Drew McEwan, tours, variously

 

A voice might change.
                        From a distance a voice may appear to change.

I see the face of another and recognize a name. 

Support structures an unequal encounter.

                                                                  Name this distance. 

You’re always on the wrong foot, I might say.

Come closer and see. (“a tour, variously”)

The latest from Toronto poet Drew McEwan, following Repeater (Toronto ON: BookThug, 2012) and If Pressed (BookThug, 2017) [see my review of such here], is the long-awaited tours, variously (Vancouver BC: Talonbooks, 2025), a book-length suite structured as a kind of call-and-response between extended lyric sections: “a tour, variously,” “exit strategy,” “a tour, variously,” “arger’s interiors,” “a tour, variously,” “theory of rooms” and “a tour, variously.” “I brace another entryway within a room.” the opening sequence begins, “You frame the performance of a beginning.” Described on the back cover as “a guided tour, a tour of a series of empty rooms,” the open-ended complexity of tours, variously does read as an exploration of space, of being, moving between an uncertainty of rooms. In the first section, a bit further along: “My madness is the madness of sequence.”

Working as an “educator and researcher with a focus on mad, disability, queer, and trans rhetoric,” tours, variously is nearly structured akin to a thesis, following an argument across the length and breadth, layered in lyric instead of prose (reminiscent of titles produced through Essay Press, one might say). “Her theoretical parenthesis capitulates to a / demand for rigour where gravity gives way to / a flex behind apprehension.” she writes, mid-way through the collection. “This description / becomes furniture music.” The ebbs and flows of tours, variously hold an array of threads of awareness around depictions, rhetorical function and narrative gesture. “Without the ‘now’ of standardized speech,” she writes, “the / loiterers drag bruised aphorisms. Or so say the / lawyers on the courthouse’s brutalist concrete / steps. Or so say the courthouse’s brutalist / concrete steps. Either way the difference / amounts only to the distance between arrival / and departure lounges.” tours, variously is composed as a long poem talking out self-aware elements of self and being around language and depiction (“Has my narration become cold and inhuman?”), writing an exploration of betweenness, becoming and having become, having been the whole time, achieving an exploration not of uncertainty but of seeking, plumbing the depths of language into a solid ground.

Suppose autonomy. Suppose a hibernation.
A marker-adjusted room to breathe.
Motivated by an impossible exchange.
A room impassable. Reconsidered in miniature. 

Once horizontal withdraws, the work various access.
Vanishing point delegates a private scale.
Margins trace transitional infestations. (“theory of rooms”)