Tracking the movement between the ‘I’ (‘the slippery pronoun, the ambivalent, glistening, / long sheath of the alphabet flares beyond her reach’) and the ‘she’ is part of what makes the book unnerving the reader is in a disadvantageous position as far as being solidly situated, which is a way to instantiate as felt experience the violence and vicissitudes of Yasmine’s life, as well as the ‘harassment and provocations’ that follow the ‘I’ even into sleep. The sections of the book, fifteen in all, alternate between the first-person and the third, in the latter case manifest in the character of Yasmine, a member of a revolutionary political group – think Weathermen, Baader-Meinhof, Black Panthers. Brand’s book-length sequence has as strong and harrowing a start as any work in recent memory, initiating the reader into a world in which ‘so many dreams of course were full of prisons,’ in which ‘my every waking was incarcerated,’ in which ‘at night, especially at night, it is always at night, / a wall of concrete enclosed me’ That bracketed period misrepresents the book’s overwhelming momentum, as these poems are devoid of end-stops – not merely a matter of punctuation. ![]() Among the most successful and noteworthy examples were Dionne Brand’s Ossuaries and Anne Carson’s Nox, quite different books on the one hand yet on the other with aspects in common. But the yield was no less abundant when it came to the more well-established writers. ![]() As ever, there were a number of new poets worth attending to, and the year was also rich in good work, or even better than that, from writers with a small handful of books to their name.
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