Laden with Crystal

About a third of my way into Assiyah Jamilla Touré’s debut poetry collection, Autowar, I flipped to the acknowledgements and discovered that it began as personal notes written on Touré’s phone on her way to and from jobs, and was not originally intended to be poetry. This was a revelation: the poems benefit from being imagined as gradual accretions, digital stalactites building in response to material and emotional lack, enervated by the everyday pressures of capitalism, race, sexual violence, and modern subjectivity. The effect is a little like reading through someone’s (very personal) Twitter account, its whispers and yearnings collected to form a portrait that feels comprehensive yet incomplete, self-conscious in its presentation of the self: “i’m always afraid of being watched / yo of course i’m being watched” (21), says the speaker in “idolatry.” That poem is an exemplar of Touré’s work, the poet always conscious of the way accretion forms a new crust of self; as the speaker continues, they explain they will “start an autocult of naivety [ . . . ] i will perform this until it feels real” (21).

The poems in Autowar investigate wounding and its relationship to both language and the poem. Throughout the book, wounds create a hunger that cannot be satisfied, even as the speaker seeks peace in poetry, theory, and human relationships. As a result, there is a tinge of Old English in these poems as they deal with primordial loss, lamenting what either never was or was only barely glimpsed. In “wishing is not the same as wanting,” for instance, the speaker learns “a theory of hunger / never having been not hungry” (11); and in “acidfield,” the speaker ruminates on the past in a way that recalls Beowulf:

caught breath, lost boasts, portraits

forgotten words now imprinted on relics

locked up somewhere in abandoned houses,

in abandoned cities, empty strongholds, fortresses[.] (13)

While these empty strongholds belong to a prehistoric past, their loneliness resonates with Autowar’s experience of the present. The collection explores, as the back copy claims, “the body as a geographical site,” but also the body as a document, traced, retraced, inscribed, and written on by automatic response, neglect, triggers, longing, and compulsion. This approach works best in poems such as “blurry,” where notes and observations on the violence of capitalism—“the fire eating all this shrapnel is imaginary / we are not in a trapped car, they’ll say” (72)—become a recognition of capitalism’s drive to consume, sounding something like a gaslighting boyfriend: “you already know / you have to kill yourself / to survive this” (73).

The auto– in Autowar suggests automatic writing, and sometimes I wondered if the speaker is most interested in speaking not to an audience, but to the self writing the poems. The potential problem with building poems out of personal notes is that it risks making it hard to follow along, excluding the reader who lacks intimacy with the works’ correspondences. Sometimes this resistance is for good reason: readers should not feel entitled to detailed descriptions of sexual violence that here are mostly only alluded to. But ironically the poem “self-taught,” which deals with sexual assault, stands out because of its strong narrative: the speaker’s repeated drive to “venture further” offers a vulnerability that, by comparison with the rest of the book, feels shocking when it is first encountered (65). Ultimately, if this collection is largely a conversation between Touré the speaker and Touré the poet, it is still one worth listening in on.

Tolu Oloruntoba’s debut collection, The Junta of Happenstance—winner of last year’s Governor General’s Award—very quickly makes an impression, as each carefully wrought poem contains at least one striking line. “Medical Séances” and “A Finger in the Eye Should Do It” are early standouts, the latter speaking about a hole in the brain that causes various memories and experiences to be lost: “a Dreamliner of swordsmen falls out,” as do “[h]ousing bubbles, unexpected contraceptive, / the cower and triumph of the inadvertent falconer” (36). “Medical Séances” describes operating on cadavers in medical school, as well as the filial regret of moving on from practising as a physician. It may be that “[a]ll the dead could teach was the fear of life, and how / it can end,” but Oloruntoba also gives the reader the uncanny pleasure of watching his speaker strip a cadaver of “the gnarly / windbreaker of his skin” (18).

The artist Alexis Arnold uses a Borax solution to dramatically freeze books in translucent crystals, rendering them beautiful but no longer legible. Sometimes I felt that the poems in The Junta of Happenstance suffered a similar fate, each poem so richly laden with crystals that when placed together they formed a mineral shield. For instance, in the aforementioned “Finger,” it’s hard to know if the “hole” is physical or mental, the falling out the symptom or the result of the cure. In addition, while the poems have many subjects in common, the collection as a whole seems to lack a unifying theme: the four sections are not heavily differentiated, and it is not immediately clear how they cohere. Perhaps because of this, Junta feels too long; I wondered what might be lost—and what might be gained—if ten to fifteen pages were cut, especially when some of the poems, such as “Chuck Norris,” feel tonally out of place. If there is anything relevant about Norris in 2022, it is not his action movies, where he “circumcis[es] villains / with bullet-hot bayonets in flick after flick” (68). That’s a good line, but the poem suffers from sharing another image with the much stronger poem that follows it: compare “those who have whetted their eyes // on window slats” in “Chuck Norris” to “eyes shut behind the flag slats” in “When Migrants Gather to Enjoy” (69). The placement of the two poems might have been a deliberate echo, but I could not figure out what was gained from the repetition. Even so, the overall strength of the poems makes it easy to see why Junta won the Governor General’s Award and the Griffin Poetry Prize. Crystallized or not, many of these poems will withstand the wearing of time.

Hasan Namir’s second book of poetry, Umbilical Cord, is part poetic documentation of queer fatherhood—from courtship to IVF surrogacy to the first year of parenting—and part scrapbook containing multiple photos of the new family. It opens with two pages of blurbs, which begin to feel pre-emptive the further one progresses through the book. Unfortunately, despite the placement of Umbilical Cord on the CBC’s list of best books of poetry from 2021, the poems are disappointing. Namir’s story—queer fatherhood after immigrating with his family from Iraq to Canada at eleven, when rumours swirled about his sexuality—is one worth telling, although Umbilical Cord struggles to convey it in depth. For instance, the ecstasies of child-rearing for a new father are described as “a surreal feeling,” likened very conventionally to feeling “like I am in a dream,” whereas another poem details the joy of the mundane in a mundane register: “You spit up the milk / You giggle after / You’re happy as ever” (25, 39). At the party in “Gender Reveal,” we are told that “auntie Alexandra prepared something wonderful” (80)—but what? We never find out, which would be one thing if the mystery was the point, but instead it feels as if the speaker expects us to know from such a limited gesture. “Something Wonderful” might have been a good alternate name for the collection, as the poems frequently fail to provide concrete images or complex feeling that might help orient reading, instead gesturing towards the poetic and falling short, a move that seems to be counterproductive given the book’s overall earnest tone. The wedding between Namir and his partner is “magical” (56), their son Malek is “euphoria” (103), and Malek teaches them “everything” (95). The superlatives are exhausting and clichéd. In the appropriately untitled poem that opens Umbilical Cord, we learn that the courtship between Namir and his partner was a “roller coaster of emotions and feelings” (9): it is curious that these poems were not considered suitable vehicles for describing those feelings in more detail.

No complexity or inversions slow the reading, and there is very little to linger on—though I tried—except Namir’s baffling choice to completely eschew turns and to lineate his poetry as simply as possible. In that vein, three acrostic poems stand out as the weakest in the book by far—try as I might, I have not been able to figure out what the reader is supposed to take from them. Here’s an illustrative selection from “K is for Kiran” (Kiran is the name of the surrogate for Namir’s child Malek):

K

I

R

A

N

I

S

KINDNESS

M

A

L

E

K

I

S

KING

Lately I have wondered if the acrostics are meant to mimic strands of DNA, or if there is a mystical reason for such simple lineation—if so, nowhere in the book is this indicated. In part because of Umbilical Cord’s size, and in part due to the poetry’s simplicity and flat, almost notational, style, it’s hard to discern who Namir imagines as the book’s audience: the poetry is too simple for the literary audience indicated by its phalanx of blurbs, but new or prospective parents—or Malek, to whom the book is often addressed—might be turned off by explicit (and clumsy) lines like “When you sucked the cake / Off my cock, you said it was yummy” (15). (Reviewers on Goodreads—mostly new parents—note this discrepancy, and advise other readers not to play the audiobook in front of their children.) One clue as to its imagined audience is that the book’s interspersed line illustrations seem to encourage comparisons to Rupi Kaur. But whatever one might think of Kaur and her work, the deceptive simplicity of her poetry at least conveys real—and relatable—feeling. It’s hard to find the same in Umbilical Cord.