Roxanna Bennett, We Gladly Feast on Those Who Would Subdue Us

 

II

& forgetting what you’re after &

      The pliers were used to open her mouth,
      was refusing to speak

    its keeper kept it supplied

in a ‘mental’ hospital. More radically than anywhere else in the outside is invalidated
as a human being. Must remain until the label is 

untainted by hate a necklace of 54 skulls
on my screen

 

 

myriad strange specimens

 

& the space he occupies is no longer of his own choosing. After being subjected to degrading
ceremonial known as psychiatric examination 

 

      the government indulges (“The Oxford Dodo vs. The Anatomical Venus”)

The fifth full-length poetry title by Roxanna Bennett, following The Uncertainty Principle (Toronto ON: Tightrope Books, 2014), unmeaningable (Guelph ON: Gordon Hill Press, 2019), The Untranslatable I (Gordon Hill Press, 2021) [see my review of such here] and uncomfortability (Gordon Hill Pres, 2023), is We Gladly Feast on Those Who Would Subdue Us (Gordon Hill Press, 2026). Moving beyond the sonnet-shapes of prior work into more of an expansive collage structure, We Gladly Feast on Those Who Would Subdue Us furthers Bennett’s work across “disability poetics,” a conversation I would be curious to see the author extend, also, into the form of the essay. I know Toronto poet Therese Estacion [see my review of her debut here] has a new collection, Jelly, Baby: Essays on Disability and Vulnerability (Toronto ON: Bookhug Press, 2026), but I have yet to go through such. The poems are gestural, composed with great flourish and a sly and subtle wit. “Sound n,” Bennett provides, within the second section, “an impression of somebody / something formed from / but significant / especially /// thigh. The subtle body / wrote / GOOD BYE /// accommodate, make / would ever curse us / word, you can find out if /// can’t be both.”

What is interesting about Bennett’s book, beyond being produced sideways—which I always find irritating, admittedly, as a reader; why not just make a wider book? I think back to Méira Cook’s Slovenly Love (London ON: Brick Books, 2003) [see my review of such here] or Stephen Collis and Jordan Scott’s collaborative Decomp (Toronto ON: Coach House Books, 2013) [see my review of such here]—opens with a page of “acknowledgements & process notes” and a three-page list of “influences, references, & sources,” material usually held for the back of any collection. As Bennett’s “acknowledgments & process notes” includes:

Many of these are ‘found’ poems using text from various sources. We had originally set out to write about the divine shadow feminine but She will not be intellectualized, only embodied. As various illnesses took away my ability to use electronic devices & think & speak & write with coherency, She invited me to turn inward, dance deeper into Madness, & to use unconscious analog art-making methods such as cut-up, collage, & chance operations. &—although I don’t love this term, it smacks of the hospital, preferring instead to be divinely guided rather than operated upon—as adaptation.

The result is this rough beast before you.

Thank you for reading.

Assembled across three sections, each of which are constructed as extended lyric sequences that interconnect—“The Oxford Dodo vs. The Anatomical Venus,” “The New Bodily Ethos” and “Excavation of the Colossal Mother”—there is something interesting in how one might see Bennett’s prior engagement with the sonnet as attempting to find order within a particular kind of chaos. Through the use of found material set in collage, a different kind of order, Bennett works a lyric structure more overtly chaotic, or, more likely, one that allows for a coherence through the chaos itself. Working with, and not against, what Bennett’s own possibilities provide. And in which Bennett’s compositional approach evolves from composing a poem with one’s own material, to being able to discern where the poem might already exist, within that same material. The pastiche provides Bennett a way to think through their improvisations to achieve something entirely fresh. Or, as Bennett themlseves write, towards the end of the second section:

      I rise & become one
in new shapes

 

 

Jacob Schepers, Ugly Ground Swell Moss

 

Ugly ground, swell moss finds you worth keeping neat.

Ugly ground, swell moss knows of some face of you you cannot.

Ugly ground, swell moss wants you all to itself. To cover you until your

            surface area is its surface area.

Ugly ground, swell moss feels the cool of your touch. Offers itself as

            covering to benefit the both of you.

Ugly ground, swell moss wants you two to be exclusive. With your gray

            its green. Your steady its growth.

Notre Dame, Indiana-based poet, editor and scholar Jacob Schepers’ second full-length poetry title, following A Bundle of Careful Compromises (Buffalo NY: Outriders Poetry Project, 2024), is Ugly Ground Swell Moss (Spokane WA: Carbonation Press, 2026). Ugly Ground Swell Moss is a deeply-ambitious book-length project, purposefully considered and sketched-out as a kind of gestural monologue or book-length essay, one that accumulates, relying on long sentence-thoughts and structural repetitions, looping through a conversation in and around biologist Carl Linnaeus (1707-1778) and philosopher Emmanuel Levinas (1906-1995). To offer, quickly: Linnaeus is best known for his work in taxonomy—the science of identifying, naming and classifying organisms—with Levinas best known for his conversations around ethics, and how we are most responsible for ourselves in relation to others. What, then, are our responsibilities, Schepers inquires, to ourselves, in relation to our natural environment? The structure of this particular ecopoetic is incredibly unique, however similar the kinds of questions and explorations I’ve seen recently through a variety of poetry titles by British Columbia poets, specifically Vancouver poet Elee Kraljii Gardiner’s sometimes, forest (Vancouver BC: Talonbooks, 2026) [see my review of such here], Kelowna poet Matt Rader’s FINE: Poems (Gibsons BC: Nightwood Editions, 2024) [see my review of such here] and Delta poet Kim Trainor’s A blueprint for survival: poems (Toronto ON: Guernica Editions, 2024) [see my review of such here]. One might suggest that such a conversation, a thesis-via-the-lyric, becomes particularly curious to explore through this particular form, and one might wish to ask exactly what prompted Schepers to approach his material through this accumulative overlay, this loop, of the extended lyric sentence.

Across four numbered sections—“To Name,” “To Call,” “To Maim” and “To Cull”—with an afterword, the poem loops, perpetually returning to the beginning, returning to that “Ugly ground,” akin to Robert Kroetsch’s perpetually-begun sequence without end, or the repetitions of poets such as Sawako Nakayasu or the late Denver poet Noah Eli Gordon. The loops begin, almost slow at the offset, allowing the anchor of that opening phrase to swirl the stretch of his thought-line well beyond the boundaries of a normal page. Each section offers an opening salvo, “Taxonomy,” before the loops begin as self-contained pieces in sequence. “Taxonomy” opens the foundation of each section, each chapter, like a thesis. The first begins:

To limit is what’s to taxonomize. Taxonomy is what is to assume a

            specialized attempt, a knowledge of prescriptive meaning

            shaving off borders.

To clear it up, this isn’t a romance: no Petrarch calls to you.

Forget the lover: this dynamic exchange? There’s no winner, no call for a

            witness-takes-all. No, none of that.

Through the repetition, Schepers offers less a return to the beginning than a series of concentric circles, as each sentence-section returns to the beginning before stretching out again, furthering the narrative cohesion and accumulation. The looped phrase offers a grounding to such an expansive, gestural, lyric, set in a compact package. Or, as the author’s “Afterword,” “On Identity, Legacy, Ugly Thinking, and Ethical Endlessness” provides, to open:

            Ugly Ground Swell Moss is at its heart a philosophically poetic project that spins around inquiry, obsession, relationality, ontology, and the epistemological questions that derive from such foundations. That sounds busy, I know, so consider all of that as the equivalent of holding a diamond up to a light source to see the various facets, reflections, and dispersions that can all be present in order to scrutinize as many details as possible to get a clearer sense of the whole thing. I am no systematic philosopher. I much prefer the lateral thinking that poetic processes depend on and thrive within. I’m grateful for big questions and for the relief of not having to answer them definitively.
            Resembling, on the one hand, a collection of odes in their insistence on apostrophe, and, on the other hand, a sonnet sequence due to their cumulative effect and twisted incantatory syntax and voice, the text of Ugly Ground Swell Moss explores the identities and relationships of the two title characters within a sparse ecosystem of longing and allegorical desire. This collection interrupts the centrally questioned relationship with tangential epigraphs and so-called “Taxonomies” that draw on the 18^th-century work and ensuring controversial legacy of Swedish botanist Carl Linnaeus and the 20^th-century’s Lithuanian-born, French philosopher of Jewish heritage named Emmanuel Levinas. To varying degrees, I confront each of these thinkers’ afterlives in intellectual history—more on this below—and consider them within the ongoing discourse around lyric subjectivity, rhetoric, and ethics. All the while, there is shifting away from an exclusively anthropocentric viewpoint and towards the nonhuman ecology beneath our footing.

12 or 20 (second series) questions with Susan Stewart

Susan Stewart is a poet, scholar, and translator and the Avalon Foundation University Professor in the Humanities, emerita, at Princeton University.  Her most recent books are Bramble, a book of poems, The Ruins Lesson, and Poetry’s Nature: Four Lectures.

She has won both the National Book Critics Circle Award and an American Academy of Arts and Letters award for her poetry. A former MacArthur Fellow, Berlin Fellow, and Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets, she is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the American Philosophical Society. 

1 - How did your first book change your life? How does your most recent work compare to your previous? How does it feel different?
My first book made a difference in the way I thought about writing poems--writing a book became the project rather than the continuous, but incidental, practice of simply writing poems. This is my seventh book of poetry and since The Forest each book has had a particular relation to understanding the past. In that book, I explored the notion from psychoanalysis of generational haunting and addressed the accounts I had of family life before my birth; in Columbarium I wanted to rethink the genre of the georgic from a perspective of doubt and an acknowledgment of the indifference of nature; in Red Rover I thought about the medieval dream vision and forms of play as spheres of the imagination. In this book I turned to Mandelstam's use of the octet and the Biblical psalms as models for countering emergency and expressing grief. Considering the phenomenon of the bramble I hoped to learn something about the potential of natural symbols.

2 - How did you come to poetry first, as opposed to, say, fiction or non-fiction? 
I have written poetry from childhood. I also like to work as a scholar. But I have never been successful at writing fiction. I don't seem to have a strong narrative sense.
 
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 am a very slow poet with only a few exceptions of poems that have come to me as I awakened in the night. Usually I have a phrase or concept in mind, or perhaps an image or memory, and I begin to make the poem.  I write drafts on long sheets of paper usually. And then I have to stop and put the poem away for quite a while--often months. Then I go back to it and try to resolve whatever seems unfinished to me.

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?
see above

5 - Are public readings part of or counter to your creative process? Are you the sort of writer who enjoys doing readings?
I enjoy doing readings in the rare periods when I have a new book that is finished. I always read my poems aloud to myself as I am writing them, but when I read in public I have a better sense of how they sound.
 
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?
Yes, I have many theoretical concerns. That is why I have written a number of scholarly books about poetics and aesthetics. I believe the most pressing question for poets of our time is the fate of both the senses and the imagination at a moment when we are surrendering our will to technologies largely in the service of greed.

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? 
Our job is to keep thinking and beauty alive and to pass on those values to future generations.

10 - How easy has it been for you to move between genres (poetry to translation to critical prose)? What do you see as the appeal?
I don't think of this practice in terms of ease--it's more of a necessity for me. My poems and criticism are nourishing to one another and I practice translation not as a "professional," but as a means of friendship and helping English language literature be less parochial. 

11 - What kind of writing routine do you tend to keep, or do you even have one? How does a typical day (for you) begin? 
I don't follow a routine, for my life is too complicated for that--but I do go for a long walk and work in my garden almost every day. 

12 - When your writing gets stalled, where do you turn or return for (for lack of a better word) inspiration?
My writing doesn't become stalled because I don't have a schedule for it.

13 - What fragrance reminds you of home? 
honeysuckle

14 - 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?
yes, all of those forms are an influence...and I often enjoy collaborating with composers and visual artists.

15 - What other writers or writings are important for your work, or simply your life outside of your work?
I have been so fortunate to spend my working life teaching the history of literature, art, and philosophy to young people and learning from others in university settings. Although I now have retired from teaching, I read in these fields every day and I don't feel a gulf of any kind between my work and the life outside my work.  My family life is also very much tied up with these worlds: and for all of us issues of social justice and citizenship have only increased in intensity under the current U.S. regime.

16 - What would you like to do that you haven't yet done? 
Walk freely at night in any neighborhood of my city and know that no one suffers from hunger, witness the success of local public schools and the flourishing of the liberal arts and humanities in U.S. colleges and universities, see my family, friends, and neighbors able to afford the health care they need and certainly deserve, watch the collapse of the military-industrial complex, enjoy clean air and water and know it can be found anywhere on the planet...you get the idea.

17 - 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?
I don't know. As I applied to college, women could not have their own financial accounts and many universities were not open to women. I have been fortunate to be able to write my way into an existence that has been fulfilling and in my private life I have been so lucky in many ways.

19 - What was the last great book you read? What was the last great film? 
The most recent great book I've read--this past week--is Jay Wright's beautiful Párodos.  The recent film I have most enjoyed is Alice Rohrwacher's La Chimera.

20 - What are you currently working on? 
I have just published three books: Bramble, Poetry: Four Lectures, and Last Stops of the Night Journey, a co-translation of two recent books by Milo De Angelis.  I am finishing, with Patrizio Ceccagnoli, a translation of Antonella Anedda's Geografie, the companion volume to her Historiae, which Patrizio and I recently brought out with New York Review Books.  So now, free of deadlines, I have the luxury of figuring out what I want to do next.

12 or 20 (second series) questions;