Obsessive traits traced via textual remapping

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This article was published 28/09/2024 (665 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

The speaker in Samantha Jones’s debut, Attic Rain (NeWest Press, 112 pages, $24), reorients the kitchen, the office, the cafe and places between them to reflect her experience of obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD).

Jones accomplishes this remapping using images, graphs and various textual techniques, including repetitions and lines that write over one another, as well as innovations to traditional forms. Part exploration and illumination and part manifesto, the collection is a moving and galvanizing mix of acceptance of self and defiance of cultural dismissal.

Jones uses form to capture both the obsessive, circling thoughts and their accompanying gestures. In Botulism Villanelle, the repeated lines focus on the speaker’s repeated hand motions, while the other unrepeated lines track her attention: “careful attention to product lifespans/ mindful shopping a relief from torment/ dispelling worries of my buying hands.”

Jones ends Attic Rain on a potent summation to both the speaker’s self-acceptance and her resistance. In Am I ‘High-Functioning?’ Jones acknowledges that OCD is relatively invisible in our culture, where “outcome is preferred to process/ in a world focused on what you make/ not how many back-and-forths/ it takes to get there.” Nonetheless, the speaker refuses to hide behind her productivity. Instead, she ends on a question that refuses resolution: “Can I leave things like this?/ Without being cured?”

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“Trauma is time travel,” writes jaz papadopoulos in their debut I Feel That Way Too (Nightwood Editions, 102 pages, $20).

In this book of interconnected sequences, papadopoulos weaves media criticism and poems about the aftermath of sexual trauma against the background of the Jian Ghomeshi trial. The effect is a layered critique that writes into the core of rape culture and considers the impact of trauma on community bonds.

“Those days during the trial/ are buzzing lights dotting a nighttime street./ Polka-dot flashes,/ pain. mostly. Community events/ become disclosure circles for women who don’t know each other./ My ears fill with flies,” they write. In this passage, papadopoulos’ use of a particularly long line, beginning with “become disclosure circles,” conveys the sense that these disclosure circles risk overwhelming community bonds.

As a counterpoint to the sense of being swamped, which comes from the way traumatized communities can amplify trauma and from the speaker’s own history of trauma, papadopoulos invokes a therapeutic relationship and a reclamation of natural space. In the collection’s last movement, papadopoulos completes the stress cycle, positing a catharsis whereby past and present join. “Once we’ve each become as big as we can be,/ we unlatch our mouths and scream.”

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In The Lantern and the Night Moths (Invisible, 108 pages, $24), Yilin Wang translates five Chinese poets — Qui Jin, Zhang Qiaohui, Fei Ming, Xiao Xi and Dai Wangshu — whose work spans the late-19th through early-21st centuries. The poems, in the original language, appear alongside Wang’s translations, accompanied by incisive essays introducing the poet as well as building Wang’s theory of translation.

The collection opens with an excerpt from Wang’s essay Faded Poems and Intimate Connection: Ten Fragments on Writing and Translation which reads, in part, “When home isn’t a person, or a place, or memories, but a whisp of smoke just beyond my grap, a glass castle so ephemeral and elusive, poetry is… the closest I have ever felt to belonging.”

This longing for home informs both the selections of poetry as well as Wang’s approach to translation. When she writes of translating Zhang Qiaohui’s Soliloquy, Wang writes about the sense of displacement hightened by the death of their wàipó (maternal grandmother), and with that event the loss of her memoir: “It’s my longing for her lost words, and for all the stories that I’ll never be able to read, about her mother, my grandmother, and great-grandmother, which now drives me to fill the gaps they left behind.”

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