Danielle LaFrance, Verbal Violence

 

From:
Date:
Subject: [Internal]
To:

            _________________________________________________

there is no position if not written down. all ways storied, all
ways factoid. 

what unifies the hadith of policies. Who provides what time
to: break disrespectful responses: report serious comportment:
develop diaphoresis in advance of a pool forms not safe for
work. 

who sedulously avoids all political discussion in the workplace:
people who manage other people are concerned with what
works: 

a migration of orphaned socks discharges who, what evidences
of good intentions over thousands of years over who,
what is every one if not forced thingification. 

what is beyond the point of instruction to decipher needle
fingering, double-talking, incorporating gravings. 

such great utopian wrath!

The latest from Vancouver poet Danielle LaFrance, following Species Branding (Vancouver BC: CUE, 2010) [see my review of such here], Friendly + Fire (Vancouver BC: Talonbooks, 2016) [see my review of such here], JUST LIKE I LIKE IT (Talonbooks, 2019) [see my review of such here] and #postdildo (Talonbooks, 2022), is the poetry title Verbal Violence (Talonbooks, 2026), a collection that “unravels, dissects, and shreds the language of the professional managerial class.” LaFrance explores and examines the specific dehumanizing language of business, comparable to Canadian poet Syd Zolf’s explorations through office language in their remarkable Human Resources (Toronto ON: Coach House Books, 2007) [see my review of such here], both titles attempting, in their own ways, to reclaim the human condition of and through language, class and stripped meanings. One can see this title the direct result of recent declarations around the destruction of Gaza to wildfires, as governments and politicians have been playing fast and loose with language through misrepresentation, dehumanization and outright fabrication. “about this / class structure.” LaFrance writes, mid-way through the collection, “neoliberal / institutions were / never neutral until / the burden of / oppression. hand / in glove no one / told hamas don’t / fit the picture.”

There is a way that LaFrance’s ongoing work fits deep within and extends a language tradition of social justice and resistance, specifically in and around Vancouver, centred around (but not the exclusive purview of) The Kootenay School of Writing—with other contemporary practitioners including ryan fitzpatrick, Stephen Collis, Jeff Derksen, Christine Leclerc, Scott Inniss, Cecily Nicholson, Kevin Davies, Rita Wong and Marie AnnHarte Baker, among others—a practice that not only emerges from those ethical structures, but one that furthers conversation around and through contemporary political crises. These are poems fearlessly composed, harnessing a fiercely intellectual rage around settler colonialism and violence, composed with swagger, gesture and an unrelenting humanity. Through a book dedicated “for every one, / mostly for miscreants,” Verbal Violence is structured through repeated loops of “From:,” “Date:,” “Subject:” and “To:,” as LaFrance writes, early in the collection: “in this day, that age, who said who will be in who’s sacred place when who is rerouted to a community mailbox. what is required at this roaring time to communicate critical taunts beginning with a hard g, finished off by a hand-held bubble machine.” As LaFrance’s “ENDNOTES.v3.pdf” at the end of the collection opens:

In 2021 an unadulterated disdain for work as such emerged anew. Back to business, the order of things, cushioned by new investment in nineties pop psychology turned “wellness culture” amid a global pandemic, and then, in 2024, the last vestige of belief in any liberal democratic institution was put to rest with the professional managerial class’s shameful complicity in the destruction of Gaza, the newest development in the ongoing genocide of Palestinians. Wrapped around these time signatures, a stranglehold, was the making of this account.