SUBTEXT, Nicole Raziya Fong
Talonbooks, 2026
The third full-length collection from Montreal poet and collaborator Nicole Raziya Fong is SUBTEXT (Vancouver BC: Talonbooks, 2026), a title that follows a handful of chapbooks including Fargone (2014), Leguminosae Delusion Athletics (with Andy Martrich; Calgary AB: The Blasted Tree, 2021) and FLIGHT MODE IN THE CITY (Spiral Editions, 2023), as well as their full-length debut, PEЯFACT (Talonbooks, 2019), “a three-part series of poems interrogating the nature of experience, language, trauma, and identity,” and OЯACULE (Talonbooks, 2021), a book the author described in their 2019 “12 or 20 questions” interview as “a psychic window into suppressed memory, lived resistance and anger.” Furthering their book-length investigations through language, memory and trauma, the back cover of SUBTEXT describes the collection as one that “peers into the imperceptible psychic strata created by intergenerational trauma, confronting the challenge of finding one’s place in a sensorium of concealed realities and obscured memories.”
As the opening sequence of accumulating and self-contained stanzas, includes: “Every morning I consider what it is / I’d like to remove from myself and / give back to you. I extract this thing / with decisiveness, writing it down / on my hands with black ink before / falling back into the depths of sleep.” The collage of SUBTEXT includes bursts of short scenes, strings of collaged phrases and reversed text, inverted images and narrative overlays, attempting a clarity through a process that itself is purposefully obscured, blurred, fragmented, and, at times, even cinematic. Further in the same sequence, writing: “Memory levels the spaces I’ve / set aside for transformation.” At the back of the collection, Fong’s “AUTHOR NOTE” closes:
The poetic and theoretical modes of SUBTEXT allow memory to manifest in forms that resist narrative closure, moving in the mode of what Édouard Glissant termed errantry (l’errance). The poetics of errantry is rhizomatic, moving through multiplicity, polyvocality, and contradiction while refusing a singular point of origin. Errantry allows for a model of identity that is composite and relation-based, one which embraces the diffusions and opacities specific to diasporic experience.
SUBTEXT is woven from autobiographical thread: traces of light I shone into the unknowable darkness of the unconscious, where the Analyst might have said that answers existed.
This project is an errant archive.
Fong certainly isn’t the first literary writer to explore memory, trauma and family archive in writing as a way through—recent further examples might include Montreal poet and editor Darby Minott Bradford’s Dream of No One but Myself (London ON: Brick Books, 2021), Vancouver poet and editor Andrea Actis’ Grey All Over (Brick Books, 2021), Ottawa poet and editor Margo LaPierre’s Ajar (Toronto ON: Guernica Editions, 2025) or American poet chaun webster’s nonfiction title, Without Terminus (Minneapolis MN: Graywolf Press, 2026)—but rarely is this done through such an open structure of experimentation through form and the unconscious. Shifting and reinterpreting meaning through visual overlays and stitched lines, the effect is one of a shifting foundation, purposefully so, attempting to tear at the roots to construct something entirely and uniquely transformed, and thus, reclaimed. In the opening section, Fong writes: “Just because something / appears does not mean it has / shown itself. What does not / show itself is something that / can never seem (show itself / as something it’s not). With / ease I can picture myself as / I am now, which is to say, / changed, [...].” A declaration through the archive isn’t enough, but an entire rebuilding of what the archive has wrought, pulled apart and reassembled, forces the archive to thus justify its existence at every level. As their author biography at the end of the collection offers: “Their artistic work seeks to delimit and reconstruct the incorporeal into inhabiting a more muscular physique.” The way through such trauma is unknowable, so why not the language, certainly, pushing the possibilities of how one articulates or works a text as a way to document and archive, set down on the page any element of that level of intimate trauma. As part of their interview for Touch the Donkey (published March 2020), Fong responds:
Perhaps you could say that in my first, PERFACT, I was just beginning this process of engaging with language and memory in an exploratory way. The writing I’m doing now is at once a crystallization and expansion of the concerns I had perhaps unconsciously begun broaching in PERFACT but weren’t fully developed there. For whatever reason I feel a lot less constrained by formal expectations now than I did in PERFACT and the ability to see the page as an expansive site of potential rather than a rigid, lineated space by which concept should be conveyed in a particular manner has been exciting for me. I really can’t say where my work is headed as I never know what is coming until it comes. The work changes as I do, in an equally unpredictable way.
SUBTEXT is assembled into four extended sections—“Neutral Grey,” “SUBTEXT,” “Disagreement Over the Cloud’s True Colour Interactions” and “Scenes on Heartbreak”—there is something compelling in the way that this particular work exists as an ongoing exploration and examination, both on family history and how trauma has impacted them, but an interrogation into the process of working through such experiences through the archive, through text. Fong’s texts don’t let up any less on their own purposes and reasonings, pushing a way through to think openly and honestly on how and what language interrogates, just as much as it interrogates.
I wake up in Montréal; it’s
late afternoon.
From where I stand, the
clouds seem tinted
with an orange hue.
I am born.
I mean enactment in the sense
of an expressive
language parting from metaphor.
Not to
transform things into
appearance, but to make
them exist in the
entirety of their being. Yet while
“the uncovering destroys
a deception; it does not
discover anything authentically
appearing.”
“What we seem to be to others”
– I want to say –
“is only a part of what
we are.”
I mean, it’s not a part.
rob mclennan lives in Ottawa, where he is very famous and has lots of friends. His latest poetry title edgeless (Caitlin Press, 2026) recently published, as well as the book-length essay A river runs through it: a writing diary , collaborating with Julie Carr (Caitlin Press, 2026), and new chapbooks Small studies in blue (Broke Press, 2026) and selected poems v1 (Subpress, 2026).
