Buy this book! It isn’t perfection but it has so much to offer, good poems, great poems, brilliant vocabulary (not every writer can say what they want to say, this one can), and new ways of expressing simple experiences. It will roil you and comfort you, distract you, inform you and entertain you. You’ll be in exceptional company with an author who leads you down a path in the forest no one else has any knowledge of.
There are three sections in the book, the first and third sections are both called Pain Log. The middle section, Ship‘s Log, is a weird sci-fi dream. It probably doesn’t fit into this book but is no less interesting for that.
Still, it is in the Pain Log sections that one bumps into some spectacular poems.
Here’s a brief excerpt from The Small Animal.
“In the moment before morning
and pain I forget my body
is an engine and lie
waiting for an external
force to drive me up and into the day’s
ache. There’s usually enough
volts in the pins
and needles in my hands to take
a small animal down
but on a bad day I can’t power
my own eyelids open.”
I will also say that what is there of the writer’s soul in this book goes only so far. In some ways, its surface is too accomplished, too glib, not sufficiently confessional in the realm of pain. It sometimes feels bloodless.
The book’s title, Allodynia, a word which means, quoting from the OED, “pain resulting from a stimulus that does not normally cause pain,” neatly expresses an overarching feeling the book delivers. Regrettable though because the title may well put people off. They shouldn’t be. This is a compelling book and it gives a hint that there are great things to come from Nisa Malli.
Nisa Malli is a writer and a researcher, born in Winnipeg and currently living in Toronto. She holds a BFA in Creative Writing from the University of Victoria and has completed residencies at the Banff Centre and Artscape Gibraltar Point. Her first chapbook, Remitting (Baseline Press), won the bpNichol Prize and her work has been nominated for a Rhysling Award and the Best of the Net Anthology.
- Publisher : Anstruther Books (April 15 2022)
- Language : English
- Paperback : 80 pages
- ISBN-10 : 1990293069
- ISBN-13 : 978-1990293061
Sharp food for thought from Simon Constam. Subscribe to his Daily Ferocity by email at simon.constam@gmail.com or go to @DailyFerocity on Instagram. All original aphorisms.
- Simon Constamhttps://miramichireader.ca/author/simon-constam/
- Simon Constamhttps://miramichireader.ca/author/simon-constam/
- Simon Constamhttps://miramichireader.ca/author/simon-constam/
