Jason Purcell, swollening

 

fertility

I pleasure over a row of white caps containing themselves. I tongue my own holes. Dislodge a tooth with a filling in it and grind it out to see its cavern, pushing against the walls of enamel with my thumb until the entire structure of the filling crumbles. Gape it enough that it splits in two, a thick rush of saliva on the tongue, alkaline and sweet. Holding my own dead self in my hands. An artifact of neglect that rots and teems with life. The slick of the mouth, its dirty floor mushrooming, iridescent beetles just under the log, under the filling’s wet dark suddenly lifted, skeletal scuttling from the searching sun, from the rising dental light.

From Edmonton poet and bookseller Jason Purcell comes the full-length debut, swollening (Vancouver BC: Arsenal Pulp Press, 2022), a collection that “rests at the intersection of queerness and illness, staking a place for the queer body that has been made sick through living in this world.” swollening is built as three sections of first person lyric narratives, and Purcell composes poems that echo and flow into each other; poems that ripple across surfaces, running deep into each other across the length of the lake of this book. “Even this memory is queer.” he writes, to close the poem “North of Nipissing Beach,” “These are the terms of this space.” And through such, Purcell sets down the terms of his lyric from the offset: composing poems that swirl around a central core of illness, writing a devastating array of dental pain and carnage (I can’t tell if it is irony or purpose that has me posting this review on the morning of my own latest dental appointment), but one that utilizes illness as a way through which to examine what feels the book’s true purpose: to examine and articulate loss, grief and growing pains. Purcell writes the breaks, pains and pauses that come with simply becoming an eventual self-realized adtult (including the threads of growing up and coming out), and allowing grief and trauma its own space to move through, and be moved through in turn. Purcell writes on first loves, masculinity, a father’s response and a mother’s love, and the distance of siblings. “How to retrace / a relationship and then to stay present?” he asks, to close the poem “Kids in the back seat,” “How to repair? I always push away / from the pain, but she reaches through and can see / me, can connect what I can’t by a very long road.” swollening is not simply a book around illness and pain but a collection of poems on attempting to understand the path travelled-to-date, sketched across childhood recollection, burgeoning queerness and heartbreak, composed as much as a way through understanding and a way forward as an articulation of where he currently stands, now.