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.

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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.

Heart Close to Bone: Steven Mayoff reviews Widow Fantasies by Hollay Ghadery

Memoirist and poet, Hollay Ghadery has described her first book of fiction, Widow Fantasies (Gordon Hill Press, 2024) as “the result of my struggling to make sense of my fantasising about planning my husband’s funeral.” Not that she wants him dead, but rather because of her need for a more equitable partnership in her marriage, such are the circuitous paths of the psyche. 

Widow Fantasies is a unique collection of micro-fictions where Ghadery condenses her narratives into semi-oblique snapshots. I say “semi-oblique” because as a reader I often felt I was wandering one of those circuitous paths of the psyche and found it necessary to retrace my steps with a second reading of some stories to get a clearer picture of what was going on. 

This is not meant as criticism. Rather the opposite, as I found Ghadery’s angular approach to story telling refreshing in how it kept me on my toes and demanded my full attention.

By my count, there are 33 stories covering about 90 pages. Ghadery manages to weave commonplace themes of aging, friendship, fidelity, parenthood, identity, sexuality and mortality by shining a light on the murkier corners of human experience and exploring the extraordinary in the mundane. These stories tend to lean into the dictum that it is only through the particular that we can discover what is universal. What’s especially impressive in stories as compressed as these is their complexity, which is achieved in part through the visceral nature of Ghadery’s descriptive language. A good example is the opening paragraph of Caviar, where a woman discovers her husband pleasuring himself in the shower. 

“If I swallow hard, the synthetic punch of his body wash is still in the back of my throat. My skin still puckers into gooseflesh. The heat of the shower is behind the closed door, but I can feel how it ribboned out to meet me.”

When we discover that they have been trying to conceive and are going the expensive IVF route, the sense of betrayal becomes palpable in this following section.

“The wet smacking sound of his hand pumping against himself.

A sickening slosh in my stomach. We had salmon for dinner because he read somewhere that it was good for my ovaries. 

His furrowed brown and slick fish-lipped focus in the shower: I didn’t have to see his face to picture it. My legs spread wide in stirrups, body bare under thin blue gown and the heavy demand for more of me: more tests, more transparency. My eggs growing gills and the small store of dark mouths I have left inside me.”

Widow Fantasies by Hollay Ghadery.

In Top Dog/Underdog two couples are in a van, returning home from a skiing holiday together. Marin is driving while her partner, Katie, is in the van’s middle row getting drunk on a wine cooler. In the front passenger seat is Amir, who is helping Marin navigate. In the van’s back row is Amir’s partner Dinah who sits with the sleeping pup Cyrus. Not much happens in this story, but when we find out that Dinah is a recovering alcoholic and that it was Marin and Katie who admitted her to the hospital with alcohol poisoning and that in the early stages of their courtship Amir stayed with her in the hospital, the bond between the four takes on a subtle poignancy beneath their post-holiday weariness. 

We also discover that if not for Amir, Dinah’s son Isaac would have been taken away from her. The heart emojis that Amir and Dinah text each other only remind Dinah that being in recovery has taken its toll on her relationship with Amir. 

“Love is need, and now that she’s sober, she doesn’t need him as much.” 

The realization that love can become collateral damage in sobriety’s one-day-at-a-time seems to echo an earlier memory of Cyrus the pup killing a chipmunk during the holiday and laying the carcass at the skiers’ feet “like a waiter offering up a bottle of wine for a guest’s inspection.” This anecdote connects to the story’s ending when Dinah scratches under the dog’s chin and finds dried blood flaked onto her hand (presumably the chipmunk’s). 

Such a stark open ending embodies the allure and the challenge of these stories. Their matter-of-fact style leaves enough space for mystery, allowing room for readers to crawl inside them, as uncomfortable as that is at times. 

Anyone who has read Ghadery’s earlier books, the memoir Fuse (Guernica Editions’ Miroland Imprint, 2021) and the poetry collection Rebellion Box (Radiant Press, 2023), knows that beneath her sleeve, she wears her heart close to the bone. These lean and hungry tales in Widow Fantasies are further proof of a talent to keep our eyes on. 

Author of Widow Fantasies, Hollay Ghadery.

More about Hollay Ghadery:

Hollay Ghadery is an Iranian-Canadian author living on Anishinaabe land in Ontario. Fuse, her memoir of mixed-race identity and mental health (Guernica Editions, 2021) won a Canadian Bookclub Award. Her poetry collection, Rebellion Box (Radiant Press), was released in 2023 and her short fiction collection, Widow Fantasies (Gordon Hill), is forthcoming in fall 2024. She is the Poet Laureate of Scugog Township. www.hollayghadery.com

Reviewer Steven Mayoff.

About Steven Mayoff:

Steven Mayoff (he/him) was born and raised in Montreal. His fiction and poetry have appeared in literary journals across Canada, the U.S. and abroad. He is the author of the story collection Fatted Calf Blues, winner of the 2010 PEI Book Award for Fiction; the novel Our Lady of Steerage; and two books of poetry Leonard’s Flat and Swinging Between Water and Stone. His acclaimed novel, The Island Gospel According to Samson Grief, was released by Radiant Press in 2023. Steven lives in Foxley River, PEI.

Review of Voice: Adam Pottle on Writing with Deafness

Voice, by Adam Pottle

University of Regina Press, 2019

ISBN: 9780889775930

$18.95, 162 pages

Reviewed by Marion Agnew.

The first time I heard the term “voice” in relation to a book was in high school. The definition remained fuzzy, far harder to pinpoint than theme, setting, point of view, and characterization. A writer’s voice seemed somehow part of her style, but I didn’t really know what that meant, either.

Mostly, an author’s voice seemed extremely important: Voice helps distinguish one writer’s work from another and makes a writer unique. 

Okay. But what is it?

I got a better sense from trying creative writing myself. Early, I’d try to “sound like” other writers on purpose, partly for fun and partly to try on identities. (Hemingway, anyone?) I paid attention when other people lauded a writer’s “unique voice” (like Barbara Kingsolver or Miriam Toews). I developed opinions: I enjoy a voice that serves a work’s characters, instead of spotlighting the writer herself.

When Voice: Adam Pottle On Writing with Deafness came along. I knew I had to read it.

Voice is available from University of Regina Press.

 And wow, this book. It combines creative nonfiction, memoir, and sage writing advice. Searingly honest, it’s full of rage and beauty and a palpable, energetic love of the written word. It’s transparent and full of longing to be “heard.” It commands and rewards a reader’s reflection.

 Adam Pottle began losing his hearing in childhood and wore hearing aids relatively young. In Voice, he describes how those facts have affected, and continue to affect, his relationship to language and writing. Of course, it’s impossible to completely separate language from other elements of his life—his love of hockey and music, his ambivalence toward others in the Deaf and hard-of-hearing community whose experiences are different from his, and his family relationships.

He describes his path to learning language and developing his voice—both literal and literary, his speaking voice and his voice in writing.

Like a hearing person, he grew up speaking English. Learning ASL at an older age meant he’d always be somewhat “outside” the Deaf Culture’s core of fluent, native ASL speakers. But like a Deaf person, he found (and continues to find) the hearing world too impatient and thoughtless to adjust to his communication needs. Even institutions that “mean well” are reluctant to provide accommodations unless constantly reminded and pressured to do so.

He writes, of his work with a speech therapist in grade five,

“I didn’t want to speak like him. I wanted a dynamic voice, my own voice, a voice that could barrel through the air and make any room I spoke in seem like an arena, a voice that pinged people on the ear and forced them to listen, a voice that could thwack people’s funny bones and crack their hearts in two, a voice like Rodney Dangerfield’s or Marie Fredriksson’s or Krusty the Clown’s.”

In the second part of the book, he addresses writing and writers directly, considering topics such as stereotypes, ideas, text, and observation. He points out that the hearing world has an uneasy relationship with silence, but that silence can be a very effective storytelling tool. He describes the Store of Stereotypes, where many writers “shop” for typical characters, and he enumerates his strategies to avoid those stereotypes while he wrote a novella about the Holocaust.

His descriptions of how he uses language encapsulate how carefully he has reflected on language itself. Because he experiences English through captioning and through senses other than hearing, his relationship with English is “uneasy,” similar to those for whom English is a second language.

I write according to how words feel rather than how they sound. Words are tactile. I feel like I can hold them in my hands and throw them at people; I feel like I might scratch myself on their edges; they roll around in my mouth like barbed marbles. I shove and bend and crank words to form images and rhythms that I hope snag the reader’s attention.

He is certainly successful: This book captures and holds a reader’s attention.

 In recent years, the term “voice” has also developed a broader meaning: in an #ownvoices book, a person writes about an experience they’ve personally lived through. Because Voice shares Pottle’s unique relationship to language and the hearing world, it’s is a valuable contribution to this definition of “voice” as well. It demonstrates the ongoing, grinding issues around accessibility, and the hoops through which people have to leap, again and again, to access a world that’s readily available to hearing people.

 Writers should read Voice for its thorough contemplation of and love for language. Non-writers will find interest in its generous open window into Pottle’s life.

 And anyone organizing an event, especially as the pandemic recedes and in-person gatherings become more possible, should add “all forms of accessibility” as a value to incorporate into their event from the earliest planning stages. Books like Voice show us what we’re missing out on.

Marion Agnew studied American Sign Language for several years. Her essay collection, Reverberations: A Daughter’s Meditations on Alzheimer’s, came out in 2019. For more about her, see www.marionagnew.ca.