Adam Haiun, I Am Looking for You in the No-Place Grid

 

The full-length debut by Montreal poet Adam Haiun is the intriguing I Am Looking for You in the No-Place Grid (Toronto ON: Coach House Books, 2025), a book of lines, grids and shapes set across each other in lengths. I might imagine that if the late Canadian poet and dramatist Wilfred Watson (1911-1998), once famous for his own grid poems (but more enduringly well-known as being the husband of writer Sheila Watson), had been able to shake Modernism, he might have emerged as Adam Haiun. I Am Looking for You in the No-Place Grid offers a long poem sketchbook of narrative threads set in overlapping text, overlapping grids, moving in multiple directions simultaneously, and deliciously difficult to replicate in the form of a review (although I shall make an attempt). “And where am I to / be found in this equation.” he writes, early on in the assemblage of untitled pieces, set in the table of contents as a listing of first lines demarking self-contained pieces, twenty-one in all. “The head the hindquarters intact / the heart presumably obliterated / if any logic governs the placement / of organs. And you only notice / today how there are little grey / apartments above that grocery / store. The miniaturizing impulse. / In terms of the heart. In relation / to the glands. All the pungency / of the ripe orange in the stairwell / and the recognition of the smell / as belonging to her very pits. The / stretch of land that constitutes a / lesson from out of the past. The / engorgement.”

The author’s note at the end of the collection—“Although I wrote this book in the voice of a digital speaker, I employed no generative software in its composition.—suggests a kind of polyvocality of not just overlapping text but overlapping sound, furthering structural echoes of some of the work of Montreal poet, translator and performer Oana Avasilichioaei’s own explorations around sound, language, meaning and performance, most recently through her seventh full-length collection, Chambersonic (Vancouver BC: Talonbooks, 2024) [see my review of such here] (although there are numerous over the years that have played with an overlapping of text, certainly, from Chris Turnbull to bpNichol to jwcurry, among others). Haiun’s overlapping sentences and phrases play the glitch and stagger, overlay and staccato of fragments across a far broader tapestry of construction and destruction, how things are built and how they fall apart. Every sentence a further step across an endless stretch of narrative across the length and breath of the long poem, as he writes, mid-way through the collection: “The head the hindquarters intact / the heart presumably obliterated / if any logic governs the placement / of organs. And you only notice / today how there are little grey / apartments above that grocery / store. The miniaturizing impulse. / In terms of the heart. In relation / to the glands. All the pungency / of the ripe orange in the stairwell / and the recognition of the smell / as belonging to her very pits.”