Cut Side Down, Jessi MacEachern
Invisible Publishing, 2025
The latest from Montreal-based poet and scholar Jessi MacEachern, following A Number of Stunning Attacks (Picton ON: Invisible Publishing, 2021), is Cut Side Down (Invisible Publishing, 2025), a playful, polyphonic study through sexy and indelible poems on and around reading, influence and how far one might fall into text. “My inkpot finally ceased blushing.” the poem “The Eighteenth Century Is Silent,” begins. “With the heavenly hierarchy / I dipped my pen. / I told my fellow poets we were only the bodies / of ghosts following birds of the heart.”
Bending body and line, Cut Side Down is structured with an introductory poem and a triptych of poem sections: “RAVISHING THE SEX INTO THE HOLD,” “DO I ENJOY THE WORK?” and “WHEN A FOLK, WHEN A SPRAWL,” an earlier version of which appeared as an above/ground press chapbook. “Start here with the cut edges of the book.” the introductory and untitled open poem begins, “They are standing at attention for you.” MacEachern sweeps through a cadence of evocative sound and gesture, offering a poetic focused on twirling lyric expectation, reordering words and expectation. “My inkpot finally ceased blushing. / With the heavenly hierarchy / I dipped my pen.” the first section’s opening poem, “The Eighteenth Century Is Silent,” begins. “I told my fellow poets we were only the bodies / of ghosts following birds of the heart.” There is such sprawl, such open joy across these gestures. “Absence is no thing / to mourn.” she writes, to close the poem “Cunt Was Her Favourite Word,” “It feeds / our immortality.” Through a delight of bustling solitude, MacEachern blends the immediate of a first-person lyric gymnastics with appearances by Lorine Niedecker, Charles Olson, Virginia Woolf and Renee Gladman, each writer present in the text because their writing remains so present, all blended into MacEachern’s swoops and swirls and contained mayhem.
I am reading a book on
architecture.
Everyone I know is
reading the same woman
and her linguistic
blocks. I imagine everyone
I don’t know similarly
reading
the woman’s ephemeral
commons.
I begin talking to the
book.
A woman talking to a book
is an everyday thing
in that it is in danger
of begin branded personal.
The future comes ambling
back. A woman has
no special status. We are
all feeling subjects. (“I Belong to the Women”)
Born in Ottawa, Canada’s glorious capital city, rob mclennan currently lives in Ottawa, where he is home full-time with the two wee girls he shares with Christine McNair. The author of some fifty trade books of poetry, fiction and non-fiction, his most recent titles include On Beauty: stories (University of Alberta Press, 2024), the poetry collections Snow day (Spuyten Duyvil, 2025) and the book of sentences (University of Calgary Press, 2025), and the anthology groundworks: the best of the third decade of above/ground press 2013-2023 (Invisible Publishing, 2023). Oh, and a chapbook is forthcoming soon via Ethel Zine; did I mention that? The current Artistic Director of VERSeFest: Ottawa’s International Poetry Festival, he spent the 2007-8 academic year in Edmonton as writer-in-residence at the University of Alberta.
