Jody Chan, Madness Belongs to the People

 

Don don ko doko doko. Don don ko doko doko! Taiko repertoire is often taught orally, relying on repetition. I learnt to drum through kuchi shōga, a system of call-and-response phonetic notation. The body learns first, then the mind follows. Vibrations felt in our feet, in our instruments’ round faces. In the streets, too, I’ll follow any megaphone. I believe that we will win, I chant obediently, even when I don’t. Without context, can language be trusted? Can sound? (“ECHOLALIA”)

Toronto-based “poet, multidisciplinary artist, care worker, and community organizer” Jody Chan’s third full-length collection, and the first I’ve seen, is Madness Belongs to the People (Prince Edward County ON: Brick Books, 2026), following sick (Black Lawrence Press, 2020) and impact statement (Kingston ON: Brick Books, 2024). Madness Belongs to the People offers itself as a book-length suite of first-person narrative fragments, prose poems and more traditional lyrics that deceptively hold a kind of accumulative through-line, propulsive through language of dense prose and lyric gymnastics. “where once you heard the cymbal / sing, dream house inside out, what luck when the performance // does not take place on this page,” Chan writes, as part of the poem “(audio score:,” “when the poem contacts not // a square of sanity, not one. madness describes / an energetic state.” Moving through all three of her book-titles alone, the notion of illness is a thread that connects the three titles, and the poems of Madness Belongs to the People work to articulate and document. As the back cover offers, this collection “mobilizes the intimate, the historical, the revolutionary, and the mundane to investigate madness as resistance and political strategy,” a curious element for the larger tapestry of the book’s structure. Chan’s poems articulate how mental illness marginalizes and stigmatizes, as well as reduces, erasing the possibility of how anyone gets seen beyond their illness. Instead, Chan offers a way through destigmatizing through democracizing, “for the people,” as it were, seeing how not so far apart we all might be, comparable to other recent titles such as Roxanna Bennett’s We Gladly Feast on Those Who Would Subdue Us (Guelph ON: Gordon Hill Press, 2026) [see my review of such here], Steffi Tad-y’s Notes from the Ward (Gordon Hill Press, 2025) [see my review of such here], AJ Dolman’s Crazy/Mad (Gordon Hill Press, 2024) [see my review of such here] or Concetta Principe’s DISORDER (Gordon Hill Press, 2024) [see my review of such here]. Set itself as an accumulation of fragments, Chan’s title sequence includes: “I want to take care of the parts of myself I can’t change.” Or a bit further, as the poem “MADNESS IS A STRATEGY” includes:

Madness disturbs the book. Anger bubbles the page, blooms a
gathering. A red breach I tend to boil over. The place my
madness knows as home: a low-pressure front, a reservoir of
panic. A muscular humidity, threatening heat. 

 

 

To the state, mass murder is a matter of economy. Years into a
pandemic, masking becomes an uncommon accommodation.
Words interrupt, but they cannot solve. Not anger alone,
translated into bodies in the street. A call-and-response of
strategy and pragmatism is not sufficient. Language cannot
replace movement, only approximate it.