Khashayar Mohammadi
Lindsay B-e, The Cyborg Anthology.
Toronto: Brick Books, 2020. $20.00.
It is rather difficult to begin speaking about the full extent of socio-political relevance in Lindsay B-e’s brilliant, multi-faceted, and incisive speculative poetry book The Cyborg Anthology. It speaks volumes to our relationships to the ever-elusive body; our perception of what constitutes a mind; our indoctrination into gender norms; our capacity to create beauty out of intergenerational trauma; the incredible power of art and poetry in politics; the ever-evolving machinery of capitalism that creates new venues for expression in its endless fundamental contradictions; and last of all, how we as a society treat canonical art, what we take away from it, and how we speak to it.
The Cyborg Anthology begins with a fictional introduction to Cyborg poetry, its influences and history, taking the reader through different categorizations, movements, and schools of Cyborg poetry. Each poet’s entry begins with a succinct, yet incredibly detailed, biography that situates them within the world building needed for each section. By the time the reader arrives at the most recent Cyborg poets in the book, some of the past cyborgs have become canonical, a dynamic that manifests itself in poetic dialogues that arise between the Cyborg poets of different generations. For example, the Cyborg poet Mi’la Lalpetit, born in the 2200s, writes a poem in response to the Cyborg poet Andre.riga, who passed away in the beginning of the 2200s.
In their poem “Blood Writing,” Andre.riga writes “blood / pumping away / your body / away” which is later referenced by the next-generation poet Mi’la Lalpetit in her poem “Blood Drowning,” which is dedicated to Andre.riga. She writes:
The blood pumping
stopped
but it shoots away still, the whole planet is engulfed,
sticky red, sticky brown…
and in this way, Lalpetit begins a conversation with the previous generation while building upon a legacy of the first Cyborg poets who wrote from their new experience of their human parts, furthering the discussion and introducing more humanity into the Cyborg canon of poetry.
As the book spans different generations of Cyborg poets, each generation re-defines and re-claims the term Cyborg for themselves, fitting themselves within a new conceptual workframe. Along the way, the poems vary in style, form, content, and degrees of humanity. Not only has Lindsay B-e managed to create this wonderful history, but the poems’ integrities are each defined by the socio-political context of the time, personalized by the project of reclamation each Cyborg poet makes toward their shared ancestry. This results in an incredible range in emotion, not to mention a breathtaking representation of the writer’s prowess in gliding between genres, forms, and content.
Speculative poetry always pushes the boundaries between philosophy and society. Never has this been more evident than in Lindsay B-e’s ever-so-wonderful debut The Cyborg Anthology.
KHASHAYAR MOHAMMADI
is a queer, Iranian-born, Toronto-based poet, writer, and translator. He is the author of the poetry chapbooks Moe’s Skin (ZED Press, 2018), Dear Kestrel (knife | fork | book, 2019), and Solitude is an Acrobatic Act, as well as the translator of The OceanDweller (both from above/ground press, 2020). His debut poetry collection, Me, You, Then Snow, is out now with Gordon Hill Press.