MA│DE, ZZOO

 

VENTRAL

As above, this eternity below the ocean waves
is a bitter and frigid blue. Heavenly heads are
full of cold light, though blood swells their hearts
with auroras pink and gold. 

Peaceful poison twinkles teal along the seascape,
winking at the passing sea angels whose wing fins
flutter like twin flames, flare pinpoints of holy
fluorescence. 

lucid as water, naked as an androgynous body,
their interior intimacy is brightly exposed, tweaked
into the devilish curl of buccal cones. Free-floating,
slow-moving alongside the drift ice, 

violence graces the angels. They crush butterflies
in the dusk of the midnight zone, gorging their young,
who will swell like a red wave until they overwhelm
the bodies that bore them.

In case you weren’t aware, collaborative duo MA│DE, “established 2018,” as the biography in their full-length poetry debut, ZZOO (Windsor ON: Palimpsest Press, 2025) reads, “is a collaborative writing entity, a unity of two voices fused into a single, poetic third. It is the name given to the joint authorship of Mark Laliberte and Jade Wallace – artists whose active solo practices, while differing radically, serve to complement one another.” The publication of ZZOO, which appears through Jim Johnstone’s Anstruther Books imprint, follows a quartet of chapbooks, the work from some of which falls into this new collection: Test Centre (ZED Press, 2019), A Trip to the ZZOO (Collusion Books, 2020), A Barely Concealed Design (Puddles of Sky Press, 2020) and Expression Follows Grim Harmony (JackPine Press, 2023). The poems and illustrations that make up ZZOO actively play with and between the binary, composed as a blended work of smart and engaged language bounce and clatter and precision, resonating with sound and lyric play across the human-animal divide. “Questions fuzz like dust,” writes the poem “FURVERTS,” “bunnies along the edges / of ever changing rooms. // We’re pooling our fantasies, / low poly sprites in a garden / of prismatic light. // When skin crawls and minds / purr, we bump against // the immovable / body // of a tree inside a forest / of illusion.”

There is a bounce and clatter, but one of a density of lyric, one that works to interrogate relations and interrelations, offering a collaborative language between and across language, sparking a binary through a binary, and where they might possibly connect. The poems are layered, and sharp, writing in the midst of, or even between, or beyond, the work of these two, such as the single sentence of the poem “PITCHDOWN BAY,” that reads: “The small sound of a falling snowflake, / slow it down, low frequency rumble / of a whale, both melting into the ocean / in time, the water glowing as bright / as lanterns, and sailors drowning as if / they’d seen lighthouses, more lost men / entering from the shore’s mouth, that / emptiness between the stars, pupils / compensating for this hard blanket of / deadlight night, still surrounded by / silent shorebirds, nested, watching, / stringing the surface of the water / like quickening nix when they alight.”

Through ZZOO, the poet/s of MA│DE write of boundaries made, met and blurred, and the impossibilities of crossing those boundaries. As the final poem in the collection, “THE ETERNAL ZOO,” ends: “On exhibition are humanity’s / ersatz transmutations. Mammals / and mundane birds reinterpret / the phoenix, rising out of the ash / of death into which they disappeared: / Life still vivid in the distance.”