THE ONE
WHERE THE GANG GETS BACK TOGETHER
The one where human community over-powers
animal.
The one where H.S. recognizes a common
strangeness, a common sweetness, a fundamental separation.
The one where the insulted experiences language
and I relate to collaborative hating.
The one where friendship is not property of a
subject and my eyes are bigger than my stomach.
The one where I start reading Nietzsche again
and apply H.S. sly love for women to my sly love for friends.
The one where I don’t believe in Lenin, I just
believe in me.
The one with the puny face of existence.
The one where “women can very well enter into a
friendship with a man, but to maintain it a little physical antipathy must help
out.”
The one where I kissed the ground beneath his
feet.
The one where “one always loses by
all-too-intimate association with women and friends; and sometimes one loses
the pearl of life in the process.”
The one with bras before brahs.
Vancouver
poet and editor Danielle LaFrance’s second trade poetry collection, after Species Branding (Vancouver BC: CUE,
2010) is Friendly + Fire (Vancouver
BC: Talonbooks, 2016). As Rachel Zolf’s blurb on the back cover attests, “Friendly + Fire starts out as a caustic
linguistic interrogation of the 2002 Tarnak Farm Incident, in which U.S. airman
Major Harry ‘Psycho’ Schmidt, hopped up on amphetamine ‘go’ pills, placed his ‘finger
on the pickle’ (trigger) and dropped a 500-pound bomb on a Canadian military
exercise outside Kandahar, Afghanistan. It then turns into a seething,
deconstructive indictment of the heteropatriarchal, capitalist-colonialist
structure of the friend-enemy binary itself as it plays out in social relations
in the ‘society of the receptacle,’ in the academy, in poetry circles, in the
street, in the bedroom, and in the structure of the split speaking ‘I’ itself.”
As far as quotes or blurbs go, Zolf’s assessment of the book is incredibly
astute and precise. LaFrance’s Friendly +
Fire is composed out of an aesthetic of war and friendship, intimacy and
accidents of upheaval, whether political, social or personal, writing out the
specifics of armed conflict and intimate acts. Hers is a critique of multiple
systems, as well as her own actions, and each thread throughout the collection,
interweaving and occasionally getting (deliberately) tangled. In LaFrance’s
poems, colours and contexts blend. As she writes in the poem “STOP REFERRING TO
SOLDIERS AS HEROES”: “Why don’t I want to hear about my self-esteem? Why is the
best way the / hardest? Why do I have to fuck with everything?”
NOBODY
WANTS TO TALK ABOUT IT
“Friendly” + “Fire” is a combination move
played in the subtropical arid deserts. But nobody wants to talk about it. These
syntagmas are thought through with due diligence. Always one step behind. There
is no female purity in the relationship between adjective and noun. A slip of
the tongue is the original form of the times OR archived missives on the
Internet. Circumlocute the vanguard of misconception and quickly re-enter the
confessional booth as a messed-up blood metaphor. Yesterday means caffeine
pills. Specialized commandos and civilized condominiums. Electric flow from my
pussy chakra to my mouth apparatus. Just like Honey. H.S. is a damn lovely soul
with whom I share my most intimate thoughts and desires for the future. Do away
with all burnt flesh or my drishti
will be caught in REAL UNREAL purgatory.
What is H.S. saying about female agency?
All radical being and such a beautiful person…
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