Amanda Earl, Beast Body Epic

 

Feathermarked along or frost-etched
deep into and below. Stalactites
suspended into the dark and my body.
Am I destroyed or am I armoured?
Was I tough? Did I hang on against
all pronouncements?

One of the frustrations of no longer running a trade literary press is that we would have easily produced one or two further titles by Ottawa poet Amanda Earl beyond her full-length debut, Kiki (Ottawa ON: Chaudiere Books, 2014), so it was a delight to see her self-produce her latest, the book-length Beast Body Epic (Ottawa ON: AngelHousePress, 2023) [launching online on November 12]. Beast Body Epic directly responds to the author’s health crisis from a few years back, and the ongoingness of Earl’s expansive lyric and visual structure echoes, slightly, of how Dennis Cooley responded to a burst appendix, through his departures (Winnipeg MB: Turnstone Press, 2016) [see my review of such here]. As Vancouver poet and editor Elee Kraljii Gardiner writes as part of her introduction to Beast Body Epic: “She leans into visual poetry, the epic, allusion, disassociation, memoir, verse, prose, fable, allegory, and other modes in order to tell a complex story in a surprisingly succinct work. The variation is not only necessary, it’s seamless, and Amanda’s text flows with the protagonist through crisis into stasis and onward.” Gardiner is an interesting choice to write an introduction, as she knows full well about experiencing a medical crisis and exploring the same through lyric: her collection Trauma Head (Vancouver BC: Anvil Press, 2018) [see my review of such here] is “a book of poetry about [her experience with and after] an arterial dissection and stroke [.]”

Throughout her book-length epic, Earl offers a dense language of sound and play, traversing visual, prose, lyric experimentation and flourish, occasionally sketching a kind of narrative point-form. “Death spent years as the taker.” she writes, early on in the collection, “Loaded art into their conversation. / The Rot was too drunk and needy, couldn’t breathe. / She nightmare herself to sleep. / The sun ceased. // The fluttering started and didn’t stop. / First the pigeons, then the crows. / Black wing over black wing. / There’s a wolf in the labyrinth, / the Rot’s husband told her.” Earl’s lyrics and visuals are wildly performative, capable of incredible grace, flourish, anguish and precision, as required. “A nurse gives me Tylenol 3,” she writes, mid-way through the collection, “a gown / and long white compression socks. / I feel like Anne of Green Gables or / maybe Raggedy Anne, my body / stuffed full of rags, my clothes too / big for me, a little orphan girl without / parents or anyone to save her.” This is a collection that somehow manages to fly in multiple, even contradictory structural directions simultaneously, while holding together as a clear book-length work with a narrative through-line. If you haven’t been paying attention to the ongoing work of Amanda Earl [see my review of her stunning Judith: Women Making Visual Poetry anthology here], you clearly need to begin.