AJ Dolman, Crazy/Mad

 

Bitch

Anger, dwelling, a sorrow of stones,
no weathers but the rains
that misery us past the broken point

Rage house and drag lawn and
all the time spent,
every moment wasted
each my/our, your fault, mine,
what differences there
could still be between us,
these spaces

Anger fibres from the carpets,
fills the voids, each empty room
brimming with furniture, clocks
and

The full-length poetry debut by Ottawa poet, editor and fiction writer AJ Dolman is Crazy/Mad (Guelph ON: Gordon Hill Press, 2024), a book of anxieties, flailing, resistance, vulnerability and mental health struggles. “Ruptured spokes and axel / whine as moulded steel settles / into new shapes,” Dolman writes, as part of the poem “Trauma response,” “plastic, / deflated lung, a broken tradition; / cougar and hare motif homaging / histories of crosshairs / triangulated on hills of fog, / the many outcomes / that came before, / that will [.]” Set with opening poem “Overthinking” and three sections of poems—“HYSTERIA,” “NEUROSIS” and “MELANCHOLIA”—Dolman’s first-person lyrics move through an array of subjects, examining and highlighting rage, trauma, self-harm, vertigo, supernatural beliefs, atheism, personality disorders and memory loss. “There’s a story,” the poem “Memory loss” ends, “the night that happened, / but a man can’t tell a story like that. / He has to wait until everyone named within / is dead; can only hope to outlive them, / so that someday he can explain his certainty / to no one [.]” How does one write, or even find balance, through such struggle? There’s something interesting, also, how Dolman refuses closure, whether easy or otherwise, ending poems abruptly (although perhaps not as abruptly as they could be), often sans punctuation. It suggests both a sudden stop and a kind of ongoingness, how one poem, one crisis or concern, actually bleeds into the next. “All our forths and backs could be broken / into letters,” the poem “Difficulty concentrating” ends, “twenty-seven shapes, / a few scratches, but we whisper / our meanings in the kerning [.]”

This is a book of anxieties, but of agency, also. In an interview conducted earlier this year by Amanda Earl for periodicities: a journal of poetry and poetics, they speak to the book’s overall theme:

AE: You deal with mental health issues in this book in a way I rarely read in contemporary poetry. Can you talk about how the collection came together and how you decided to center it around this theme?

AJD: I write what I am passionate about, and this is a thread that has run through my life, through generations of my family, among friends and colleagues. And now, especially since the start of the COVID pandemic and general acknowledgement of the climate crisis, anxiety and depression, in particular, seem to be running rampant. Of course they are. Look at what is happening. I am honestly amazed we aren't all just breaking down in the streets daily. Yet, Madness was one of my most fundamental fears for as long as I can remember. Not the being Mad itself, but to be considered crazy, to be sent away, institutionalized, diagnosed. Voicelessness, again.