Annick MacAskill, five from hem
This beautiful little chapbook from the incomparable Annick MacAskill is the kind of feminist revisioning that comes straight out of Gap Riot’s dreams. This collection is five tall, gorgeous feats of poetic prowess where MacAskill writes from the perspective of female figures from Ovid’s Metamorphoses. The poems consider sex, gender, desire, and sexual violence in Ovid and beyond, and each poem works to animate and amplify voices that, as the author notes, “say little to nothing in the original text.” Each poem begins with an epigraph from the Metamorphoses with the author’s original translation and then it starts running down these long pages it’s become some wild animal. These poems are from a larger project, hem, and we cannot wait to see the whole thing!
Printed all tall and beautiful and textured and in a limited run of fifty copies at Product Photo in Toronto, this chapbook and all translations of Ovid are by Annick MacAskill. It was typeset by Dani Spinosa who also did the cover design.
Sample Poem:
What burden unto you, Daddy, this new form, though still I gleam like stars—
“me miserum!” ingeminat; “tune es quaesita per omnes
nata mihi terras? tu non inventa reperta
luctus eras levior!”
(Ovid, Metamorphoses, Bk I., ll. 653-55)
my skin so shone that not
from his slippery desire
or her sticky envy
could I hide in the dark
like an ancient nightlight
under shadow gifted
by father or sky-father
find a whole world a life
under a drench-thick cloud
& still be discovered
& still be prey make my
domestication this
ultimate specimen
such textbook flattery so
damn literal why don’t
you & quickly stop yr
crooning for what kind of
girl wastes away her pink days
in a swarm of eyes his
net such devotion O
chase me away but first
Father look in the sand
see the resistance I
trace in the dirt w/ my
hardened hand the O
how I protest for such
is still my name & I
can shape no words & so
useless to you [is this
about the weight gain?] each
sign renewed w/in me
& the world will come O
could mean everything yet
as I now on this same
earth w/ tremulous limbs