their architecture
unwhole, gleaning, their
edges are soft
sanded and ground to softness
near skinless
their flesh is open and
wet
worn past translucence
hard and shining and
whole
edges sharp with newness
they are columns,
cathedrals
softnesses folded into
geometries
untenable
light shines through
they cannot be held
or they will die
I’m fascinated by AUTOWAR (Kingston ON: Brick Books, 2021), the full-length debut by Toronto-based poet and multidisciplinary artist Assiyah Jamilla Touré, following their chapbook feral (Montreal QC: House House Press, 2018). “i run on silences / i swallow them whole, eagerly / see? i seem to say,” Touré writes, as part of the poem “beckoning,” “a steady heartbeat taming my ear / is an assault / my recall is quartered / by any steadfastness [.]” Theirs is a poetry of direct statement composed via musical gesture; performative lines of breath-thought upon breath-thought. As the poem “acidfield” begins: “bones jutting up jagged planted in this garden / will we too be a garden on the ocean floor / an ocean so acidic, vast, roaring / the salt shearing everything in it to bone / bones for us to be too, tomorrow? / or something new where bones used to be?” There is something really compelling in the ways in which their rhythms line up, launching as a single breath from left to right, before the next one begins; each end of line an intake of air.
Touré
composes a lyric of gesture and metaphor on the pure mechanics of possible
survival, from being forced to create a father out of thin air and space, to
navigating, as the back cover offers, “kinesthetic memory and longing, inherited
violence, and the body as a geographical site.” “i am an approachable object—a carved
wooden idol / if i am a deity i am of the rank closest to dirt,” they write, as
part of the poem “idolatry.” Touré offers a shaped articulation of space and
the body; one that utilizes performance as a way through which to speak of
missing shapes, and the ability to reform, reshape and even regenerate. The
poems are sharp, unflinching and even unrelenting, while holding, still, the
ability to take the process and thinking seriously while simultaneously able to
allow small bursts of quirky humour. Towards the end of the collection, as part
of the poem “autodeity,” they offer: “every six months i shed my skin / and
become new and pure, another / i spontaneously forget any language but my own /
finally everyone admits i’m incomprehensible [.]”
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