Kate Siklosi, SELVAGE

 

my nagypapa was an immigrant and immigrant children without a mother are dangerous. they had settled in a small oil town and he started to build a small house with his own hands. all i know of that night is that it was dark and there was screaming. i’m drinking tea when my aunt recalls looking back on her father falling to his knees. she was old enough then to know that the axis of their lives and those to come had shifted. an inverted arch crouching in concavity. each child a coordinate clinging to a dead line. one took his life one destroyed others. the rest have done their best to keep grounded. the fact of the matter is they all grew up against a backdrop of negative space. each a stellar burst a collapsed star in a hellbent universe. notwithstanding, here. i. (“reasonable grounds”)

Toronto poet, editor and publisher Kate Siklosi’s second full-length collection, following the stunning visuals of leavings (Malmö, Sweden: Timglaset Editions, 2021) [see my review of such here], is SELVAGE (Toronto ON: Invisible Publishing, 2023). Set in four sections of stitch and carve, Siklosi writes of new motherhood against intergenerational trauma, leaves and immigration, edges and a blurred centre. Whereas leavings focused on images of physical objects set with text, SELVAGE focuses instead on the text itself, while still offering an extension of the visuals and visual elements presented in that full-length debut. She writes of stitch and vein, a blend of images (including full colour), offering text on seeds and leaves, and weaving in elements of language from the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms through examining a family history of devastating losses and their rippling effects. “leafing through the charter,” she writes, as part of the opening sequence-section, “i am a loss. when things shall be deemed it can both protect and threaten at once.” As the press release offers: “Kate Siklosi grew up in a family shrouded in a veil of mystery of how they came to be: the scant facts about her grandparents and how they came to live in Canada after escaping Hungary under the Iron Curtain in 1956; her nagymama (grandmother) dying in childbirth; her nagypapa’s (grandfather’s) grief at finding himself alone without his family in this new country (subsequently taking out his grief by setting fire to the Children’s Aid building and then dying in jail); the mysterious ‘neighbour’ who sexually abused Kate’s brother and cousins.”

The online Merriam-Webster offers that “selvage” refers to “the edge on either side of a woven or flat-knitted fabric so finished as to prevent raveling. specifically : a narrow border often of different or heavier threads than the fabric and sometimes in a different weave. : an edge (as of fabric or paper) meant to be cut off and discarded.” The poems in SELVAGE are stitched together as four sequences of prose blocks, lyric fragments and image—“reasonable grounds,” “field notes,” “lockstitch” and “radicle”—that quilt a larger narrative of crumbles, holds, breaks, language patters and splinters, able to entirely smashed to pieces but held together by thread, across, one might say, that narrow border; of how, near the end of the opening sequence, “drought tolerance is passed / from parent tree to child.” There is something quite fascinating, also, in how Siklosi seeks, through a blend of image and text, to examine a story that begins with her Hungarian grandparents, forced to leave home to emigrate to Canada during the same period as Calgary poet Helen Hajnoczky’s grandparents, something Hajnoczky worked to examine in her own way through the blend of visuals and text of her own second collection, Magyarázni (Toronto ON: Coach House Books, 2016) [see my review of such here]. Accumulating into a book-length poem, Siklosi’s scraps, threads and fragments pull at those buried elements of family lore, seeking the story to see what pulls apart, simultaneously held together by the determination and a story, notwithstanding. “being is a maze.” she writes, as part of “lockstitch,” “the sky is stitched in. cut the selvage by taking the people upon entry. you can create laws, like that bush and that corner and how high. You can even manage it so it appears like a living thing from space: branches and limbs with people roaming through. the thread is of course the word that holds it together: five hearts searching taxed land held down with pins.” Or, as part of the third section:

Everyone has the following fundamental freedoms:
what if i told you nothing dropped.
every citizen of Canada has the right to
a landmine made our calves burn with
in time of real or apprehended war,
coming home. handful of roots explode
the right to enter, remain in and leave
into light. skylarks on a pond.
pursue the gaining of a livelihood
look, the year is now gone.
life, liberty, and security of the person.
i have my dad’s waves.
compelled to be a witness in
he made me a constellation to swing from.
law recognized by the community of nations
i don’t have his hands so can’t build myself
not to be tried for it again
a country but i have enough ink to sink
not to be tried or punished for it again
us into a river, bone and mind, and with
time of commission and the time of sentencing,
this i’ll dive in and give you everything but
a witness who testifies
the currents to remain inside his
freedoms shall not be construed as
rattled lungs and mistake
treaty or other rights
his ribs for home.

There is something, of course, quite natural to having one’s first child that prompts a particular look back at one’s history, one’s foundations; to attempt to reconcile particular elements of the past for the sake of being able to move forward. In this way, one could even point to comparable titles, such as Jessica Q. Stark’s recent Buffalo Girl (Rochester NY: BOA Editions, 2023) [see my review of such here], as Siklosi writes through the limitations and effects of a document, of a story, upon the body, utilizing text and stitch as a way to unfurl both family and archive, stitching one word immediately upon and following another. “as if,” she writes, as part of the fourth and final section, “to survive was a baseline / life blossoms from a wound / how does one escape a cycle?”