambodia” causes the speaker “jealousy and rage” for which they must confront by way of their “edible moss” that is only adequate insofar as it might “calm myself enough to sleep.” Here the language of rare and high cuisine stands as a place marker for other suggestions of class—travel, freedom, rare and often inaccessible experiences that may lead to expensive varieties of wisdom. The speaker in the poem is aware of their own shortcomings but (literally) breathes back into those it perceives as judgmental, “My breath smelled as though I’d been fellating a corpse. I coughed on everyone.”

This sets up the central concern of Table Manners: how the self reacts when constrained by the obligatory digestion of cultural signifiers and the sometimes unpalatable imperative to perform socially. The poems do not provide an answer but interrogate social experience purely through reaction and reflection, compacted by the constraint of culinary terms that often reveal themselves as distinctively unappetizing. In “Dumpster” the voice flirts with eating garbage:

I would not let a single

rainbow Chips Ahoy! or briny dill pickle

or cocktail shrimp ring breach my lips

unless it had first passed through the purifying

fires of the dumpster—five star chef, wizard

capable of transforming the too, too processed

into the unsullied flesh.

The contents of the dumpster are allotted the same linguistic treatment as fresh produce at a grocery store and explored with the same capitalistic impulse, “The only thing rotten is everything sold here.” While Wright’s andoxographic practice should have the impact of mocking the dumpster, it instead, cleverly, has the opposite effect. It elevates waste while diminishing the appeal of clean and fresh material thereby embarrassing the lexical signals society uses to sell and profit off ideals and anxieties surrounding health and nutrition. In the poetry of Wright, everything is both soiled and appetizing.

This is again reiterated in “Parties: A Selection”—a collection of haikus that concisely portray different social gatherings:

pulled pork    muddled mint

pansexual Prince      all primped

pumping up the crowd

this first poem in the series conveys what one might imagine to be a lavish nightclub with techno music and bottle service.  Yet, by the end of the series we are at another event entirely:

barbecued tofu

please don’t call me a lady

left early         for once

Here food has the power to signal not just what people will be eating but what they will wear when they eat, where they will eat it, and, ultimately, it sets the tone for the kind of social engagement the speaker will have.

It might be a stretch to call Wright’s poetry anti-Whitman because it seems both poets are driven by the urge to connect the body with the external world to show the ways in which the external and internal of undivided. However, while Whitman celebrates the body as intermediary between external and internal, Wright problematizes this connection. In Table Manners the body is one with the world but the world makes the body sick. These are not celebratory poems, they are irritable bowel poems wherein the body is capable, adherent to natural law, but reluctantly adherent and always in pain. This is at its most elevated point in the collection in the poem “Origin Story” where mandatory ingestion predicates an obligatory renunciation of the self: “women resigned themselves, just waited for it to end, floating above their bodies.” The point is reinforced in “Instinct” where bodies fight the desire to eat other bodies (“just a few clean snips to guarantee I won’t be tempted to devour my young”). Both these poems are devastating and masterful, they are the two best of the collection.

One criticism for Table Manners is that what works for it, sometimes works against it. While the constraint is noble—the language of the culinarian in the world beyond the kitchen—limiting a project to reliance on a single metaphor that repeats itself can sometimes feel to the reader as if they are being hit over the head with the theme. The book, paradoxically, is at its best in the poems that abandon the metaphor the most.

Julie Mannell is an author of poetry, prose, and essays. She is currently completing her MFA in Creative Writing at the University of Guelph. Mannell is the recipient of the Constance Rooke/HarperCollins Scholarship, the Mona Adilman Poetry Prize, and the Lionel Shapiro Award for Creative Writing. She splits her time between Montreal and Toronto.

This review was published in issue 14:2 “Lies and Duplicity.” To see more from this issue, please visit Vallum’s website.

Vallum magazine is also available in digital format. Featuring additional content such as: AUDIO and VIDEO recordings of selected poets, further poems, interviews, essays, and MORE!

Download the FREE APP and FREE SAMPLE EDITION for your tablet, kindle or smartphone through PocketMags OR iTunes

Featured Review: Alex Manley’s We Are All Just Animals & Plants. Review by Klara du Plessis.

Alex Manley‘s We Are All Just Animals & Plants (Montreal, QC: Metatron, 2016, $12, 61 pages). Review by Klara du Plessis.

“Instead of writing a poem about this mess I made, / what if I wrote a poem about the natural sciences?” Alex Manley asks in his debut collection of poetry, We Are All Just Animals & Plants. Here he projects imagery from the natural world onto a series of reflections on the contemporary climate of dating and relationships. In contrast to the emotional distance and cynicism that is often associated with millennial love, the inherent growth narrative of the organic images employed throughout—namely, animals and plants—allows Manley to capture a sense of vibrancy, even in the face of rejection; if not outright optimistic, the poetic speaker is willing to keep putting himself out there. Accepting present-day dating at face value, and not comparing it with past or alternative modes of romantic love, he is able to highlight the charm of contemporary times; when lovers check their phones in-between bouts of passion, they are not separated by technology, but rather insulated from the landscape of “Instagram flakes” snowing outside, together in a moment of quiet tenderness.

While the title We Are All Just Animals & Plants insinuates a devolutionary agenda—humanity being governed by their baser, animalistic instincts, the proverbial birds and bees—one of the collection’s major concerns, on the contrary, is the poetic speaker’s persistent urge towards personal evolution or reinvigoration of self: “All I want is for it to be springtime … so I can be a new me.” Absorbing the vitality of verdure in order to discard the old, unwanted self, the poetic speaker imagines himself to be “sprouting / leaves, vines, tendrils” burgeoning from his limbs as “a new person grow[s] over top of you, like / ivy.” The implicit caveat within this duality, and coexistence, of old and new is that, while a linear narrative of maturation may lead to a stronger, more rounded sense of self, dependency on change can also become a cyclical avoidance of difficulty in favour of the constant thrill of renewal.

Case in point, the accretion of vegetal images of revitalization soon leads
to a body superseded parasitically by plant matter: “I just have all these
bonsai trees growing in my torso. // It’s pathetic, I imagine them whispering,
a grown man / who can’t stop accumulating miniatures.” It is one of
Manley’s strengths as a poet that figures of speech consistently maintain
the vividness of metamorphosis. The bonsai trees are more than the poetic
speaker’s psychological state. In contrast to other “people [who] are
photographers / dancers, chemists, lepidopterists,” the poetic speaker is
immobilized, unambitious, unable to manipulate his transformation to his
benefit; he is paralyzed by “the way the roots snake; the way the leaves
fall,” by the way his entire being has morphed into that of a tree. The poetic
speaker never reverts from this transfiguration back into his human
anatomy. Instead the image lingers intact till the next metaphor, the next
metamorphosis, and poetic suspension of disbelief when he suggests:
“I’m the panther.”

Formally, the collection is divided into three sections labeled as Animals,
Paraphernalia, and Plants. The poems in the first two sections of the collection
are exclusively written in couplets—a constraint, which maintains
an orderliness and thematic resolve to break away from solitude, to meet
someone, and to couple with them. The final section opens up to stanzas
of varying lengths, and a concomitant dissolution of the hopes and dreams
expressed before. Stripping the poetic speaker of the drive to find his better
half, Manley revokes the gentle insinuation of domestic animals and
houseplants, embracing the feral instead. We Are All Just Animals & Plants
concludes with an apocalyptic poem “Noahtic,” a reversal of the biblical
tale, not leading to redemption and safety, but destruction and bloodshed;
now the “animals will not / be loud as we kill them off. The / leaves will
not be loud as they detach, slow, languid / bodies, from the evaporating
trees.” As the violence abates, the collection leaves the reader with a pervasive
sense of calm, a dismantling of the metamorphic jungle of dating,
and a clearing, a blank page, for Manley’s next book to germinate.

Klara du Plessis is a poet and critic residing in Montreal. Her chapbook Wax Lyrical (Anstruther Press, 2015) was shortlisted for the bpNichol Chapbook Award, and her debut collection Ekke is forthcoming (Palimpsest Press, 2018). She curates the monthly, Montreal-based Resonance Reading Series.

This review was published in issue 14:1 The Wild. To see more from this issue, please visit Vallum’s website.

Vallum magazine is also available in digital format. Featuring additional content such as: AUDIO and VIDEO recordings of selected poets, further poems, interviews, essays, and MORE!

Download the FREE APP and FREE SAMPLE EDITION for your tablet, kindle or smartphone through PocketMags OR iTunes