From Burlington-based poet and York University professor Andy Weaver comes the second installment in our Mentor Series, and the first book we’re printing by a white dude (!) in the form of Haecceity, a segment of Weaver’s larger project, The Loom. Haecceity is encyclopedic in its study of love, looking to Weaver’s beautiful family and asking the hard questions: what is this love thing? how do I write it down? can words ever encode what I feel in this home? Weaver borrows, steals, reworks, and pays homage to a series of poetic and academic predecessors, keeping a comprehensive list of influences and sources at the back of the chapbook. Weaver’s lines are sprawling, spilling over into new lines, new stanzas, and attempting to say as much as he can about a feeling he knows he can never truly speak.

This chapbook is printed on white paper with a sand-coloured cardstock cover (designed by Dani Spinosa and beautifully, painstakingly typeset by Kate Siklosi). Each chapbook is lovingly wrapped in a ribbon of text, requiring that we break something to get at the good stuff.

Sample Poem

And so, this absurd quest
begins, where love is an exploration
of apperception, our perception
of what we perceive based on
an intuition of order, of form
beyond form in which forms partake
in the nature of a constant co-action
of resolution and revolution,
a revelation of the world, where
love is a process of listening
to the world and responding to it
unafraid of contradiction or paradox,
unafraid of the incommensurate,
a fluency of those who risk to be damned
in order to ride the curious turn
of a translation that dissembles
to assemble its most faithful
and felicitous fidelity.

In other words: I want
to know what love is.

But why bother with a question
that has bested both Dante
and Foreigner, both Plato
and Haddaway? Baby, don’t
hurt me if I say there is
no answer, though some rightly
say it is a unique utterance, neither
substance nor faculty, but a promise,
a holy book brought to flesh, brought
to the flesh, one that draws itself back
from the law of transit it lets appear.