to prescribe to ritual

The Art of Perpetuation – Alison Powell

This collection is marketed as lyric essays and, as with most writing lately, I liked it best when it leaned towards the lyrical. Alison finds good objects to fuel the motor of each essay. The collection starts with “Nice Wanton”, an essay on dolls, those creepy, endlessly played with creatures. There’s much ground to cover between sex dolls, Barbie, and Alison’s childhood memories; though she flits through each facet nimbly, I wasn’t fully enraptured yet, and the next few essays didn’t grab me either. What won me over was “Missing File #3: Panthera Leo Leo, or, a Civics Lesson”. Five pages long but we’re brought back, viciously, viscerally, to Alison’s middle school days and the casual violence dished out from boys and grown male teachers alike. It’s a hard read but that feeling of being young and learning of all the gendered cruelty the world can hold is preserved perfectly, like a bug in amber.

The rest of the book veers through child-rearing and capitalism, tragic futurists, nomenclature, feminism. The weaving of each thought is tight, the images succinct and usually powerful, with enough surprise to work well. It was very well written but I don’t know that I’ll come back to it often. A very pleasant way to pass the time, though.

Footnotes (the goal is to prescribe to ritual) – Angie Sijun Lou

I am so close to finishing Mari Ruti’s “The Ethics of Opting Out”, and I’m excited to write about it here when I’m done; it feels like it might be one of the big ones for this year, one of those books that really changes the way you think and gives you a new lens for seeing the world. In the meantime, though, I’m picking up other books to give me a break from reading critical theory. So I took this chapbook from andie’s stack of poetry books and, of course, it ends up referencing the exact same theories that I’ve been reading about already; namely, Lacanian psychoanalysis, along with queer theories of negativity and anti-subjectivity. 

I’ll save my thoughts on those theories for the later review I’ll write. But what a thrill it is to pick a random book off the shelf and have it speak to the other book in your backpack. I’ve always loved reading several books at the same time, and I had a great time watching this poet incorporate Lacanian theory into her poetry, with a great deal of meaning and passion and image-making.

“Because each of us is willing to prescribe to ritual / until it spills over the boundary of the Real. ++”

Nothing revolutionary here about how the book played with formatting, but I loved all the ways Angie made the format feel like an essential part of each poem.

If I’m being honest, I think I’m just learning the basics of queer theory, and Angie seems like she was kind of learning the basics of queer theory back in 2019 when she wrote this book, and so it just resonated with me. I think that resonance, that ring of a bell, will dissipate over time. But I really picked this up at the exact right time for me to enjoy it deeply.