Jane Shi, echolalia echolalia

I’m intrigued by the long sentence, sentences, that stitch together to form Vancouver poet Jane Shi’s full-length debut, echolalia echolalia (Kingston ON: Brick Books, 2024), a collection that follows her debut chapbook Leaving Chang’e on Read (Vancouver BC: Rahila’s Ghost Press, 2022). Stretching across the length and breadth of the one hundred and twenty compact pages of her debut collection, hers is a remarkable extended thought across lyric meditation and formal invention writing the body, loss, nostalgia and layers not simply reconsidered, but recycled, repurposed. “a tide-pool winter a hiss / of hot violets little fibres / along my bedspread brush of threaded grass / in the grubby broken cinema of memory scrub / my back filthily in the thick sublunary lust / starts would make canyons o me the vast valleys / airless marshes where travellers stumbled,” she writes, to open the poem “worship the exit light,” a poem subtitled “A found poem created / from my wordpress poetry journal / of my late teens (2008-2016) [.]”

Across five sections of lyrics that offer visual and language play—“Unreliable NarReader,” “griefease,” “picture/que,” “The Organization” and “ECHOLALIA AS A SECOND LANGUAGE”—Shi offers poems as declaration, observation, visual reference, restraint and expansive gesture, study notes; as points of clarity, both to the reader and herself. “You offer to run him over with your wheelchair.” begins the poem prose sequence “I’ll Dial Your Number,” a sequence that counts down in reverse order, starting with five. “I come to you deceived and smelling of fish oil. You pat my back with your hospital-gown grin. It’s so soft I cackle. I cough him out tat the rate of decomposing newspapers.” Her lyric is delightfully witty, even absurd, and subversive, articulating through her exploratory gestures an underlying loss that layers, ripples, the more one moves away from those points of origin. Listen, for example, to the opening of the poem “then you put missing them in your calendar,” that begins:

after tax season you stare at the gingko leaf lines of your excel sheet. long bridges dull linger of lullabies. until. you pause at each last lantern lit desk doorknob dusk grip laptop foxglove-covered drawer. open it to sort through documents you were too tired to sort through last winter. return to each drawstring/word dock/sticky note: another year, gone. smoke in song-shadow, milk candle rehearsal. you light things up to shimmer chimney what they’ll say when they hear you. you light things up till your steps are in step with theirs through history’s afterword.

These are such lovely visual and gestural sweeps, such as the poem “I want to face consequences,” which begins with and leads into such an expansive swirl across the page, one of a number of such she composes throughout: “17 / years / old, and / still throwing / tantrums, the suburban / problem so specifically / misdiagnosed / as the problem / of picky eating, on a sunday 10 / years later she’ll check / into a resignation hostel, become / an audible ghost, beckon a make-believe / social worker to arrive at her pillowside like a tooth / fairy.” There’s a coming-of-age or coming-into-being element to these poems, but one far more self-aware and wry, more playful, than most examples I’m aware of, providing a sense of exploration and wonder, collaging observation with cultural and pop culture references, and what one carries no matter where one lands, such as the poem “is it literature or deforestation?,” that includes:

you imagine her in the faces of others: you see the mogui of race in the crowds of this too-Asian campus: so you emptied yourself of what they saw as competition: remaining useless so you no longer needed needing: years later he will Gwen Stefani another sidekick: she will have the same name as you: will get another chance to pay respects: stilling a compass of coincidence: had a knife fight in the Uwajimaya parking lot: not a shell (not a shell): you belong to shoe polish: you belong to gavel polish: goodbye 2014: your legs froze: your throat thawed: you ripped up their contract: refused to take hush money: god/dess of mercy smiling through the paragraphs: ghosts: historians: hesitations: scrawled hi: hello: the caramel salt sting: sigh: wont be long now