laid down to their
building blocks
word and word and then
brick-light
the attack and decay
of every action-sentence
made its own assembly
line
like take the darkroom
for example
and build an apiary
like take the gun chamber
for example
and build an apiary
like take the steam
engine for example
and build an apiary
like take the black page
for example
and build an apiary
(Khashayar “Kess” Mohammadi)
There is such lovely detail to the moments, the fragments, of Khashayar’s Gavel sound. Gravel sound., offering poems and condensed fragments and short sketches, holding to the smallest possible utterance amid what might be an extended, single piece. “a poem / is just / what light / thinks about,” Khashayar writes, just near the end. There isn’t a wasted word throughout this entire sequence, taking the entirety of a single poem and dismantling it across such a length of thought. “I’m struggling to kich the poem / out of my neighborhood,” offers an earlier poem-fragment, “sea urchins / like riddles / or ruin // flicked by toe tip / into lake Ontario [.]”
There is something really interesting in the way that Khashayar’s work has progressed through and since the publication of their first two collections—Me, You,Then Snow (Guelph ON: Gordon Hill Press, 2021) [see my review of such here] and the dos-a-dos WJD conjoined with The OceanDweller, by Saeed Tavanaee Marvi, trans. from the Farsi by Mohammadi (Gordon Hill Press, 2022) [see my review of such here]—extending into projects of smaller moments that accumulate and stretch in really fascinating and quiet ways, such as their third full-length collection, Daffod*ls (Pamenar Press, 2023) [see my review of such here], or through the collaborative G (with Klara du Plessis; Palimpsest Press, 2023). There’s already a further full-length due this fall with Wolsak and Wynn, which I am very much looking forward to.
under
neath the
patient
spider
golden
in its thereness
I laid
beside you
weepy
a landscape for ants
for grass to tickle
pushing up dandelion
clocks and
raising up dirt
Jo Ianni is one of only a handful of repeat authors through Apt. 9 Press, with inside inside inside appearing with the press in 2022 [see my review of such here]. Akin to Mohammadi, Ianni’s FAT LUCK AND FUZZY SONG (the opening part of the title I keep mis-reading as something much ruder, admittedly) is a beautifully-crafted long elegant thread of extended sequence, constructed out of condensed curves, bends and moments, lyric stretches and the weight of the occasional underlined passage or word. The underlined passages are curious, and there were moments I wondered if these were to highlight for the sake of a poem-title for these small, self-contained fragments, but the fact that other poems hold more traditionally-placed titles while still offering underlined passages contradicts that, making me wonder if these are simply points in each poem where the eye is to be drawn, slightly, and possibly held. The poems are quiet, thoughtful, odd, with gestures and utterances in the direction of Robert Duncan, here and there, which is curious, the poem “Itty bitty ditty,” “for Robert Duncan + his cat,” that includes “Where else will I go but here deeper still wish my knees bent and belly full of soup / There’s no more I can do for the moon than glory [.]” Oh, how I delight in the quiet, extended stretches of Jo Ianni’s lyric structures; more people should be reading the work of Jo Ianni.
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