On Kendra Sullivan’s Reps

My review of New York poet and academic Kendra Sullivan’s latest, Reps (Brooklyn NY: Ugly Duckling Presse, 2024), is now online at Seneca Review.

Anna Veprinska, Bonememory

 

I rode an escalator into a Kyiv
metro station just before emigration
in the summer of 1993. I remember
because it was my first escalator,
my first metro station. Now,
on the news, I watch Ukrainians huddle
in the metro station, birth children
from the privacy of the womb
into war’s pubic, hairy arms. Every year
since turning fifteen, I have longed
to return to Ukraine, if only
to lay stones on the graves
of my grandparents. What Ukraine
will be left for me, or for those
who still call it home?
Who, now, will witness
my grandparents’ graves? (“Vignettes for Ukraine”)

The full-length poetry debut by Calgary-based poet and academic Anna Veprinska is Bonememory (Calgary AB: University of Calgary Press, 2025), a collection of first person lyric observations dealing with conflict, heartbreak and intimate loss. As the back cover of the collection writes: “Memory is stored in the body. Memory sprouts in families and is transmitted from one generation to the next. Memory imprints at the level of bone.” This is a book of questions, and prayer, composed as poems with clear, sharp edges that write of generations, distance and the body, working through losses deeply felt, including that around immigration, colonialism, chronic illness and other upheavals. “Gravesite / suggests the dead are a site to behold,” she writes, as part of the poem “A goose lays eggs on the side of a highway,” “and aren’t they?” Further on, the poem “Testimony” offers: “Somewhere / there is a mouth generous // with opening. / Each lip stirs // in service of its own / secrets.”

Referencing the discovery of unmarked graves on multiple sites across Canada of former residential schools in the poem “Shoes,” she offers: “How much of this country is an unmarked grave?” She ties these recently-held memorials and acknowledgments to similar memorials at the Auschwitz museum, writing: “What comes from the reification of metaphor?” She writes of pain, and the bewilderment of patterns, repeating, all of which is held in the body. “Empathy,” the same poem concludes, “the lie with whom wee sit making small talk / until decorum dictates we can depart. / 215 Indigenous children. Makeshift memorials / of children’s shoes coast to coast. / How much of this country is an unmarked grave?”

12 or 20 (second series) questions with Monroe Lawrence

Monroe Lawrence (he/they) is a Canadian writer. He is author of the poetry book About to Be Young and the chapbook Nice,. Winner of the Robin Blaser Prize for Experimental Writing and the Kim Ann Arstark Memorial Award, he has published writing in The Capilano Review, Annulet: A Journal of Poetics, Black Sun Lit, The Brooklyn Review, Prelude, Flag + Void, and Best American Experimental Writing, among other places. They hold an MFA in Poetry from Brown University and are a PhD candidate in Literary Arts at the University of Denver. They were born on Vancouver Island and grew up in Squamish on Sḵwx̱wú7mesh Úxwumixw land.

1 - How did your first book change your life? How does your most recent work compare to your previous? How does it feel different?

The process of writing that first book was very fulfilling. It was eight years ago, and I was a mere child! When it was published five years later—almost by accident—I think I finally felt that I’d contributed to a conversation I cared a lot about, one I’d been listening to for years but not yet really participated in. I think, too, that some of the art for art’s sake armor I’d built up (you don’t need to publish, you do this for the love of the work itself, etc.) was swiftly demolished by the sheer joy of having, myself, produced one of those objects that, since I can remember, fascinated me so much—a book. My second poetry manuscript Gravity Siren is made of the same “material” as About to Be Young, I’d say, but twists that material into different shapes—bigger ones!

In my current fiction work, I’m interested in the distinct language pressures of prose, the regimes of cliché that make fiction happen.

2 - How did you come to poetry first, as opposed to, say, fiction or non-fiction?

Maybe acknowledging a certain pretension is due: poets just seemed smartest. They were interested in talking “about” what they were doing, about art and language and philosophy and hybridity, whereas fiction was a lot more—in some ways—hermetic. Or a lot less academic. I don’t mind the academic. This is ironic because fiction actually wants to talk to regular people, while poetry builds a little indentured community for itself. (“Poetry is the scholar’s art” – Stevens.) The poets were more articulate at producing discourse about what they were up to, it seemed, so that’s one answer. And that did matter to me. Another answer is that poetry is an extremely portable, practical technology for a person. The catharsis is reliable and swiftly delivered. I remember growing fascinated, though, with the rich, expansive world of experimental poetry, how the community self-interrogated and worked through its issues, such as the crises of Conceptualism.

3 - How long does it take to start any particular writing project? Does your writing initially come quickly, or is it a slow process? Do first drafts appear looking close to their final shape, or does your work come out of copious notes?

I like sitting down and writing. I write a lot. But my process is . . . inefficient. Only .01% of the words I type make it into a publishable piece of writing. I like to think this is because I set a really high standard for myself and don’t settle for my lesser creations, but maybe I’m just stupid.

4 - Where does a poem usually begin for you? Are you an author of short pieces that end up combining into a larger project, or are you working on a “book” from the very beginning?

Generally, I am thinking about books from the beginning, these days. Aim high, or something . . . It’s an interesting question, though, because I have little interest in writing single, titled poems. I want to build a world, a landscape. I want a poem to feel like a droplet of microorganisms was placed on a page-slide, and the reader is observing a fascinating, like, plant that grew—but is perhaps not finished growing—up from the seed state, and each page is a different instance of such a process.

5 - Are public readings part of or counter to your creative process? Are you the sort of writer who enjoys doing readings?

I think the poets that matter to me are almost visual artists—sculpting text and flecks of letter, which nevertheless enregister vectors of mental sound. Reading those poems aloud can produce appreciable derivatives of the visual form, but it’s less interesting. I started out writing SLAM poetry in high school, and I think those experiences with writing designed to be heard, designed to be appreciated on first listen, led me to suspect non-SLAM poems of being sort of ill-suited to being read aloud. Much contemporary poetry resembles SLAM poetry now, but I think it is still the visual encounter that matters to me. One exception would be the talk poems of David Antin.

6 - Do you have any theoretical concerns behind your writing? What kinds of questions are you trying to answer with your work? What do you even think the current questions are?

In fiction, I’m frequently trying to achieve conceptual purchase on something that happened in the past. In poetry, I’m trying to build a pleasing, fondleable object out of words for a like-minded community. From a more scholarly perspective, I’m interested in what I’ve called “aesthetic pain” in poetry, poetry with language that enacts rather than merely describes shame by producing tears in the seemliness of the language. In essays on prose, I have been elaborating a term called “fictional pedagogy” to refer to depictions of teaching, and I’ve been writing about speculative pedagogies. I like doing that work. But I rarely think of it while I’m writing poetry or fiction; they’re more retrospective descriptions of finished thought.

7 – What do you see the current role of the writer being in larger culture? Do they even have one? What do you think the role of the writer should be?

In some contexts, I would probably say that engaging with literature and the notion of literary value is the most important thing a person can do. Books and literary writing are tools we use to talk about practically all the things that really matter to, at least, me, things people rarely talk about in other contexts. Again, in SLAM and perhaps poetry more broadly there is this proselytizing impulse built into the role, like part of your job as a writer is to always encourage and nurture literary art, always encourage people to read and write, always be “on the clock” as an advocate for books and poetry and reading. I don’t mind that.

8 - Do you find the process of working with an outside editor difficult or essential (or both)?

On occasion, I’ve militantly refused to share work with anyone, determining to “do it all myself” and “owe no one anything.” Hah. But those moments don’t last. I owe others everything. Like Philip Roth, I ideally want my mistakes to “ripen and burst” on their own, but sometimes I get impatient and will just confirm that a revision “is bad” with someone so I can write the next draft.

The editors I’ve worked with professionally—Broc, Alicia—have been lovely and had a light touch.

9 - What is the best piece of advice you've heard (not necessarily given to you directly)?

A mentor once said that the only commonality she’d ever observed between successful art practices was that the artist has to surprise themself. Given the shortage of such commonalities between successful practices, in my experience, that has been really valuable to me. In fiction, on the other hand, one often does have a goal or plan, so the trick is to accomplish a task—kill George, build a frame narrative, get Aubrey downtown—while having fun and mixing things up along the way.

10 - What kind of writing routine do you tend to keep, or do you even have one? How does a typical day (for you) begin?

When I sustained a serious back injury four years ago, I decided to be a little less single-minded about writing. For around a decade, though, I would wake up every day and work on writing all day.

11 - When your writing gets stalled, where do you turn or return for (for lack of a better word) inspiration?

I’m not sure. I am never stalled! Writing always happens. What doesn’t happen is good writing, and no amount of “inspiration” will change that. Inspiration is not the common denominator for me. Quite often I’ll write a couple sentences distractedly on my phone on the bus and they’ll be more interesting than pages I spent hours on, writing that maybe felt totally mind-blowing and inspired at the time.

12 - What fragrance reminds you of home?

Moss.

13 - David W. McFadden once said that books come from books, but are there any other forms that influence your work, whether nature, music, science or visual art?

I like teaching, and draw on pedagogy in the sciences or, say, dance or studio art to inform my teaching. I’ve been interested in film for periods. Some of my best memories are sitting around late at night with friends talking about music. In a way I’m obsessed with talking about pretty much any art form.

14 - What other writers or writings are important for your work, or simply your life outside of your work?

I like how raw and ingenious Anna Mendelssohn is. I like Tan Lin and work that distrusts the writerly. Most sentences in Proust are, for me, smarter than other writers’ entire oeuvres. The novel I recommend most is Vi Khi Nao’s Fish in Exile. Incomparable in her vision and lush, sinuous language, her range: Lisa Robertson. Andrea Actis’s Grey All Over was my favourite book published in the last three years. I’ve been devouring Jean-Phillipe Toussaint’s novels in French and am pretty obsessed with the Australians, Patrick White and Gerald Murnane among others. The poet Alex Walton never publishes anymore but I spend a lot of time staring at his poems. I like the absolute political-verbal commitments of Verity Spott and Danny Hayward; I’m really glad they exist. I loved Avgi Saketopoulou and Ann Pellegrini’s careful use of psychoanalysis to express how gender and sexuality are never finished in Gender Without Identity. I reviewed late J.H. Prynne recently here.

15 - What would you like to do that you haven't yet done?

Write my The Weather.

16 - If you could pick any other occupation to attempt, what would it be? Or, alternately, what do you think you would have ended up doing had you not been a writer?

Acting.

17 - What made you write, as opposed to doing something else?

It’s the best port in the worst storm.

18 - What was the last great book you read? What was the last great film?

Riders in the Chariot by Patrick White. The first film I’m thinking of is, I’ve watched Apichatpong’s Cemetery of Splendor a lot. I’ve watched it maybe 5 times in different company. Its atmosphere is this soothingly accurate blend of boredoms, desires and dreads.

19 - What are you currently working on?

Finishing a novel about Squamish and freewheeling in another about hockey. Putting together some academic essays about finding pedagogy in literature.

12 or 20 (second series) questions;

Tom Jenks, A Long and Hard Night Troubled by Visions

 

1984

After six days in the forest, I finally reached 1984. The tribe that lived

there welcomed me. I sat on a mossy log, ate a toasted sandwich and

drank American cream soda from a hollow stone. Later, as the stars

wobbled above the tree line, we watched Torvill and Dean win gold at

the Sarajevo Olympics on a primitive television set installed in an

abandoned foxhole. The tribe’s leader, a tall man with an asymmetric

fringe and wearing a tight silk blouse, asked me if I had been here

before. I said yes, a long time ago, and my bike got stolen.

Not long after I reviewed his rhubarb (Beir Bua Press, 2021) [see my review of such here], British poet and publisher Tom Jenks and I traded books, which landed me a copy of his collection of prose poems, A Long and Hard Night Troubled by Visions (Manchester UK: if p then q, 2018). I’m intrigued by the pieces here, and Jenks’ work through the prose poem seem related to what Chicago Benjamin Niespodziany has been doing over the past few years; poem-cousins, perhaps, these odd short bursts of momentary capture. As the poem “Mushroom Forest,” for example, reads in full: “You have gathered a lot of flowers. You are buzzing happily. Who is // watching you? Why are you angry? Where are you off to with your // snorkel?” Existing somewhere in that nether-realm between poems, prose poems and prose, Jenks’ pieces each appear as a collection of sentences assembled into prose poem structures. “He turned on the lights and saw through us immediately.” the poem “inspector” begins, “I hadn’t read // all those books. Topaz wasn’t descended from Marie Antoinette. // Carstairs’ odd socks weren’t an endearing eccentricity, but a calculated // affectation to obfuscate a deeply uneventful personality.” This is a collection of sentences, set into poems, themselves set into titled clusters, or sections: “SHRINKS,” “THE STRAWBERRY MOSHI COLLECTION,” “TOPAZ” and “THE DYSPHORIA SUITE.” What appear in Jenks’ pieces to be narrative foundations are, instead, layerings of accumulation, setting one idea or phrase or situation upon another, allowing for what the accumulation might become or reveal. Jenks’ poems offer sly slides of prose, leaning into a lyric surreal, shifting in and out of focus in really striking and unexpected ways. There is surprise behind these declarations, certainly, and it is interesting how time moves through this collection; always an eye backwards, even while looking front, immediately ahead, or further afield.

And beyond all of that, a highlight has to be the poem “strikes,” near the end of the collection; a striking and sharp notation from the AMC television series Mad Men (2007-2015). As the acknowledgements offers, the poem “documents every instance of smoking in season 2,” and the effect is impressive. One almost wishes he’d devoted a whole collection to such a thing (although one might garner how that might have worked from the focus on that second season).

1.47

Dr Stone smokes at his desk, in a monogrammed white coat. Bobbie

smokes in a bar, using a cigarette holder. Don smokes at his desk. On

a globe behind him, the countries of Africa are picked out in different

colours.

Bobbie smokes, taking a cigarette from a gold case.

Bobbie smokes in Peggy’s apartment, talking on a yellow telephone.

Bobbie smokes, reclining on cushions. Salvatore smokes in a wicker

chair.