Jessi MacEachern

M-S
 

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:

 

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