Danielle LaFrance, Verbal Violence

 

From:
Date:
Subject: [Internal]
To:

            _________________________________________________

there is no position if not written down. all ways storied, all
ways factoid. 

what unifies the hadith of policies. Who provides what time
to: break disrespectful responses: report serious comportment:
develop diaphoresis in advance of a pool forms not safe for
work. 

who sedulously avoids all political discussion in the workplace:
people who manage other people are concerned with what
works: 

a migration of orphaned socks discharges who, what evidences
of good intentions over thousands of years over who,
what is every one if not forced thingification. 

what is beyond the point of instruction to decipher needle
fingering, double-talking, incorporating gravings. 

such great utopian wrath!

The latest from Vancouver poet Danielle LaFrance, following Species Branding (Vancouver BC: CUE, 2010) [see my review of such here], Friendly + Fire (Vancouver BC: Talonbooks, 2016) [see my review of such here], JUST LIKE I LIKE IT (Talonbooks, 2019) [see my review of such here] and #postdildo (Talonbooks, 2022), is the poetry title Verbal Violence (Talonbooks, 2026), a collection that “unravels, dissects, and shreds the language of the professional managerial class.” LaFrance explores and examines the specific dehumanizing language of business, comparable to Canadian poet Syd Zolf’s explorations through office language in their remarkable Human Resources (Toronto ON: Coach House Books, 2007) [see my review of such here], both titles attempting, in their own ways, to reclaim the human condition of and through language, class and stripped meanings. One can see this title the direct result of recent declarations around the destruction of Gaza to wildfires, as governments and politicians have been playing fast and loose with language through misrepresentation, dehumanization and outright fabrication. “about this / class structure.” LaFrance writes, mid-way through the collection, “neoliberal / institutions were / never neutral until / the burden of / oppression. hand / in glove no one / told hamas don’t / fit the picture.”

There is a way that LaFrance’s ongoing work fits deep within and extends a language tradition of social justice and resistance, specifically in and around Vancouver, centred around (but not the exclusive purview of) The Kootenay School of Writing—with other contemporary practitioners including ryan fitzpatrick, Stephen Collis, Jeff Derksen, Christine Leclerc, Scott Inniss, Cecily Nicholson, Kevin Davies, Rita Wong and Marie AnnHarte Baker, among others—a practice that not only emerges from those ethical structures, but one that furthers conversation around and through contemporary political crises. These are poems fearlessly composed, harnessing a fiercely intellectual rage around settler colonialism and violence, composed with swagger, gesture and an unrelenting humanity. Through a book dedicated “for every one, / mostly for miscreants,” Verbal Violence is structured through repeated loops of “From:,” “Date:,” “Subject:” and “To:,” as LaFrance writes, early in the collection: “in this day, that age, who said who will be in who’s sacred place when who is rerouted to a community mailbox. what is required at this roaring time to communicate critical taunts beginning with a hard g, finished off by a hand-held bubble machine.” As LaFrance’s “ENDNOTES.v3.pdf” at the end of the collection opens:

In 2021 an unadulterated disdain for work as such emerged anew. Back to business, the order of things, cushioned by new investment in nineties pop psychology turned “wellness culture” amid a global pandemic, and then, in 2024, the last vestige of belief in any liberal democratic institution was put to rest with the professional managerial class’s shameful complicity in the destruction of Gaza, the newest development in the ongoing genocide of Palestinians. Wrapped around these time signatures, a stranglehold, was the making of this account.

12 or 20 (second series) questions with Christine Wu

Christine Wu is the author of Familial Hungers (Brick Books, 2025) which was longlisted for the Raymond Souster Award and shortlisted for the Gerald Lampert Award and the J.M. Abraham Atlantic Poetry Award. She serves as Reviews Editor for The Fiddlehead and currently lives in Mi'kma'ki, on the traditional and unceded territory of the Mi'kmaq.

1 - How did your first book or chapbook change your life? How does your most recent work compare to your previous? How does it feel different?

My first book, Familial Hungers, showed me it was possible to be a writer. Previously, being a published writer seemed like a childhood dream, an impossibility in the face of economic realities and what I perceived to be my capabilities as a poet. Committing to and completing the work (and receiving support—practical, emotional, and financial) was eye-opening and life-changing for me, to see that it was possible. My current work feels both like a continuation of my first book and also something completely different—it takes a wider lens to childhood/adolescence, life and death, faith and disillusionment. 

2 - How did you come to poetry first, as opposed to, say, fiction or non-fiction?

I actually came to fiction first! When I was 16 I was convinced I wanted to write novels, because that’s what I primarily read. When I started studying creative writing at the University of Victoria I quickly realized I didn’t have the patience for fiction while also falling in love with poetry.

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

My overall writing process is quite slow. I spend most of this time (weeks, months) mulling over thoughts and feelings before committing something to the page. Once the first lines of a poem appear in my head, the rest of the poem follows quite quickly and poems usually emerge pretty close to their final form.

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?

A poem begins with a single thought or emotion that I will jot down on an index card. So far, I’ve mostly worked on book-length projects, I think because I get caught on an idea and want to explore it to its fullest before letting it go.

5 - Are public readings part of or counter to your creative process? Are you the sort of writer who enjoys doing readings?

I love doing public readings and see it as the other side of the “work” – connecting with others and filling my social well. I’m often inspired to keep going when I hear others read from their work but ultimately my creative process requires a lot of unstructured time and solitude.

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?

Something I wrestled with a lot when writing Familial Hungers was how to write about the effects of colonialism with the language of the colonizer (i.e. English). Audre Lorde’s quote about ‘the Master’s tools’ comes to mind here, although perhaps I’m thinking about it in too limited a way. Language shapes thought and culture in such foundational ways and I’m always thinking about the way the English language shapes my work despite efforts toward resistance. I’m interested in both working with and against the limitations of language.

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?

There are so many possible roles for writers I’m not sure there’s any one answer to this question. I’d like to think that among the possibilities are the ways writers can notice/witness and point out what might be otherwise missed in our busy capitalist societies.

8 - Do you find the process of working with an outside editor difficult or essential (or both)?

Working with a good editor is absolutely essential—someone else’s eye can always offer new insight and growth to the work.

9 - What is the best piece of advice you've heard (not necessarily given to you directly)?

“I keep saying it doesn’t matter, just write something down. Eventually things will distill themselves into something that behaves like poetry.” – Elizabeth Bachinsky

10 - What kind of writing routine do you tend to keep, or do you even have one? How does a typical day (for you) begin?

My writing routine has more seasonal rhythms than daily rhythms, although I do tend to start each day the same way—with a warm beverage and a book. Throughout the day as ‘poem thoughts’ come to mind I will jot them down onto an index card and eventually these index cards become the starting point for full poems. 

11 - When your writing gets stalled, where do you turn or return for (for lack of a better word) inspiration?

I try not to agonize over stalled writing, although that’s easier said than done. I’m always reading, and often the magic of inspiration comes from writers I admire.

12 - What fragrance reminds you of home?

            Onions and garlic in the wok, ginger scallion oil, instant ramen broth.

13 - 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?

Often literal dreams—a number of poems have been direct translations f dreams that have haunted me upon waking.

14 - What other writers or writings are important for your work, or simply your life outside of your work?

Gillian Sze, Jane Wong, Victoria Chang, Grace Lau, Chen Chen, Ocean Vuong, Kayla Czaga, Sharon Olds. Sue Sinclair whose work I studied 20 years ago and later supervised my master’s thesis that became the book Familial Hungers. Phoebe Wang whose work I read while writing my first book who later became my editor for said book.  

15 - What would you like to do that you haven't yet done?

I would like to make a chapbook! I was so determined to write a full-length collection I completely bypassed this rite of passage.

16 - 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?

Writing is actually my third career! Previously, I was a campus minister and then a librarian. I’d probably still be a librarian if I had the capacity to do more.

17 - What made you write, as opposed to doing something else?

Writing has always been my primary way of wrestling with my thoughts and feelings. I simply can’t imagine functioning without it. Even when I wasn’t professionally writing, I was journalling everyday in an attempt to ‘find out what I [was] thinking’ (a la Joan Didion).

18 - What was the last great book you read? What was the last great film?

To Place a Rabbit by Madhur Anand. I can’t remember the last film I watched!

19 - What are you currently working on?

A collection of poetry about leaving the evangelical Church and losing my late father, and the ways these two experiences intersect with and complicate one another.

12 or 20 (second series) questions;

Nicole Mae, Ribgrass, Poems

my review of Saskatchewan poet Nicole Mae’s self-produced Ribgrass, Poems (Peachpiles, 2026) is now online at periodicities: a journal of poetry and poetics. see my 2025 Bronwen Wallace Award shortlist interview with Mae here.

Kevin Davies, Transfer Portal

 

53

IF, AS I’VE DONE HERE, YOU STRING TOGETHER
all the tiny roles I’ve played on the various versions
of Law & Order over years, a masterpiece
emerges from the rubble of erased plot
and theologized desert, a stunning
or stunned study in deep facets, as unbegun
subject treading the boards of late and
early century in search of the antidote
that will cure him of these pestilent data.
you can continue to the wedding in a moment. 

                                                            66

I’VE BEEN BEFORE IN THIS LATRINE.
Its broken locks subtend a trauma.
If punctuation could limn this scene:
Five hyphens and a giant comma.

The latest from Jackson Heights, New York-based Canadian poet Kevin Davies, following Pause Button (Vancouver BC: Tsunami Editions, 1992), Comp. (Washington DC: Edge Books, 2000), Lateral Argument (Barretta Books, 2003), The Golden Age of Paraphernalia (Edge Books, 2008) and FPO (Edge Books, 2020) (as well as a recent chapbook through above/ground, a further Edge title next year, and a forthcoming Talonbook title in 2028), is Transfer Portal (Edge Books, 2026). It has been suggested to me that Davies’ work is difficult to discuss as his work is increasingly self-referential, so perhaps even to speak of such is to reveal my own ignorance [although there’s a remarkably good recent interview up at Jacket2 with Davies, conducted by Scott Inniss, that is worth reading for a larger context to Davies’ ongoing work]. Perhaps so. The accumulated and numbered fragments that make up Transfer Portal exist in proper sequence, but for the opening two (above), set in order prior to the beginning. To what end is such information important for narrative comprehension, moved out of linear order?

Across the language of Davies’ impossibly-long threaded lines, a mélange of words pushed in against each other to splatter, purposefully disrupt and undermine, and eventually rebuild, meaning. All of this, also, while including what seem a uniquely scattered list of references, such as the American Revolution, playing catch in the dark, ancient Rome, paradise and old debt, Shakespeare’s Caliban and discipline, snowfall and swaths of crossed-out text. Davies’ language swirls gymnastically around and through critiques of capitalism and culture, an evolving poetics that evolved out of early engagement with and through The Kootenay School of Writing into something more expansive and even evasive, engaging beyond, and yet still connecting to, poets such as the late Peter Culley [see my review of his latest here], Dorothy Trujillo Lusk [see my review of her latest here], Jeff Derksen [see my review of his latest here], Rob Manery [see my review of his latest here], Colin Smith [see my review of his latest here] and Louis Cabri [see my review of his latest here], as well as more recent poets who have taken up similar threads, such as ryan fitzpatrick [see my review of their most recent here] as well as Inniss himself [see my review of his latest here].

As part of that same Jacket2 interview, Inniss references [… Philadelphia poet Ron] Silliman’s review of [Davies’] The Golden Age of Paraphernalia from his blog, where he writes, ‘Davies appears to have found a spot exactly halfway between language poetry and flarf.’” Nearly a decade earlier, Joshua Clover offered this about Davies’ work in Boston Review: “This is how I think about Kevin Davies’s poems, for which few if any of the possible metaphors seem even close: weather, the fractured encyclopedia, disobedience. His poetry is not especially metaphorical in the first place; it is more a kind of realism, for a real world that seems all too often not just too awful, but too incalculable and messy to look at in its full unfolding.”

When two words are placed side by side, of course, they can’t help but sit in relation, and thus, a narrative sense of meaning, from left to right (or up to down, or however words are placed against each other). And yet, there’s almost a similar kind of overarcing floating narrative created across these short bursts to the prose work of Toronto writer Ken Sparling, how the present and the surreal offer steps across a complex grid, and composed of sections that may or may not connect to the larger narrative. “Anyway that’s my tale and now it’s done. / The young woman took my chair when I stood / briefly to wash my beak. / And then would not move her legs to // allow me to retrieve my bundle / from beneath the chair,” he writes, near the end of the collection, as part of the rather lengthy section sixty-eight, “and that is when I felt myself / turning into pressed wool and about to go haywire.”

                                                            61

THE POPPINJAY, SHRILL, HAS NONE
of the absolute quantum blackness of the bird of paradise
nut is nonetheless an end it itself
in this valley or alley. 

 

                                                            62

CAPACIOUSLY CONSTRUED, THE ENDED FENDER
can seem to catch hold of the tree’s inner funk.
You’ve got nerve to kneel under the bandstand and glow.
We had wanted to be apprehended serially
in a way that made our monkey aunts and uncles proud.
Look, Horace, you haven’t got it in you
anymore if you ever did. If you did, you’d do it
or it would do it for you, or you would stand up to it
and it would do as you told it, it and its parcelling division.
We buy companies, sell off the assets, fold up the shells,
and fuck off to our personal car elevators.