Alycia Pirmohamed
Canisia Lubrin, THE DYZGRAPHxST.
Toronto: McClelland & Stewart, 2020. $21.99.
In the title poem of her previous collection, Voodoo Hypothesis, Canisia Lubrin writes, “But why / should I unravel over all this remembering?” A kind of answer, or at least a further interrogation, resonates in The Dyzgraphxst, where in seven parts that rupture and remap selfhood, the lyric “I” unravels into a multiplicity of voices:
i: First-person singular.
I: Second-person singular.
I: Third-person plural.
JEJUNE: THE VOICE addressed, every
page. The chorus, the you, the we/unnavig
able self. The character never leaves the
stage. The character must always leave the
stage. This is an ocean drama.
These voices, the i/I/Is, pull geography, temporality, language, history, myth, into a reflected present. In conversation with Room, Lubrin states that dysgraphia’s “amorphous quality…characterizes the African diaspora and is why the poem spans geographies.” Readers engage with these representations through the collection’s innovative leaps, through its revitalized syntax and grammar. These are the moves that fracture spaces typically reserved for linearity; coherency; pattern—like the tercets across the poem’s first two acts—to create an interrupted (figurative) landscape. I find this collection so striking, so transformative, because in it, I repeatedly encounter myself oriented toward disruption, comfortable in its fluency, my own self unravelling amongst its various strands.
speaking I after all, after all theories
of abandonment priced and displayed,
the word was a moonlit knife
with those arrivants
lifting their hems to dance, toeless
with the footless child they invent
Such an unravelling makes me question my own understanding of the “I” in poetry, where I’ve subconsciously oscillated between two fixed points: the coded whiteness of the lyric “I,” and the lyric “I” that embodies a strict individuality. The Dyzgraphxst, however, resists the kind of classification that I’ve historically let guide my poetics, that I read into a poetic subject. Multiple registers flicker at once, and in this flickering is an accumulation of selves that seem to accentuate and dislocate particularity all at once. It is in this flickering that we see the “unnavigable” Jejune, the confluence of voices, the book’s enthralling character, the body that is both always on and off the stage.
Initially, I chased the individual voice of the “i,” seeking out Jejune’s narrative for context—Jejune as the framework, the underlying anchor, the displaced chorus across oceans. But, again and again, I found myself compelled elsewhere, into the poem’s experiments, into what was ungraspable. Into its reclaimed dysgraphxa. In Act III, for example, the book alternates between a series of “Dreams” and “Returns,” a section that is stunning for its manipulation of both form and imagery. In Act III, there is the shape of the ocean. Its peaks and troughs are densely felt, visualized—they are four-dimensional, dragging sensorial remnants, a disoriented recollection, to the fore.
I understand what happened
not particularly well
Uronarti,
why do this:: why send
poisonous butterflies
fluttering to the feeding
ground of hawks after
a night too heavy with _____
The Dyzgraphxst is its own vocabulary, its own knowingness. It is an incredible, elliptical journey, a masterful work that demands to be reread.
and so you have arrived, Jejune, and so I
in a million pictures of our face, and still
I was not myself, i am not myself, myself
ALYCIA PIRMOHAMED
is the author of the pamphlets Faces that Fled the Wind (BOAAT Press, 2019) and Hinge (Oxford Brookes’ ignitionpress, 2020). She is the recipient of a Pushcart Prize, the 2020 Edwin Morgan Poetry Award, and the 2019 CBC Poetry Prize. Pirmohamed received her MFA from the University of Oregon and her PhD from the University of Edinburgh. She is currently a postdoctoral creative writing fellow at the University of Liverpool. Find her online at alycia-pirmohamed.com and on Twitter @a_pirmohamed.