Nat Raha, apparitions (nines)

 

[ i/5 ]

 

grrrl // if we are citizens
of nowhere, a threat to the tone &
image;; composed / lace cute
we divine femmes no here to disse
-ct your impositions >>
so late in the day, bark organs
in casual violence: your pleasure
excruciate living / &
the beauty about our eyelines

The latest from Edinburgh, Scotland-based “poet and activist-scholar” Nat Raha is the poetry title apparitions (nines) (New York NY: Nightboat Books, 2024), a fragmented, fractalled, book-length sequence. This collection was composed, as she writes in her four-page “Afterword,” “during a period experienced as temporal reversal, rupture and compression, 2017-2021. On June 14^th, 2017, seventy-two people—the majority of who were Black and brown—were killed in the fire at Grenfell Tower, a twenty-four-story apartment block in West London. For many of us engaged in housing struggles, and in the radical history of London and the UK from anti-racist and anti-colonial perspectives, Grenfell was the amalgam of everything we knew regarding the ‘organized abandonment’ and neglect that comes with private property oriented towards maximizing profits and a state that considers poor Black and brown people, especially Muslims, to be disposable.”

Set in nine sections of nine, each poem-fragment comprised of nine lines, offering staccato and stagger of word fragments, twisted syntax, and flagrant punctuation and hesitations, she writes small moments, accumulated and electrified, punctuated and piercing. “detached / formulaic / our / saturate eyes / chroma,” she writes, as part of “[ iii/7 ],” “-tic , brittle  , split, flaked w/out [.]” Her poems are expressive, and gestural, blending lines and references from other sources when required, whether a poem “after Anne Boyer,” or “with lines from Frank O’Hara’s ‘Homosexuality’,” as Raha’s accumulations provide a layering effect across her narratives around social upheavals, human requirements and demanding, despite capitalism, that humans treat each other with at least a modicum of respect and dignity. “schema di/vesting black & brown / breath burnt ab/andoned / nest synthetic pale on pray / screech bitter salvation prized,” she writes, through the poem “[ vi/6 ],” “light disdain calls benevolent / neoliberal tears cellular / carbon based/carbon torn / stones & plaster time contained to fail // continues its ordinary [.]” Her narratives, as apparitions, shift with the difference of light, of shadow, as she closes her “Afterword”:

            The poetics of the last one hundred plus years have demonstrated poetry’s power as a direct mode of communication that can cut through times of diatribes and violence. The niner is a form attuned to speed and constraint. They are brief containers to feel through, polemicize, and remember—to communicate the stakes of the everyday harassment and structural violence that are the lives of ourselves, our friends and our loves. For possibility, contra disposability. They shed light on the glitter and heat of our creopolitian, queer, and trans lives, in and through their collective formations.

The poems are staccato, and highly structured, as visual as they are performative, and I’d be curious to hear how any reading of these pieces would hold to the visual notations sparked across these pages. As she writes at the opening, in “A NOTE ON THE FORM”:

The niner is a contemporary form of the nine-line poem, typically in sequences of nine poems. More recently, the niner consists of lines of nine syllables and/or other numerical orderings in the number of sounds or words related to the number nine.
            Coined by the poet Mendoza and adopted by various innovative writers, the niner is seemingly a “sonnot,” resembling a sonnet while radically departing from its conventions; a perverse sounding that adopts a masochistic containment. In this book, the nine-syllable line reads as a brash, punk, or post-punk response to the metrics of Anglophone verse. The form has allowed for experiment and study in dialect and accent, and their effect upon the language, contained in a line of nine syllables or beats.