Noah Ross, The Dogs

 

Have to be a pretty large wolf to snap own spine the force can you imagine

Something that out of control in your vocabulary

It’ll heal

If you lick or please especially, one question, if on the way back

The blood left a bad idea

If we know what the game is, if we promised a rite

Somebody’s promise, somebody’s bait

After moving through Noah Ross’ chapbook The Holy Grail (Wry Press, 2025) recently [see my review of such here], I’m attempting to catch up with the rest of his published work, finally moving through his collection, The Dogs (Krupskaya, 2024). As you might already know, The Dogs is Berkeley, California-based poet, editor and bookseller Noah Ross’ second full-length title, following Active Reception (New York NY: Nightboat Books, 2021) [see my review of such here]. In both The Dogs and The Holy Grail, there is something curious about how Ross works through each particular subject thoroughly, completely, and from multiple angles (this new title, providing, in its own way, an echo of Sawako Nakayasu’s classic title The Ants, a poetry collection recently afforded a new edition). As well, both projects were prompted and structured as response-echoes of other works, overlaying his own take over the bones of another. Whereas the structure of The Holy Grail follows Jack Spicer’s own classic sequence, this new project, The Dogs, follows a structure of a source material I’m not familiar with. As he writes as part of a note on the text at the back of the collection:

            The Dogs is the outgrowth of an illicit project—an affair with language that multiplied. Many affairs. A series of unofficial, say, “creative,” engagements—Hervé Guilbert’s Les chiens, dialogue from the 2010’s soap drama Teen Wolf, Marie de France’s “Bisclavret,” that, in their cohabitation, brought to the fore other texts, other pack dynamics, other images and languages of queer love, power, devotion to monsters. What began with Guilbert found itself seeded with Auden’s unauthorized poem “The Platonic Blow” (“The Gobble Poem”), Dom Orejudos’ leather dom comics, my own packs.
            An affair with a question, a question around translation. How to work with a text that will likely remain untranslated (Les chiens)? This plaquette pornographique—dirty, autofictive, bodily, juicy, disturbing, awkward, biting. Personal. Guilbert’s life, Guilbert’s sex, Guilbert’s work. What methods of engagement translate, retranslate, expand, disturb a text until it’s no longer an author’s, an author’s sex, an author’s work—could it ever be mine? Ours? Is it that my desire is heightened by the impossible, the unrequited? Or that a moment of assimilationist legacy making, where monsters are refashioned twink saints for sanitized worship, brings out my own inner wolf? The drive to bite the text, turn it, make it transform. To cut it up, to be cut up, to perform acts of violence, to reflect acts of violence.

Illicit, Ross offers, although this sly intention might underplay what he has accomplished: an ambitious and incredibly playful work, stitching together an array of propulsive language and collaged reference across the bones, presumably, of Guilbert’s original work. One would suspect this a work not purely translated but reimagined, utilizing translation but one of a handful of tools towards constructing an entirely new work.

As if the presence of the text excites me [as if behind this room another where the bodies lapping in] Defiance of this room and the contractions of my ass. [His, His, Theirs, and the letting of a fall to the ground, the barely] Perceptible sound of bellies in motion [just beneath me, somewhere behind me, above this bed] Impossible to even imagine the very thought of falling [asleep the thought of finding positions elongated in the reach across] Walls that I lick, as if to taste our texts, [the bodies heckle, the buzzing of horseplay, as if to taunt me, as if like children] Messing around in the text, throwing bricks where the bellies connect [rooms hitting where my head rests against this wall, letting the juice pour into my mouth, my] Sleep, taking it from behind

The Dogs is structured as a sequence of collage-accumulations, offering lyric prose structures, paragraphs and fragments, across six sections: “Teen Wolf / How Beautiful People Hurt Together,” “The Dogs / Every Hallway Somewhere Else Start Over,” “Swaddled In Lint The Cloth Pure In Dye / Less Swaddled In The Water He Enters,” “Swaddled In Lint The Cloth Pure In Dye / Less Swaddled In The Juices,” “A Dream Within A Dream Of Garwolf / Oh Bisclavret” and “A Liquid Sky / Some Night Again.” The collection holds as a kind of book-length suite, an accumulation of stitched reference, movement and playful enterprise, writing around elements of love and violence, human and animal capacity, werewolf/wolf man legends, and language twists. “A string being pulled,” the first section offers, “people whispering: // Remember this absolute Hair of the dog // Take a deep breath and tell me what you feel // Any riddles, are you magnetized, superstitious // Who are you, getting colder, who are we freezing [.]”