Paul Vermeersch, NMLCT: Poems

 

Hello. The wetware is at it again, synthesizing mythologies from monstrosities,
hobgoblin cognition from thin err. On Golgotha, the hippogriff is singing
“Mandinka” to children. Let’s telecommunicate, cool? Let’s watch TV collectively
across a desert of broken antennae. Let’s ache for obsolescence. Let’s go. (“On Monstrosity”)

The latest from Toronto poet and editor Paul Vermeersch, following his Shared Universe: New and Selected Poems 1995-2020 (Toronto ON: ECW Press, 2020) [see my review of such here], is NMLCT: Poems (ECW Press, 2025), a collection very much constructed as a book-length project, one that opens with a helpful “NOTE ON THE PRONUNCIATION OF TERMS”: 

“MCHNCT” is pronounced
machine city 

“NMLCT” is pronounced
animal city

As I’ve written prior—referring, specifically, to Hamilton writer, musician and editor Gary Barwin’s charming creatures: poems (ECW Press, 2022) [see my review of such here]—I’m always intrigued to see the first collection by any poet, following the publication of a selected; to look at a new work composed after having examined, and self-examined, even if rather broad in scope, the length and breadth of a career in poetry. “Words say there is another place.” the poem “ESCAPE FROM MCHNCT” begins. “But who will make it there?” Vermeersch’s eighth full length poetry collection (if one counts the selected, which seems only fair), it is interesting in how his work has evolved from articulating echoes of nostalgic looks at once-imagined futures from the mid-twentieth century into this assemblage of four-lined stanza blocks, themselves accumulating into a narrative structure of speculative fiction, setting a conflict between animal and machine. “Submerged in celestial shadow,” the poem “THE SECOND MOON BEHIND THE FIRST MOON” writes, “saturated and rattling with frags / of cyborg nightmares, the collective unconscious of artificial life, none / of this will be remembered. But it can be recovered.” Throughout the collection, Vermeersch builds his bricks of lyric narrative in lengthy and even gymnastic lines, more oriented in propulsive, almost staccato, sound than in his prior work. He builds his bricks, four lines per, whether through sequences of four poems, one to a page, including the opener, “On Monstrosity,” and to close, “Deep Water / Amnesia,” with the bulk of the collection, not to mention a further interruption or two, made up of self-contained poems, each of which, themselves, as quartets of these poem-blocks. His structures are rhythmic, even propulsive, offering line breaks when needed to maintain that particular four-line shape.

After ejection from a mirrored box, where you have spent your entire life,
will you understand that you have arrived in a forest—or will you believe
that you have become a forest, and the wooded landscape that you see all
around you is just the reflection of your new body inside the mirrored box?
                                   (“Inside A Mirrored Box”)

And through this assemblage of stanza-bricks emerges a book-length narrative umbrella composed to examine the tensions in that imagined future, between the binaries of machine (“MCHNCT”) and animal (“NMLCT”) (humans are most likely on either side of that particular binary, I suppose, depending). “Here you are.” the poem “WELCOME TO MCHNCT” writes. “Everything you love is now customizable with cutting-edge / character tech, but there’s always a faint trace of some remnant avatars embedded in / the most recent blueprint of MCHNCT. We’ve made some changes for your security / and convenience.” The tension is palpable, shifting between an optimism for humanity or sense of doom, interspersed throughout. Or, as his opening sequence of broadcast signals continues:

Hello. The dead will be recast. The dead are imaginary animals in the forest
of broken telephone poles. Electrified crosses are bearing what an era needs
to calm itself. The dead are source material, the end product of homeostasis
converted to narrative. The dead all have their I’s X’d out.

Composed as a response to recent more overt cultural shifts across technology (and vice versa, of course), including elements of artificial intelligence programs that continue to propagate, seemingly against our will, this collection furthers a growing (and intriguing) thread of speculative fiction across Canadian poetry, one that also includes Toronto poet and filmmaker Lindsay B-e’s full-length poetry debut, The Cyborg Anthology: Poems (Kingston ON: Brick Books, 2020) [see my review of such here], an anthology shaped around speculative fiction, exploring ideas of consciousness, being, artificial intelligence and technology, and Ottawa-based poet Mahaila Smith’s own full-length debut, Seed Beetle: poems (Hamilton ON: Stelliform Press, 2025) [see my review of such here]. Much as with Smith’s work specifically, Vermeersch’s poems provide a landscape of speculative conflict as warning for the present, of where this all might be heading, akin to James Cameron’s original 1984 film, The Terminator. As the sequence “The Forest” offers:

Deep beneath Antarctic ice, a forest has waited ninety million years for its rebirth.
This is not Eden. This is the end state of every ecology. Every sprout is the crown
of this realm trying to breach our own. Great pines of epochal growth climb beneath
primeval glaciers. They signal always to the upper world their need to breathe again.

As addendum, the acknowledgements at the end of Vermeersch’s collection provides that: “No part of this book was created with artificial intelligence, chatbots, language models, or any similar technology.”