Jessi MacEachern
Biography
Jessi MacEachern (she/her) lives in Tiohtià:ke/Montréal, where she teaches English literature at Concordia University and Dawson College. MacEachern has a PhD in English Studies from the Université de Montréal and her writing on the contemporary feminist poetics of Lisa Robertson, Erín Moure, and Rachel Zolf has been published in Canadian Literature, Studies in Canadian Literature/Études en littérature Canadienne and CanLit Across Media. MacEachern recently released three chapbooks: You Do Not Like Animal Sounds (Ghost City Press), Ravishing the Sex into the Hold (Model Press), and Television Poems (above/ground press). Her debut poetry collection A Number of Stunning Attacks was released with Invisible Publishing in 2021.
Poetics Statement
“A Number of Stunning Attacks is a serial poem about gender and dream. The book is divided into six parts, such that each long poem arrives as a surreal fragment of intimate exchange. The reader is invited into this open text (to borrow a description from Lyn Hejinian) in order to illuminate their own domestic, violent, and/or erotic histories. In these poems, intimacy is staged as a risky encounter. The reader by entering the page takes part in that risk.
The excess of white space on the page, within with language is disoriented and disorienting, emphasizes the breaking of the lyric subject. Of course, this breaking — and re-making — has been an ongoing process in Canadian and global poetics since or before the tradition of high modernist objectivity. With attention to the materiality of language itself, my poetry is always teetering between silence and excess, personal vulnerability and radical citationality (by which I allude to the feminist citational practice of Sara Ahmed).
I write a haptic poetry in which the touch of other writing is continually felt, such that the encounter with my book is also an encounter with the books I have been reading. As a poetics of response, this method itself responds to a long tradition of poets on poets in poetry and prose. Both influence and experience erupt in the book in direct and indirect ways, so that the touching exchange is sometimes felt to be a little less than real. In this way, I follow the direction of Emily Dickinson: “Tell all the truth but tell it slant.”
Ultimately, this is a poetry of beauty, glamour, and dream that embraces its subjects through an experimental hold combining language, theory, and desire. After their encounter with the page, the reader is brought to an elsewhere, somewhere new, to which all language-making aspires.
”
Sample of Poet's Work
Excerpt from “A Number of Stunning Attacks”
A woman in acts of sex
failed attempt to squeeze the world out
to have a human body. she visits her father
---
Alcoholism is charming in suburbs where everyone has enough
money to keep. off-balance
When the doorbell rings. A woman does not answer
unless for fresh-cut diamonds or hay bales
---
This need to be two in sunlight mourning greater intimacy
a stranger flushed by her surprise becomes small and able
As two she straightens the mouth’s curve
---
A wheel is a skittish hand separate bodies
catapult into children’s open mouths
A woman with laugh lines
fat thumb
lifts
unlatches skin
torso in stunning cascade
Puckering waterfall
pubis thighs knee-folds
underneath
She is there
and gone
---
It is not important
the fundamental attitude of
All women
---
As two she moves in a distorted way
a woman loved by a man
Unmoored and generous with
her insides
Shared disaster throws light
on humanity’s soft body
---
Separate bodies return to losing
the unknown
if the heart
resides above
Its chamber the doll-like sweetheart will return
to life three times
if she is a crude lover
red and so vulnerable she is
a perfect container of incised skin
A larynx stands up in the body
hear the luscious echo
---
“There have been such a number of stunning attacks.”
You were moved to say: