Bardia Sinaee, Intruder

 

You pulled my hair because you care.
Suffering won’t make me beautiful like the people
buying menthol chest rubs at the pharmacy 

or the trees that drop used band-aids everywhere
then feign death for a season.
I grind my teeth not knowing what to say to you. (“BAND-AID”)

Award-winning Toronto-based former Ottawa poet (and In/Words editor) Bardia Sinaee’s long-awaited book-length debut is Intruder (Toronto ON: House of Anansi Press, 2021), a collection of smart, crafted, lyric narrative poems, rife with image and storytelling. “This / is my desert island mood,” he writes, as part of the poem “ALTHOUGH I AM ALWAYS TALKING,” “as free, surely, as I have / ever felt.” Later on in the same poem, offering that “Love / outside of habit / is occasional, punctuated // with fatigue, / like the weather.” The poems that make up Intruder offer an assemblage of short scenes or stories composed via the narrative lyric, thick with verve and detail. “You’re in a quiet place between / school and unemployment,” he writes, to open the poem “HIGH PARK,” “lying / down in the park with a scarf / over your face. I’ve brought a big, / boring book to press flowers in, though / these dandelions are awfully / juicy, don’t you think?”

Intruder is structured in three untitled sections of shorter poems, bookended at either end of the collection by a single poem, both of which speak to blood, bloodwork and injections. “If you have trouble keeping track of time,” he writes, as part of the opening poem, “BLOOD WORK,” later offering that “No one will hold it against you / It’s like when you were younger / Someone is keeping an eye on you / It’s getting dark and someone is driving you home [.]”

As the press release presents, Sinaee works structural influences from a number of poets: “The first section, consisting mostly of plain-spoken poems about city life, is influenced by the poems of James Schuyler and Karen Solie. The second spools out in a sequence of imagistic sixteen-line poems that progress via quiet observation and associative logic, and it takes its cue from works like John Ashbery’s Shadow Train and Ben Lerner’s The Lichtenberg Figures. The poems in the third section are slower, minimalistic, and aphoristic, at times reminiscent of the work and style of Rae Armantrout and Fanny Howe.” While I understand that the bulk of those potentially picking up a debut collection by a Canadian poet might be previously unaware of their work, but that is an enormous amount of weight to put on a debut; I know there are certain arguments to be made for placing a book within a particular context, or offering how a book might be structured, but Anansi has published enough poetry titles over the years that some of us might already suspect the quality and potential poetics and structures of a poetry title with the Anansi logo upon. I would also be curious to know how much of this, how many of these names, were offered by Sinaee himself as his own structural influence, or offered after the fact by another. The poems are more than strong enough to exist on their own, without overlaying such a weight of expectation. “How harrowing the prospect,” he writes, to open the poem “DEPOSITION,” “there may be no clandestine agency after all, / only our clamouring until we’ve built / something we’d sooner take up arms for // than name.”

Pain interrupts my thinking. Drowsiness leads me in loops. I give up on Moby Dick, then on Teach Yourself Mindfulness. My head aches all the time. If the internet works well, usually before and after the daytime hours when the outpatients downstairs are using it, I watch old sitcoms on my laptop. Whenever I find myself growing grim about the mouth; whenever it is a damp, drizzly November in my soul …. I check my email. I apply for EI sickness benefits. Meals are either overcooked or refrigerated to the point of near-freezing because the absence of white blood cells means I have no immune system. I bear my being without defenses. Tuna sandwiches, inscrutable stews and steamed vegetables arrive on a tray beside a cold, unripe banana beaded with condensation. I give up on The Big Book of Quick Crosswords. The same people deliver and collect the trays, politely avoiding eye contact. (“TWELVE STOREYS”)

Throughout the collection, Sinaee plays with the notion of intrusion, sidling up to ideas of the outsider, the intruder and the interloper, from his experiences with cancer and two and a half years of chemotherapy, the history of the Middle East, culture and the solitude of cities, and simply living in the world as a human being. How does one see the world as from the outside, or even one’s own body? “This is not the travesty of early trials,” he writes, to close the poem “ABERRATION,” “this is not the oblong rug with eyes, the horned flower spraying blood, / or the strip of skin inching back toward its dish to die—only / a tentative being, translucent and exhibiting adaptive boundaries.” How does one consider the intruder, when one’s body itself is the world? Sinaee works through and references a variety of boundaries and intruders, and the health and moral implications that run throughout, from the invasive and destructive, to the boundary itself protecting that which has itself been rendered toxic. Referencing the prior American President to open the poem “NOTHING IS FORBIDDEN,” he writes “Only the truth will stand on the other side, / and I am the truth itself.”