Khashayar “Kess” Mohammadi, The Book of Interruptions

 

│││

I can no longer afford humour

a spear knocks at my caged heart and the rattles awaken a primal fear.

a marble floor, a marble bust, all the negative space potent within rock.

mandibles in an oyster of sunlight within the sunflower. this sap.

there are things I can’t do with words.

there are words that are flexed too far off the body. 

clouds make way for the Alborz mountains to crack.

revealing millennia. 

the sun

a temperament of the great flood. 

the sun

makes new 

the speech (“Psychotic Notebooks”)

The fifth full-length collection from queer, Toronto-based, Iranian-born poet, writer and translator Khashayar “Kess” Mohammadi, is The Book of Interruptions (Hamilton ON: Wolsak and Wynn 2025), following on the heels of their full-length debut, Me, You, Then Snow (Guelph ON: Gordon Hill Press, 2021) [see my review of such here], 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], the collaborative G (with Klara du Plessis; Windsor ON: Palimpsest Press, 2023) and solo collection Daffod*ls (Pamenar Press, 2023) [see my review of such here], as well as a plethora of chapbooks. Set with opening poem, “Before We Begin …,” and six sections—“Psychotic Notebooks,” “Purgatorial Imagery,” “There Needs to Be More to This Than Nostalgia,” “A Harmonious Armageddon,” “An Autobiography” and “Consonants* A Book of Visions*: A Book of Illuminations*: A Chorus of* L*ght: Against L*ght: Against L*ght”—The Book of Interruptions extends Mohammadi’s accumulations of space and spacings, writing a sequence of interruptions and disturbances, hiccups and self-sabotage, writing the possibility and impossibly of words, language and meaning. “my mouth bubbling under water // the narrator mentions me by name,” the opening of the sequence “Psychotic Notebooks” begins, “I am the cliffhanger // for one of a thousand nights before slaughter // having asked more questions than I have answered // in the city within the city I swerve // among the cacophony of the tunnel // an ocean within an ocean [.]”

Gestural and expansive, there is an element of worldbuilding to Mohammadi’s lyric, one that returns the structure to the crossed-out (or interrupted) vowel through their use of the * symbol from prior work (specifically ), writing a narrative structure concurrently fragmented, populated and isolated, swirling amid staccato struggles with faith and cities, queer experience and a litany of restless, thoughtful observations around feeling unsettled in a secular Toronto, while holding on to a cultural history of the poem that connects to that stretches back thousands of years. With each collection, Mohammadi furthers a complexity of their engagement with the long poem, the book-length accumulated lyric, a trajectory that is as striking as it is propulsive. And yet, each work begins fresh, composed with an open curiosity, and an array of questions, some new, and others, that need to be asked more than once, for the sake of a broader, even ongoing, response. As part of the sequence-section “Purgatorial Imagery,” as they write:

I began as a novice
to a city
long ago mastered
by a writer’s eventual plunge
into blindness
the instinct to pub-crawl
came from a different breed
and the black tome of the night
painstakingly written to be fed
as an offering to the lake
as if breadcrumbs to ducks
whose soft glide
is the unfolding
of the universe 

a betrayal

gods
            idols
gods
            stone
God
the parenthetical