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.
Wonderful to read this thoughtful review and interview excerpt on AJ Dolman's brave and vulnerable poetry. Loving the book!
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