That Was Me Haunting Me: A Review of Margo LaPierre’s Ajar: Poems by Tea Gerbeza

Margo LaPierre’s Ajar is a poignant collection on LaPierre’s experience with bipolar disorder 1 with psychotic features. This collection is not one that shies away from harsh realities of Madness; instead LaPierre reclaims and makes real the Mad self with tender honesty. Ajar is an account of “what it is to have [LaPierre’s] body” and how the ill self cannot be separate from the “well” self.

 LaPierre makes terrific use of form to communicate the various ways in which the body becomes a palimpsest of experience and knowledge. For instance, there are several Centos (a poetic form that relies on multiple poets’ lines to form one coherent voice) in the book. Through this engagement with other poets, the act of constructing a Cento becomes a metaphor for assembling disparate selves. 

A major repetition throughout the book is that the self is haunting themselves: “I mistook real for unreal and I haunted me.” “I haunted me” is a repeated phrase that traces the book and takes on more meaning as we encounter more of LaPierre’s experiences. This deliberate self haunting is itself a palimpsest of timelines existing at once, past-present-future converging as it often does for the speaker’s Mad self. In fact, the speaker acknowledges that their experience of bipolar disorder 1 with psychotic features is one that blurs and blends time. This blending of timelines suggests that a body does not separate its memories like the mind does. Instead, a body remembers with no linearity, and all bodily experiences exist at once. Therefore, there cannot be a separation between the Mad self and the “well” self. They will always exist together. 

LaPierre’s speaker asks, “if we are echo only, what sonic boom will shock the gloom right out of this place?” There is a sense of loss here because if the speaker is merely an echo, how will they tell what needs to be told? LaPierre answers this question by enacting a body-telling through ghosts, selves haunting selves, palimpsests, centos. She shows how a self disassociated eventually comes back and makes space for past selves. 

In the poem “Characteristics of Nonlinear Systems,” the past is the body and what happens to her—a flu, a “mysterious cold spot,” and how the past ripples throughout the body again and again. This cyclical ripple can oftentimes be confusing, but it also becomes a natural rhythm for the Mad self. The speaker also recognizes that their body experiences “hysteresis”: “the name / for stress in an organism / or object when effects / of the stressor lag.” This definition is an important one when addressing the catastrophic effects of gendered physical violence and how the body remembers those events. These effects lag, sometimes take years to show up in the bodymind. In the subsequent poem, “Brute,” LaPierre writes, “Hysteresis is the past / gripping the body.” The offset “g” in the poem makes the line read two ways: the past is ripping the body and the past is gripping the body. This dual meaning points to how trauma nestles in a body, how it lives within the mundane. Mundanity becomes an integral aspect of Ajar in discussing how bipolar disorder 1 affects daily life. There is a kitchen that leads to a patio and a “slanted rooftop perfect for writing”, and yet among these positive mundanities, LaPierre slips in how she tried to die by suicide. Ajar does not romanticize suicide or villainize it; instead, suicidality is shown to be a symptom of bipolar disorder 1 with psychotic features that the speaker copes with, something that comes with living “in this body.” There are moments of desire to die, but also moments with a desire to live. There is no cure for bipolar disorder 1, but LaPierre makes it clear that there are ways to understand, to have tools to survive. With other symptoms like delusions and the perception of time being permanently altered, Ajar asks how do we put words to such things? How do we parse the real from the unreal? 

I don’t think Ajar wants its reader to be able to parse the real from the unreal because it becomes clear that regardless of what is “unreal,” the experience the speaker has is real to her body and self in that moment. In “Chatoyant,” we are told, “It’s delusion only because I lift myself from our mutual system of reality. My mind sees what now means. I contain my past, present, future self, existing simultaneously. I’m complete. I have access to all my timeline.” This access the speaker mentions is a wisdom of the Mad self. A realization that frees the Mad self from a system that doesn’t cohere with LaPierre’s experiential knowledge, a knowledge that is incredibly important in healing and reclaiming the self. While LaPierre’s poems spend ample time focusing on remembrances all the selves in the book have, there is a significant shift in “On Friendship” where the mind doesn’t remember, but the body does. LaPierre writes, “I don’t remember this” when her friends tell her that she insisted on wearing heels to the hospital. Memory here is fraught, only given through other people. The self, then, only exists in what the body knows, in an unknowable language one needs to work to understand. Ajar’s self does this work.

Later in the collection, the speaker states, “As I write this poem, I revisit me.” This change in pattern from a self haunting a self to one revisiting signals an important shift to how the Mad self is perceived. To visit is an act of connection, which leads us to LaPierre’s affirmation and reclamation of the Mad self. LaPierre writes, “I am old and aimless as the sun, and just as radiant.” Describing the self as “radiant” is indicative of a small act of reclamation. Then, in “Regeneration,” LaPierre makes an even more powerful statement: “I am cell renewal, membranes kissing / within my body project: / tongue and speech turn / silence inside out—look, grace.” Here, the self finally sees themselves as grace. The self reclaims the Mad self and embraces them. 

Margo LaPierre’s Ajar reminds us that there is power in connecting to the selves we are taught to separate from. She reminds us that we are recurring like the sun in the sky. Ajar is an exquisite book, one that I will turn to again and again in the years to come.

—by Tea Gerbeza

About Ajar:

The poems in Ajar navigate the physical and psychological dangers of womanhood through the flattening lens of mood disorder. Psychosis isn’t the opposite of reality—it’s another perceptual system. If neurotypical thought measures the world in centimetres, this collection measures it in inches, gallons, amperes. Ajar celebrates radical recovery from gendered violence and psychotic paradigm shifts, approaching madness through prismatic inquiry. As time converges within us, we find new ways to heal and grow. From the emergency room to the pharmacy to the fertility clinic to the dis/comfort of home and memory, this collection humanizes bipolar psychosis.

Margo LaPierre is a writer and freelance literary editor. With multi-genre work published in The Ex-Puritan, CV2, Room, PRISM, and Arc, among others, she has won national awards for her poetry, fiction, and editing. She holds an MFA in Creative Writing from UBC. Ajar is her second poetry collection.

Tea Gerbeza (she/her) is the author of How I Bend Into More (Palimpsest Press, 2025). She is a neuroqueer, disabled poet, writer, editor, and multimedia artist.

Luca de la Lune Reviews Your Devotee in Rags, a sonic poetry collaboration by Anne Waldman and Andrew Whiteman

Review: Your Devotee in Rags, a sonic poetry collaboration by Anne Waldman and Andrew Whiteman

Review by Luca de la Lune

Your Devotee in Rags truly is a voracious visage of passionate construction. Exotic soundstages tumble unfettered around thunderous drum breaks and wholly convincing vocal performances. The narrative is female - is woman. Churning laments championed by steaming percussion drive us through moments, memories, patriarchy. The narrator is hungry. The voice is visceral, snarling.

Your Devotee in Rags takes place in a brutalist landscape, bloody and hard-fought—yet through the eyes of our narrator, there is hope and a cathartic solace. My favourite track on the record occurs halfway through: 'to never have enough, be enough, get enough' rolls repeatedly from a cursive maw, comforting you in how casually it makes you feel seen. Hypnotically coherent it lands a dagger and twists it with persistence. As an album it is symbiotic. The sawtooth synthesizers bite in tandem with our protagonists chomping barbs. A familiar, telephone-like distortion frequently warms vocals and instruments alike. Drones and Sirens haunt from both ends of the frequency spectrum. It is a complete experience. A mature sense of structure skillfully coddles the raw chaos. I predict the journey it takes each listener on would be totally unique. immeasurably useful and changing; thus, I would recommend this album to anyone.

Your Devotee in Rags from Sonic Recordings, 2024.

Learn more about Luca de la Lune:

IMDB: https://www.imdb.com/name/nm15139363/ 

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/itsautumnbb/ 

Website: https://lucadelalune.wixsite.com/

More about Your Devotee in Rags:

Your Devotee in Rags is a sonic poetry collaboration between Anne Waldman and Andrew Whiteman; an act of desire and metamorphosis expanding the performative vision of being at the horizon of new experience, stripped down, exploring the turf, through poetry and spiritual yearning.  

More about Anne Waldman:

Anne Waldman is a living legend. Poet, performer, professor, editor, cultural activist, grandmother, and co-founder with Allen Ginsberg of the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics. Former director of the Poetry Project. Tireless author of over 40 books, her trademark energy coils ever outward, always seeking to reveal the four-fold vision that we have largely lost.

More about Andrew Whiteman:

Andrew Whiteman is a musician and mythopoetics scholar from Montreal, Canada. He writes and performs in Broken Social Scene, Apostle of Hustle, AroarA, and Poets’ Workout Sound System. He is a co-founder of Siren Recordings. 

Siren Recordings is a digital, multimodal platform that operates as boutique, studio, and archive. We seek to connect scholars, artists, and lovers of sonic poetry in an online community. Following Ed Sanders, we believe that perfection comes in the poetic triad: “the spoken text/the text as beauteously presented on the page/the text as performed.” We incorporate elements of sound and music into recordings of poetry performances to emphasize the affective, social experience of poetic work.  

We value experimentation in form, both contemporary and modern. We renew older poetic works by treating the archive as a participant in the work we are making; archival play ensures that our releases blend contemporary technology with influential poetry. These values seek to serve one, ultimate goal: to contribute to the siren call that warns of the diminishing time we spend in the archaic situation of gathering to hear someone speak.

Power Q & A with Andrew Whiteman

Close your eyes and open your ears, friends, ‘cause cultural icons, Anne Waldman (The Iovis Trilogy: Colors in the Mechanism of Concealment) and Andrew Whiteman (Broken Social Scene) have collaborated to create Your Devotee in Rags—a metamorphic sonic poetry LP being released with Siren Recordings.

Your Devotee in Rags is a missive to this age of patriarchal power, its songs and poems are designed to specifically confront that power and hold it to account. Taking such activist inspiration from musicians like Lido Pimienta and Tanya Tagaaq, musically Your Devotee in Rags blends acoustic and electronic genres, waltzes, laments, and Pauls Boutique-era Beastie Boys mash-ups all with the intent of creating a new artistic headspace: sonic poetry. The cultural direction is forward, the earbuds open up the stereo field, listening to Your Devotee in Rags is, in a word, empowering. 

We are excited to have Andrew join us today to talk to us about poetry as resistance. Welcome, Andrew!

Q: How is the performance of poetry an act of resistance, and what kind of resistance can listeners of Your Devotee in Rags expect to experience?

A: In the global west, the reading of poetry is already culturally resistant: its values are contrary to those promulgated by the culture-at-large. It seeks sustained and total attention, it slows the world around you down to a movement of breath, it rejects merely instrumental language and instead offers soul-making as the ‘pay-off’. Poetry doesn’t explain, it makes; but what it makes isn’t valued by society. To decide to spend one’s time here is to resist everything else the culture throws at you. Anne Waldman’s long career of poetry and performance teaches us that the human body is an integral part of this pact. The sounding of poetry keeps us grounded to the physical dimensions of our psychic being, even as it splits off like a kite into the blue or a truffle pig snout to the dirt. Isn’t that an antidote to virtuality, as it is now envisioned? Sonic Poetry treats the earbuds as the entry point for an experience of physicalized thought—in this case, Anne’s Your Devotee in Rags. Here, Waldman launches mind form after mind form at the patriarchy’s cynicism and embedded cruelty, buoyed and urged onward by an acoustic/electric collage by turns terrifying and tender. Like life.

Andrew Whiteman

More about Your Devotee in Rags:

Your Devotee in Rags is a sonic poetry collaboration between Anne Waldman and Andrew Whiteman; an act of desire and metamorphosis expanding the performative vision of being at the horizon of new experience, stripped down, exploring the turf, through poetry and spiritual yearning.  

Anne says: “Wizard Hal Willner would be proud of us companions in the vibrational matrix.  Comrades in a studio of subtle suspense, and where were we headed? A magnificent voyage! Tender, rugged, true. I met Andrew Whiteman, genius player, composer, scholar, in one of Hal’s unpredictable alchemical laboratories. We instantly bonded as mavens of poetry and its attendant orality, dedicated to the passion of epic life that is the source of this album, the 1000 plus pages of the feminist canto: Iovis Trilogy: Colors in the Mechanism of Concealment; passages plucked to be re-imagined in ambient explosive word-sound. On the Yantzse, in a strip club, a maelstrom of memory honoring  precursor male poets, dressed in the rags of Celtic hags, so much more as mendicant, witty siren, compassionate lover, exploding empires of patriarchy and war. A kind of mythic hospitality.” 

Andrew says: “It was filmmaker Ron Mann and producer Hal Wilner who showed me the way. Hal was my guiding presence—whip smart, funny, gentle, empathic. This album is dedicated to him.” 

More about Anne Waldman:

Anne Waldman is a living legend. Poet, performer, professor, editor, cultural activist, grandmother, and co-founder with Allen Ginsberg of the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics. Former director of the Poetry Project. Tireless author of over 40 books, her trademark energy coils ever outward, always seeking to reveal the four-fold vision that we have largely lost.

More about Andrew Whiteman:

Andrew Whiteman is a musician and mythopoetics scholar from Montreal, Canada. He writes and performs in Broken Social Scene, Apostle of Hustle, AroarA, and Poets’ Workout Sound System. He is a co-founder of Siren Recordings. 

Siren Recordings is a digital, multimodal platform that operates as boutique, studio, and archive. We seek to connect scholars, artists, and lovers of sonic poetry in an online community. Following Ed Sanders, we believe that perfection comes in the poetic triad: “the spoken text/the text as beauteously presented on the page/the text as performed.” We incorporate elements of sound and music into recordings of poetry performances to emphasize the affective, social experience of poetic work.  

We value experimentation in form, both contemporary and modern. We renew older poetic works by treating the archive as a participant in the work we are making; archival play ensures that our releases blend contemporary technology with influential poetry. These values seek to serve one, ultimate goal: to contribute to the siren call that warns of the diminishing time we spend in the archaic situation of gathering to hear someone speak.

Media inquiry about Your Devotee in Rags? Drop us a line!