Unfuckable Lardass: Poems, Catriona Strang
Talonbooks, 2022
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Composing the collection out of six extended sequence-sections—“Unfuckable Lardass,” “By Patient Accumulation Also,” “This Rabble World,” “Lake Lac,” “Fuck Variations” and “Coda: TGFI”—she writes a lyric that engages both language writing and the slant, offering a form of lyric through slip and ease, allowing for a mutability that language isn’t always able to achieve, or achieve so well. Even light, one might say, can be affected if the gravity is enough, and her gravity is fierce: writing against the reduction of gender to mere subject, but as a conversation that includes agency, capacity and self-determination, as well as a feeling of exhaustion that such has to be continually reiterated, as the opening of the sequence/section “Lake Lac” offers:
I lack the
capacity adequately to theorize the extent
of my own
lackings. We may lack. I might be a
lackey. Consider the
ways in which we currently
lack. I lament my
lackings, they drive me to tears,
but I try not to
swim in Lake Lac. Sometimes I
admit my lacks
with alacrity. On good days, I can
manage my
lackings. There’s acrimony in my lacks.
Lack we may.
There is such music to her cadence, and she writes a lyric of rebellion, resistance and response. “picking myself apart,” she offers, as part of the second sequence-section, “rapts all part’s lift / and flicks curious reflection; / let’s slough off all / peaks, my peaks / give flex to too many / scurrilous scrapings / to reach this / sure reef’s shore [.]” Referencing George Bowering, Ted Byrne and Fred Wah (with the unspoken echoes that suggest threads of early Sharon Thesen, Lisa Robertson and multiple others), Strang composes a lyric deeply influenced by a west coast poetics that runs through a Kootenay School of Writing chaser back to a TISH language bounce and parry down the page via a collision of sound and meaning. “I might / comfort history / a con // diction of / living,” she writes, in part twenty (“from GB”) of the opening sequence, “you then bring // or brink the / unblinking story stood / up, borrowed // as heroic fire night / hawks failed to / fill, night // fall holding.” The opening sequence, at twenty-nine sections, appears to structurally harken back to a variety of west coast works, from Fred Wah’s ongoing “Music at the Heart of Thinking,” to George Bowering’s “Blondes on Bikes.” The poems within Unfuckable Lardass work through lists and lyrics, prose poems, billboards, sketches and mantras, offering section-sequences as accumulation along a loose thread, writing through and around outdated gendered expectations and the inevitable response. She writes of the patriarchy, and of (in the opening poem/section) “Niceness vs. the performance of niceness: stop / and observe the ceaseless intersections of shifting / social clusters. How is this possible?”
On the whole, there is an element of Strang’s structure that feels akin to a catch-all, utilizing her title in a way that is open to everything she might have been writing during that particular period, always and eventually looping back to that insult lobbied at Merkel like a tether that holds the collection of sections and sequences together. As she writes as part of the section-sequence “Fuck Variations”:
A woman with a
cudgel changes tense in order to
be seen. Plough the
fucking fields, and what would
I be fit for? Despite
the relief in loss, I became a
subject merely due
to my associations. Fuck it! –
“Now we see the
violence inherent in the system.”
Ruin, spoil,
exhaust, or wear out [inert hapless
intensifier here].
“We don’t care what you say,” and
no, I don’t care
to mess around.
