Musings on the margins contemplate connections

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This article was published 28/10/2023 (1073 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

The speaker in Hana Shafi’s People You Know, Places You’ve Been (Book*Hug, 132 pages, $23) moves through the city, from public transit to the mall, from the streets in posh neighbourhoods to the laundromat. Shafi, who illustrates under the moniker Frizz Kid, combines colourful, whimsical illustration with a keenly observed celebration of people and places on the margins of aspirational narratives.

Of the themes that animate the collection are the ways in which people’s lives affect each other: “we linger in the people we know/ [… .]/ your best friend in the second grade/your worst enemy in the fifth grade/ we all leave a little bleed// and they leave a little bleed in us.”

Shafi, for all the whimsy, wry humour and generosity she brings, also faces a real darkness: that capitalism has made people morally sick in order to survive. In public transit should be free; the epilogue, after she describes a homeless man “facedown on a seat in the streetcar,” Shafi asks, “are we so used/ to the slow, casual death/ of the city’s poorest/ that it hardly stirs a feeling?/ or is this a sick evolutionary necessity?”

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“We learn/ and lapse/ in language,” writes A. Light Zachary in their debut collection, More Sure: poems and interruptions (Arsenal Pulp, 99 pages, $20).

In this collection, which centres a set of trans and neurodiverse experiences, Zachary translates ancient writings into modern contexts and quantum physics into the body to illuminate a journey of self-discovery.

In Someday You’ll Love _____ Zachary, they describe the process of coming out as a “soft-launching [their] reintroduction.” In this poem, they consider the frames that influence people to be so inflexible in relation to others’ identities: “can you imagine Adam’s outrage had some beast refused the name he gave it, the people with their language and their pitiable need to feel secure in its dominion.”

Here, Zachary draws a connection between foundational texts in Western culture and the way they encourage “brittle ways of knowing” that “seek to shut me in.” Thus, their interventions in these founding texts, both the ancient ones and the modern, aim to break through this rigidity into “[becoming]/ [examining]/ [mirroring]/ [overcoming]/ [repenting]/ [transcending]/ [unbecoming].”

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Nasser Hussain defamiliarizes language in his collection Love Language (Coach House, 80 pages, $23).

Swerving from playful to sincere, Hussain’s collection considers “how to write about joy when it isn’t safe for everyone, everywhere, always.”

The poems in this collection are, indeed, serious about finding joy in the fissures of a world and language made weird. Beginning with Sing, wherein he appends alphabetical prefixes to “love”: “wlove xlove/ ylove/ &love/ zlove,” Hussain engages in play that is at times exhuberent and sometimes self-conscious.

Throughout the collection, Hussain subverts conventional expectations. In Love Poem, where poetic convention suggests an address to a beloved is forthcoming, Hussain writes a litany of the poems he loves: “I love Susan’s poem ‘without you’/ I love Charles’ poem ‘My/My/My’/ I love Barrie’s poem ‘blues’/ I love Simina’s poem ‘cloudburst’/ I love William’s poem ‘Sonnet LV’.”

These subversions are not always so light-hearted. In, for example, This Dis Orientation, which he addresses to author Ian Williams, Hussain inserts “[racialized]” as a modifier to the nouns of the speaker’s routine, and in so doing textually emphasizes the weight both of being racialized and the cultural denial thereof.

What energizes the linguistic play in Love Language is the way Hussain deploys it to challenge the status quo. He challenges not only poetic and linguistic convention, but also social and cultural conventions, and these challenges animate the collection: “& folx/ who’ll say// the word/ folx sux// & I/ think shux —// how the/ fux do// I spell/ real change.”

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Poetry columnist melanie brannagan frederiksen is a Winnipeg writer and critic.