Khashayar Mohammadi, Me, You, Then Snow

 

Close your eyes. Picture your ego and draw.

A blue whale? A deep trail? Roots.

                        Lover’s kiss and mother’s bones
                        Fickle thoughts                        reminiscent
                        Last oyster uncleft 

Close your eyes. Picture my heart and draw.

A cave? Pebble-dashed. Roots. 

Each pebble cast into encircling lakes.
Each ripple unfolds into you. (“Moes’ Skin”)

An Iranian-born writer and translator based in Toronto, Khashayar Mohammadi is the author of the long-awaited full-length poetry debut, Me, You, Then Snow (Guelph ON: Gordon Hill Press, 2021), a book of lyric compassion, epistolary gestures, film references and porn stars, and first-person explorations of memory, dreams, desire and personal histories. “You’re aching,” he writes, as part of the poem-section “Dear Kestrel,” “and while aching / you promise yourself you’ll be beautiful forever [.]” Later on, in the poem “Bergman’s ‘Persona,’” he writes: “to see oneself in the actress / is to make a leap of faith / a cultural martyrdom / of imagery [.]”

Me, You, Then Snow is organized into five sections, the first two of which are constructed as self-contained suites/sequences: “Moes’ Skin,” “Dear Kestrel,” “Salon,” “In Loving Memory of Midnight” and “Homohymns.” I do find it odd any book that doesn’t include a proper acknowledgements, not referencing but for a single publishing credit, especially knowing that the first two sections were originally published as chapbooks: Moe’s Skin (Windsor ON: ZED PRESS, 2018) and Dear Kestrel (Toronto ON: knife│fork│book, 2019) [see my review of such here]. An acknowledgements is, quite literally, about acknowledging those journals and other publications that offered support, and can often provide certain readers a context. The sole reference included is editor and publisher of the second title, Kirby, thanked for the sake of producing Dear Kestrel. A writer, translator and photographer, Mohammadi is the author of three poetry chapbooks, including the more recent Solitude is an Acrobatic Act (above/ground press, 2020), as well as the translator of Saeed Tavanaee Marvi’s chapbook-length THE OCEANDWELLER (above/ground press, 2021), as well as currently working on a full length poetry collaboration with the Toronto poet Terese Mason Pierre.

As part of a 2019 interview on the Invisible Publishing site, Shazia Hafiz Ramji asked Mohammadi about the chapbook Dear Kestrel:

Shazia Hafiz Ramji: How did you arrive at the title of your chapbook, Dear Kestrel?

Khashayar Mohammadi: A few years ago, during a very rough time in my life, I started writing small prose-poems addressed to my dear friend Ke, whom this book is dedicated to. I started every piece with “Dear Kestrel,” and after a while I found this epistolary format both intimate and endearing. I also enjoyed the ambiguity of “kestrel,” the lack of age, gender, etc. allowed each reader to imagine a different person, so I kept writing poems in this format in the years to come, when they weren’t even addressed to Ke herself. None of these poems in this chapbook directly address Ke, it’s just a format that started with her, the primordial Kestrel! 

The difference of Moe’s Skin to “Moes’ Skin” is a curious one, reminiscent of the difference between Leonard Cohen’s fifth studio album, Death of a Ladies’ Man (released November 13, 1977) and his subsequent poetry title, Death of a Lady’s Man (published September 27, 1979). The difference between these is rather clear, from the plural to the singular, but Mohammadi’s shift is less so. What is the difference? And yet, whether writing poems to “Moe,” epistolary poems to “Kestrel” or poems responding to film, the poems in Me, You, Then Snow accumulate into a collection of response poems, placing the narrator in the world in relation to those around them. In poems such as “Canada Day 2019,” “Greg’s goodbye party” and “Pastoral,” Mohammadi centres the narrative “I” in relation to other people and experiences with travel, love, desire and media, all of which reaches out as a way to explore inward. Poems that seek connection, safety and love. The title moves, ripples, outward from “Me” to “You” and then the abstract-beyond, “Then Snow,” all of which seems to sum up perfectly the perspective here, although with a looking outward in part to better comprehend the self, and the narrator’s relationship with any and all else. “I hone my desire to feel more in tune with my past,” he writes, as part of “No pockets ghazal,” “unibrow beauty         hairy arms beauty [.]” Or the poem “Anemone,” that opens: “When I speak of the body, I speak / of its ability / to reconnect and repair [.]” Further on in the same short poem, writing:

The lake is a body without organs.
I am an organ without a body.
My body is a schism between selves.
Each self is a homeland to the body.
So I lay down on the waterfront
to reconnect, extend limbs as an offering
of nautical community housing
and float weightless: an anemone

Shazia Hafiz Ramji, port of being

Heat

Birth from our own skin

Concerns over devaluation

Body that hangs and holds

Mushroom halos of work

Dark faces glow in oil

At the back of the room hands wait

To be held in court

To speak a warm fabric of lips

Gaze that hangs and holds

Scholar alone in the office

Ports open for syntax

Decoys of chat and lovers

Hands that hang and hold

Faces of men and women

In the night of a still life

Circuitry to collect heat

From our whispers

Vancouver poet and editor Shazia Hafiz Ramji’s debut full-length collection, winner of the 2017 Robert Kroetsch Award for Innovative Poetry, is port of being (Picton ON: Invisible Publishing, 2018). Hers is a collection composed as a book of dislocations, implications and accumulations via short lyrics that explore borders, violence and human connection. The poems in port of being are deliberately constructed to keep the reader off-balance, employing sequences of fragments that layer upon layer into something unsettling, writing on violence, distant wars, social media, internet cables, death, borders and the horror at an increasing disregard of facts. port of being writes from the slippages of what was once actual or presumed solid ground, writing from a series of negative and positive shifts, from what hadn’t been acknowledged before, to what never should have occurred. As she writes to open the poem “Heat”: “Birth from our own skin // Concerns over devaluation // Body that hangs and holds [.]” Ramji writes from a dangerous place, one that comes from knowledge and acknowledgment, attempting to articulate how one might navigate in such a landscape, such as this fragment, from the middle of the poem “Secret Playground”:

It doesn’t make sense to ask

if words will ever stop failing me

but I want to ask it. What does it take

for a three-year-old who lived on M&Ms

and barely escaped the Gulf War

to call the first part of her life

“simulacra”?

I didn’t tell you

because I still don’t believe it.

In Toronto, I read a poem

about another part of my life,

one I still find hard to believe

when I’m not with myself.

Ina recent interview posted at Train : a poetry journal, she spoke to the difference between compiling the poems in her chapbook Prosopopoeia (Anstruther Press, 2017) and this debut full-length collection:

Prosopopoeia brought together some poems I'd written over the years. It's not necessarily unified, though themes and connections emerged after seeing the various pieces in conversation with each other. The chapbook clarified my obsessions with surveillance, geography, time, and relations between people and objects, and it began to couple those with more personal experiences of loneliness, addiction, and clinical depression. Recognizing these connections in the chapbook was crucial for the book. When I was writing Port of Being, I constantly jostled with the weight of these personal experiences and a sense of responsibility to facts, history, and the experiences of other people. This struggle was intensified when, a few years ago, a thief who stole my laptop followed me and had knowledge of my whereabouts. It was a traumatizing experience that made the more removed preoccupations with surveillance and space far more personal and immediate. The book has a clear arc (at least to me) that moves into the lyrical. I should clarify that the book isn't about me being stalked, though. I've preferred to tell it slant (thanks to Emily Dickinson for the wise words!). It began with research, which led me to undertake a kind of surveillance (after Vito Acconci's Following Piece) in return, and this gave rise to the first part of the book. The process of putting together the book was like following a trail of myself in the world and mapping it all together. I learned so much about the world (for lack of a better word) when writing this book and that makes me feel okay.

One might think she writes for the same reason as Dany Laferrière’s narrator, “Dany,” in the novel Why Must a Black Writer Write About Sex? (Toronto ON: Coach House Books, 1994), offered for writing his own first novel: I wrote this book to save my life. Shazia Hafiz Ramji’s poems, while betraying the occasional exhaustion, exasperation and frustration, don’t fall entirely into hopelessness, providing a glimmer of something beyond mere survival. “In the morning we consider ghosts.” she writes, to end the poem “Nearness”: “I feel the sun settle on my ear.”

Spotlight series #22: Shazia Hafiz Ramji

The twenty-second in my monthly "spotlight" series, each featuring a different poet with a short statement and a new poem or two, is now online, featuring Vancouver poet and editor Shazia Hafiz Ramji.

The first eleven in the series were attached to the Drunken Boat blog, and the series has so far featured poets including Seattle, Washington poet Sarah Mangold, Colborne, Ontario poet Gil McElroy, Vancouver poet Renée Sarojini Saklikar, Ottawa poet Jason Christie, Montreal poet and performer Kaie Kellough, Ottawa poet Amanda Earl, American poet Elizabeth Robinson, American poet Jennifer Kronovet, Ottawa poet Michael Dennis, Vancouver poet Sonnet L’Abbé, Montreal writer Sarah Burgoyne, Fredericton poet Joe Blades, American poet Genève Chao, Northampton MA poet Brittany Billmeyer-Finn, Oji-Cree, Two-Spirit/Indigiqueer from Peguis First Nation (Treaty 1 territory) poet, critic and editor Joshua Whitehead, American expat/Barcelona poet, editor and publisher Edward Smallfield, Kentucky poet Amelia Martens, Ottawa poet Pearl Pirie, Burlington, Ontario poet Sacha Archer, Washington DC poet Buck Downs and Toronto poet Shannon Bramer.

The whole series can be found online here.

Three recent chapbooks: Shazia Hafiz Ramji, Chuqiao Yang + Lindsay Cahill

[this review originally appeared in #68, the "small press" special issue, of filling Station]

Shazia Hafiz Ramji PROSOPOPOEIA 
Anstruther Press, 2017

Chuqiao Yang REUNIONS IN THE YEAR OF THE SHEEP 
BaselinePress, 2017

Lindsay Cahill BORG EMOJI: robot sleep studies 
words(on)pages, 2017 

I’d been hearing about the work of Vancouver poet and editor Shazia Hafiz Ramji for some time [see my recent interview with her here], finally able to get a copy of her first chapbook, PROSOPOPOEIA, a collection of fourteen short, dense lyrics [and: in mid-stream while composing this review, she won the Robert Kroetsch Award for Poetry, which means her first full-length trade collection will appear next year through Insomniac Press]. Moving easily between styles, Ramji’s lyric engages the precision of the line break against the flow of the prose poem. “We were warm in the summer grass,” she writes, to open the poem “Change of Scene”; “fireworks on mute. One of us / arrowed out towards the question of our death. // Their faces were brick facades organizing under the sunbulb. // A thin voice of silver chalk spoke and changed the scene.”

According to Wikipedia, “prosopopoeia” is “a rhetorical device in which a speaker or writer communicates to the audience by speaking as another person or object. The term literally derives from the Greek roots prósopon ‘face, person’, and poiéin ‘to make, to do’.” In this way, Ramji’s fourteen poems are reminiscent of Ottawa poet Stephen Brockwell’s explorations on voice throughout his own small handful of poetry titles; both poets speaking, if not precisely for, but through. In the space of such a short collection, the poems themselves accumulate into a kind of collage, and make me curious to see what she can accomplish with her larger structure. I am very much looking forward to her first collection.

Toronto poet (by way of Windsor, Toronto, Saskatoon, and, originally, Beijing) Chuqiao Yang’s [see my recent profile on her here] long-awaited first chapbook is REUNIONS IN THE YEAR OF THE SHEEP, a collection of precise and arresting lyrics, composed as meditations on travel, relationships and family. A curious blending of dreamy stream-of-consciousness and precise narrative description, Yang’s poems float across the lyric as a sequence of short studies, exploring the ways in which interacting with travel, home, family and others can’t help but alter us; her poems predominantly focus on those positive changes, both enriching and even grounding.

Her travel poems are intriguing, constructed less in a matter of going away than specifically returning home to a foreign soil and grounding herself in family and half-familiar settings. I’m also fascinated by the lyric rush of her prose poems, such as the four-paragraph “PYGMALION THE COLONIST,” that begins:

he spoke to her in riddles and departed to China, determined to open an ancient world and save it from plunder. they sat at a bar as he tipped the waitress, who was all eyeballs and gunnel legs, leaving him a number and a glance as he said, kid, adios, I bid you farewell, stood then left, headed east to her old country where he sent weekend Skype updates: Asia is really messed up, I need to help these people, your country is a tyrant among kings, I am an expert on Asian women. meanwhile his angry ex-wife sent him Sufi love poems and threats of violence as he paraded himself like a pageant queen through a country filled with ghosts.

Toronto poet Lindsay Cahill’s second chapbook is BORG EMOJI: robot sleep studies (a third, The Movement of the Triangle, also appears this year, from Kalmalka Press) is an intriguing and playful collection of very short pieces composed as both visual and soundscape, including pieces composed of five couplets of “o m g / z z z,” and quick phrases such as “nephology = the study of clouds” and “the ponderous rhythms of a mechanical monster [.]” Cahill writes out robot/machine poetry as something short, incredibly precise and even a bit temporal, existing quickly and then not at all. There really is something impermanent in the way her robot/narrator/voice attempts to speak, articulating a kind of semi-coherent and almost desperate jumble, before finally collapsing. Does her robot in fact fall into sleep, or is sleep the state in which she, poet, becomes machine? She writes, in the poem “ECOLOGY WITHOUT NATURE: 000”:

white point DEAD ZONE

a pulled apart rainbow

#000000

#000000

#000000

three bananas: jackpot :’)