VII, Holy Disorder of Being
It was over for the rest of us when seven of the freshest and fiercest voices in poetics out of Ottawa joined forces like some beautiful poetic Voltron and started making some gorgeous collaborative poetics. Sorry, not sorry. This is a multifaceted chapbook that brings together beautiful moments of the confessional and lyrical (“I burn through my well of hopes”), the ecocritical (hello mushrooms, rot, trees, dragonflies), some feminist embodiment (“she had become dry”), and just a little of the absurd (what will I do with all these cows?).
Printed in a limited run of fifty copies at Product Photo in Toronto, this chapbook has a colour cover and no indication of which member wrote which part, just straight-up collaboration. Cover designed and chapbook typeset by Kate Siklosi.
Sample Poem:
on a Sunday afternoon walk, the girl fell into the sky. the little scraps from her purse — receipts, bus transfers, an empty blister pack of pills — left a milky way of detritus. anthropocene constellations drawn not by a new mother goddess but a woman descending the heavens. she cried a celestial “why?” and heard air whistling in her ears. “we’re sorry, we’re sorry, we’re trying at softness but, sadly, we’re just so sorry.” an echo is pain’s doggerel, a hollow show of heed, also: litter gathering round her thighs like so many rippled stars. rippled, now ripped, she’s unsure where they lint. is it by her feet or is it by her ankles, by the tips of her toes or the deeps of her pupils? cupping her hands, she waits to catch the spaces between her bones. takes those ripped stars and leaves the whys to the absent hues. if you take her shallow marrow, divide it by the tight swelling of space that shifts her, and wait for gravity to swallow colour (no robin egg, no forest green, no pigments of living left to swirl), she will sketch a saintless astronomy.