Cut Side Down by Jessi MacEachern

Cut Side Down is a textual collage, or a book feasting on books. The title is a metaphor for the sensuous paper cut received when diving face first into the bookcase, and it means to call up the pleasure and pain of contact with so many literary personalities. The poems are collapsing under the weight of influence and the result is a sumptuous, body-and-mind bending landscape. The book is written in three parts, but those parts refuse to remain discrete. In poems that blur the line behind autobiographical lyric and conceptual experiment, Virginia Woolf, Orlando, and their many husbands and wives attend the experimental salons hosted by Clark Coolidge and Renee Gladman. Lorine Niedecker is in the interactive classroom, scolding Charles Olson. The poet is sometimes perceptible too, as a lost boy in rural Prince Edward Island, as a young woman in Montréal la retentissante, as an inventor of worlds and words. Ultimately, through being immersed in the reading life of the poet and spying through the keyholes of fantasy, Cut Side Down is a false autobiographical engagement with desire and memory.