Luigi Sposato
Roxanna bennett, uncomfortability
Guelph: Gordon Hill Press, 2023. $20.00.
Uncomfortability takes on many uncomfortable tasks, from enlightening the reader about a pandemic they thought they knew all too well, to wrangling and breaking the sonnet form to the extent that the reader becomes lustful for the rhythm the poet creates. Bennett shows discipline and remorse for those unaccustomed to lockdown, but welcomes all nonetheless regardless of how temporary their struggle may be. These poems indulge in belief rather than pessimism, as in “Life Without Weather:” “could we begin to love each other’s pain? / No one needs to fight. We are all the same.”
Uncomfortability documents five seasons, Spring through Spring, with the sonnet taking on malleable shapes throughout each season. The first spring, fourteen lines are placed together in one stanza, where Bennett leads the reader by the hand toward their new, now shared, arrangement, and where together they begin to hypothesize life before death. “Prisons or Prisms” ends with “Robins / belly flop April’s chilly daffodils & / windows are prisons. Or prisms. We hide / ourselves in every season,” while the very next poem, “The Unwinding Empire,” admits that “we don’t care. people / die, we think it’s fine. We could change our minds.” In these two poems, Bennett contrasts the windows we stared through every day—sometimes optimistically, other times blankly—to the belief that we could begin to care for those who have been struggling daily. Bennett uses their lyrical prowess to enable the reader to see a different light—a convincing voice that hopes for change.
Bennett begins their re-engineering of the sonnet with the dissolution of the form into a 4/4/4/2 set-up in Summer, couplets in Fall, a 4/4/4/2 with every second line indented in Winter, and couplets again 100 with double-spaces between stanzas in the second Spring. Each time the form of the sonnet is re-imagined, so too are the words Bennett besieges; with the hopefulness in “(Un)relatedly” (first Spring) being challenged by the fear of loneliness in back-to-back Winter poems “Meet Me Outside the Dog Museum” (“down to the core & plant cyanide seeds / coronal lantern auroral. Don’t leave me please”) and “How to Give a Sponge Bath with Broken Fingers” (“Please, don’t go, I’m so weak / I can’t speak. How many times can I die in one week”). Bennett’s words not only document the strange rabbit holes and epiphanies one could make in isolation, but also provide a welcoming warmth to the reader, regardless of their identity or past opinions. This guidance is found in “Tonglen in February,” where the reader is relieved of pain through the speaker’s breaths of healing, and comforted in the fact that “[n]ot everyone can be normal, none of us are Sappho / but we all know how to burn.”
Uncomfortability is a masterclass in optimism, shown in a plenitude of sonnet forms that constantly consign the words they house, offering lessons and guidance to its readers. In asking for hope, Uncomfortability instead commands understanding and reason from the reader, indulging in their experiences while ushering in a different, often overlooked perspective—these poems show us that despite who we are, we are all people at our core. Bennett’s final poem, “Do What Thou Wilt Shall Be The Whole of The Law,” leaves the message of the book in our hands at last: “do what thou wilt, make peace with the sheep, / possums, spiders, cripples, those we call least.”
Luigi sposato
is a poet from Etobicoke, Ontario. He graduated from Sheridan College with an Honours Degree in Creative Writing & Publishing, having been named the school’s third annual Poet Laureate. He currently works as a tutor for the college, helping students with English and creative writing, with aspirations of becoming an ESL teacher. Luigi currently reads and writes with the hopes of sharpening his craft and leaving his verse somewhere out in the universe. You can find some of his other works in The Quarter Press and Serendipity NewsMag.