Grace Nissan, The Utopians

 

bring any country     to a standstill
take the same form    with everyone 

say it’s hard to find
it’s hard to find 

hold up their hands
their hands 

start thinking up arguments
and that’s farming (“The Utopians”)

I’m intrigued by this title by New York-based poet and translator Grace Nissan, The Utopians (Brooklyn NY: ugly duckling presse, 2025), a book that but hints at the structure of the constraint used, through blurbs offered by Hannah Black, Kay Gabriel and Ted Rees. As Black offers: “Using mostly the para-colonial language of Thomas More’s Utopia, Grace Nissan has made an almost shockingly compelling book out of a formal constraint as sharp and absurd as the limitations of living in these trivial, awful, genocidal, yearning times.” Gabriel, also: “Rewriting Utopia using, mostly, Thomas More’s own language, Grace Nissan poses in a different way a classic organizer’s question: how do we turn what we have into what we need to get what we want?” It is only through the publisher’s website that one might find this (arguably offering little more than what the blurbs provide, and not assisting to spell out Nissan’s specific constraints through this project): “Built around a sequence written entirely with language from Thomas More’s Utopia, The Utopians invents a new world, from the pieces of the old one, to formally explore the contradictions of liberation. A series of letters to Thomas More, and a poem called ‘THE WORLD’ about Utopia’s vexed escape, encircle the remixed no-place as they elaborate Utopia’s double edge.” Or, one can seek through the text itself to hear Nissan’s own thoughts, set close to the end: “that the dead mix freely / in a spirit of reverence // this translation is based on / death / terribly well, I must admit // they cremate the / discussion / to accept it [.]”

Nissan is also the author of The City Is Lush With / Obstructed Views (DoubleCross Press), as well as the translator of kochanie, today i bought bread by Uljana Wolf (World Poetry Books) and War Diary by Yevgenia Belorusets (New Directions / isolarii), and their translations of Yevgenia Belorusets were exhibited in the 59th Venice Biennale.

“I feel almost ashamed to send you this little book about the Utopian Republic.” (That’s how you started Utopia—with a letter, to introduce Utopia through its messenger, Raphael.) “Some people say that he has died somewhere on his travels. Others that he has gone back to his own country. Others again that he has returned to Utopia, partly because he felt nostalgic about it, and partly because he couldn’t stand the way Europeans behaved.”

The bulk of the collection exists as “The Utopians,” with two further sections—“THE WORLD” and “Passages 1, 2, 3”—interestingly enough, are interspersed throughout the collection, held as fading text (something Ellen Chang-Richardson recently played with as well, through their recent above/ground press title) and even text set backwards. The interplay, the interlay, feels akin to less a series of interruptions than a layering, held as a critique of where we currently are, but through the translated and transposed language of English lawyer, judge, social philosopher, statesman, theologian and writer Sir Thomas More (1478-1535), and their infamous book originally composed in Latin, and published in 1516. “Utopia / wasn’t retailing,” Nissan writes, “like a talented   author / had seen absolutely    nothing // to get an even clearer picture / died somewhere    on his travels / and whispered / More [.]” There are few poetry titles, one would think, responding to texts by one simultaneously held as Lord Chancellor to King Henry VIII and venerated by the Catholic Church as a Saint. If More’s Utopia offered a fictional, perfect, island republic or commonwealth, Nissan’s The Utopians writes of a population set within a bubble, offering an articulation of and counterpoint to contemporary western society. How does any utopia turn in on itself, and twist its own impulses? How can any society find its way out of such dark? Held as critique and counterpoint, The Utopians occasionally write directly to More, writing out his limitations, his declarations, through lyric fragment, layering and narrative interplay, and into what More could never have imagined. Or, as Nissan writes:

What I mean is, transmission hurts. Utopia was not always an island, you wrote, it was a peninsula first. Because your new world is dripping with passage, territorial lust and imperial phantoms, as well as all that could not come into being. Thrilling call for the abolition of private property. But you are sullied by the name of one (yours), puppeting as total social structure. You are sullied by personage itself.

Sometimes it helps to think like a child. More: there is no point outside the world, there is only mouth.

Let me enter the picture. Notice me like a low and constant breeze. When it stops.