Rasiqra Revulva
MLA Chernoff, [SQUELCH PROCEDURES].
Guelph: Gordon Hill Press, 2021. $20.00.
MLA Chernoff’s electrifying [SQUELCH PROCEDURES] (Gordon
Hill Press, 2021)—the hotly anticipated follow-up to delet this (Bad
Books, 2018) and Terse Thirsty (Gap Riot Press, 2019)—is a collection
I’ll voraciously return to until my skull pops open and my eyes prolapse
in their sockets (and not necessarily in that order).
“Yes, that’s right: my ass, my crack, my gumption, and my frack. I turn up the heat and splay a toonie out of my churned-over stomach in the form of: give me veganism or give me death. One time I took a shit and it looked like Vegandale: it was Vegandale, it was Wilmington Plaza.” The book begins with one of five bordered and evolving pages of “h’s” (ashes) and “//ÄÄ” (slashes), immediately recalling bpNichol, and setting the stage for the dizzying array of references (to theorists, poets, locations, medicalizations, Jewish and/or pop and/or internet cultures) that permeate the text to follow. In this confluence of art and theory, mourning and play, intimacy and performance, embodiment and getting bodied, both allusions and affectations are revealed to be necessity: the product of their home within the pome.
“Kill ’em with mine-ness, they say.
You can bet your bottom donner
they’ve hacked your bank account.
Neigh, they’ve elongated our musk
to a death of grimy Soundclouds;
means seized meanly—
no hard feelings to your inched-in
Heelys.”
Chernoff has eschewed an explanatory appendix, and rightly so. [SQUELCH PROCEDURES], in all its dazzle of references, is no encryption to be decoded by cipher1;[NOTE TO DESIGN: set the following text as a footnote at page bottom. 1. An Unauthorized Guide to Reading MLA Chernoff’s [SQUELCH PROCEDURES] (Gordon Hill Press, 2021):
Hold the centre of the [SQUELCH] right up to your nose. It should be blurry. Focus as though you are looking through the [PROCEDURES] into the distance. Very slowly move the [SQUELCH] away from your face, until the two [SQUELCHES] above the page turn into three [H’s]. If you see four [H’s], move the [SQUELCH] farther away from your [H] until you see three. If you see one or two [BOO\\\WHO///s], start over!
When you clearly see three [H’s] hold the page still and the [PROCEDURES] will magically appear. Once you perceive the hidden [///ÄÄÄs] and depths, you can look around the entirety of [[SQUELCH PROCEDURES]]. The longer you look, the clearer the illusion becomes. The farther away you hold the [SQUELCH], the deeper it becomes. Found and augmented text c/o https://www.magiceye.com/faq-items/help-how-do-i-see-in-3d.]
but rather a Gorgonocephalus basket star whose labyrinthine branches loop and coil to both spotlight and conceal its radiant, aka, heart. In order to witness said heart, as is so often the case in their writing, the reader must pursue language beyond the realm of meaning and into that of sound. Chernoff’s sonic virtuosity illuminates the acrobatic logic of the labyrinth by puncturing not only binaries of gender, but also the perceived divides between performance and page/pop culture and academia/body and mind; while plugging said punctures with equal measures of pleasure(disgust) and pain(delight), politics(defense) and problematic faves(Derrida). All of it squelched, and all of it squelching.
Oh, dead daddies, you strung out my gen-
ders to dry in
the sky and clipped yourselves so many
Hitlers for a
single flower; camping oxidation like small
smiles at
the bottom of my sea.
Oh, dead daddies—I know that I don’t owe
it, but i am
dancing and stamping with you.
Dead daddies, you tightropes, I’m—Who?
Rasiqra Revulva
is a disabled queer femme writer, multimedia artist, editor, musician, performer, and SciComm advocate. She is the head of publicity and a developer and co-editor of the hybrid section at Puritan Magazine; an editor of the climate crisis anthology Watch Your Head: A Call to Action; and one half of the experimental electronic music and arts duo The Databats (Slice Records, Melbourne; Toronto). Her third chapbook, Sailor, C’est l’heure (The Blasted Tree, 2021) is a full-colour experimental visual haiku suite now available in print and online. Cephalopography 2.0 (Wolsak & Wynn, 2020) is her award-nominated debut collection of black-and-white glitch-illustrated poetry.