NewPages Blog

Guest Post by Jami Macarty

The super real, feminist, and sharp-edged poems of Catriona Wright’s Continuity Errors are at turns an “embodied presence / in virtual environments,” a “fever / dream of escape,” a “walk through the cemetery,” and “a scathing assessment” of our time. To tell us like it is, our self-deprecating narrator, a fierce new mother, “got” her wings “removed,” owns her “inner bitch,” and admits she “know[s] … little about how to live / a good life or about who [she] want[s] to be.”

A line item in her assessment: The angelic/“rowdy” paradigm for women within her family and the impact a woman’s choices have on “job, … marriage, / a life organized // around wealth.”

Another item: Relationship difficulties. We are reminded “don’t kid // yourself, love has always been / transactional.” Our “demons / look like our mothers… exes / … bosses and professors” who “condescend / and lecture and harangue, activating / shames from childhood.”

These poems implicate “parental models,” gatekeepers, “scammers,” “tourists,” the “betrayer and betrayed,” and the “visionaries and oracles,” and they make us face the “old sputtering hurts” we cause ourselves, one another, and our world. This is the world our narrator has brought her child into, admitting we “can’t fix” or “staunch” its bleeding fast enough. It may not be fair, but some of us “get to stay here longer than the white rhinos, / the bees.” Informed by environmental ethicist Michael Vincent McGinnis’s term “species loneliness,” Catriona Wright’s poems “flicker” and “mourn,” and are “as likely as anything / to banish loneliness from the world.”

Continuity Errors by Catriona Wright. Coach House Books, May 2023.

Reviewer bio: Jami Macarty is the author of The Minuses (Center for Literary Publishing, 2020), winner of the 2020 New Mexico/Arizona Book Award – Poetry Arizona, and three chapbooks, including Mind of Spring (Vallum, 2017), winner of the 2017 Vallum Chapbook Award. Jami’s writing has been honored by financial support from Arizona Commission on the Arts, British Columbia Arts Council, and by editors at magazines such as The Capilano Review, Concision Poetry Journal, Interim, Redivider, Vallum, and Volt, where Jami’s poems appear.

Guest Post by Jami Macarty

The poems, “filled with ellipses and reversals,” of T. Liem’s Slows: Twice are offered by a “speaker” who doesn’t “always feel / like” they are who they “say” they are, from a “threshold / between [self] and potential in any direction.” That is, the poems explore and explicate a betweenness: “on either side / of leaving… on either side / of the kind of words that look / right at you and leave you / in the middle of nowhere.” Even “nowhere” is “somewhere.”

This “threshold” is a way to “conceive of what a border could consist of.” A “border” is a place where “two things can be true at once”; both a place where “every fact has an afterlife” and a place “to link arms with some future.” At a border, time folds in on itself. The present reflects “what looks back at you”; the future “what can unfold from hurt.”

Liem’s poems swing on the hinges of “asking and repeating” the question: “[W]hat will carry you through what hurt you?” The poet uses mirror imaging and strikethroughs of poem text to suggest this phenomenon of “renewal or expiry.” The poet also uses their poems to argue with “time… spent // in omission” because, they assert, “there is no place and time / without names.” Our “bodies become an etymology”; “language is change.”

Dear Reader, whether you would choose to “slow time, / speed it up,” “[w]ouldn’t you like to be transported?” To read T. Liem’s Slows: Twice is to encounter “what other kind of living”—and writing—”is possible.”

Slows: Twice by T. Liem. Coach House Books, May 2023.

Reviewer bio: Jami Macarty is the author of The Minuses (Center for Literary Publishing, 2020), winner of the 2020 New Mexico/Arizona Book Award – Poetry Arizona, and three chapbooks, including Mind of Spring (Vallum, 2017), winner of the 2017 Vallum Chapbook Award. Jami’s writing has been honored by financial support from Arizona Commission on the Arts, British Columbia Arts Council, and by editors at magazines such as The Capilano Review, Concision Poetry Journal, Interim, Redivider, Vallum, and Volt, where Jami’s poems appear.