Dani Spinosa, Whispering Gallery: Poems

 

There is one student who is attentive and thoughtful in my college Classical Mythology class. She wants to make video games and has played Hades maybe fifty too many runs and she draws me an illustration of a non-binary Herakles wearing a raver outfit with a furry lion hat. She stays after class to talk to me about her final paper. The windows of this room do not open. I wonder if I’ve ever been in a classroom with windows that open. She has questions about the impending strike. The room contracts. I feel the questions’ labour. The clock on the wall moves itself forward again and again. She wants to know which source is definitive. I can’t stop her from taking notes.

The latest from Toronto-area poet, editor, publisher and critic Dani Spinosa is the trade poetry title Whispering Gallery: Poems (Prince Edward County ON: Assembly Press, 2026), following her full-length debut, OO: Typewriter Poems (Picton ON: Invisible Publishing, 2020) [see my review of such here], and the monograph Anarchists in the Academy: Machines and Free Readers in Experimental Poetry (Edmonton AB: University of Alberta Press, 2018). Furthering her exploration through the typewriter-constructed concrete poem, Spinosa’s Whispering Gallery is structured as a collection of duos—thirty-six two-colour typewriter poems titled via heroines from Greek mythology in alphabetical order, each of which follow first-person prose blocks—each pair held as point, and counterpoint. Alkmene, Alkestis, Andromeda, Antigone, Aphrodite, Ariadne, Artemis, and so on. Through the two narrative threads and multitude of voices, there’s an element of performance to this book-length suite, one that might sit equally at home on a theatrical stage, if one might imagine concrete poems, say, performed on stage (and honestly, why not?). Two actors on stage, each performing one of the two of this collection’s threads. The narrative quilt of her text blocks provide a structural through-line, writing on the many ways and times that women have been abused, reduced and restricted by the machinations, whether passively or overtly, by men.

Yes I am still—I am always—trying to find space for poems. I am looking for writing hours though my friends remind me that the day does not come with writing hours and you have to put them there.

Through both sides of the conversation, Spinosa writes trauma and women. “But I know traumas,” she writes, early on in the collection, “the traumas of women. My women. Other women. The real heartbreak stories. A woman answers the door with a toddler on her hip, bobs her up and down slightly as the cop details her husband’s DUI. A woman must birth her eight-and-a-half-month baby that, she knows, has died in utero while her family goes to their house to dismantle the already assembled crib. Burnt-down house. Stolen car. Missing cat. Kidney stone. One of those real asshole cancers that just doesn’t let go. This is a stupid game. There are only losers here.” From structural point to counterpoint, across these two threads, Spinosa offers a poetry collection of visuals and concrete poems that forms itself into a book-length essay, one that speaks to and through female agency and gendered violence, whether physical, emotional or cultural; a book that writes herself and students through heroines and old gods, a collection that directs itself, in whole, towards the young lady that will make the author an auntie, directing all this talk of agency and possibility into all the hopes anyone could have. This is Auntie Dani writing the world as it is and has been, and as it could be, all for the sake of this new life, an opening salvo of a mentorship, offered open-hearted, without cover or expectation or bullshit. Or, as she writes near the end:

I am here and you are there. Silly thing, that distance. I’ve been saying small, quiet things all morning while the dust and cat hair twirl in great winter angles of light. I hear the little whispers come and go as if it wasn’t me speaking them. I don’t know if you can hear me, but I’ll keep saying this shit anyway.