Not Now Now, Sandra Doller
Rescue Press, 2025
While moving through Sandra Doller’s latest, Not Now Now (Rescue Press, 2025), I was trying to think of when she last published a book, which has been a while. Unless I’ve missed something (which is entirely possible), the most recent prior full-length collection by the American poet and founder/self-described “l’éditrice-in-chief” of 1913: a journal of forms/1913 Press is the absolutely striking collaborative/parallel prose work she did with her husband, Ben Doller, The Yesterday Project (Sidebrow Books, 2016), one that followed her own list of full-length solo works: Oriflamme (Ahsahta Press, 2005), Chora (Ahsahta Press, 2010), Man Years (Subito Press, 2011) and Leave Your Body Behind (Les Figues, 2015). The only other title I’m aware of is the chapbook I’ll try this hour (above/ground press, 2025), a text fully included in this new volume. Composed as a triptych of extended, accumulated fragments, Not Now Now offers an assemblage of interconnected, overlayed, lyric threads that weave and blend into a trajectory of propulsive, meditative everythings. “It’s good good good / goody good,” she writes, as part of the first section, “Here here here here / here // So long seminal / building blocks / DNA smoothee // It’s been a line line / line line // How could it not / have folded [.]” I appreciate the way Doller pushes pure sound and meaning to interact, even bounce off each other. The interplay of her lyric is jagged, repetitive, almost looped, allowing the poems, the poem, to gain ground and force. “Political / statements you can truly / sink your nose into,” she writes, as part of the opening poem-sequence, an extended, staggered lyric of sections that run full down each page, “like / an installation on the very / top floor you walked miles / to get here together and / the guards watch you watch- / ing their phones. You could / really get into this if you didn’t / have to be somewhere else / soon.”
Set in three sections—“Not,” “Now” and “Now”—there’s an urgency, even an exhaustion, across these poems, as Doller composes threads around and on parenting, female agency, depression, dark humour, American peril, parental responsibility and what might get passed along, whether purposefully or stitched into the bones; elements one might wish to embrace, and others one might leave behind. As she offers, as part of the same opening poem-section:
I can’t tell my child
the names of those
trees, not only be-
cause I don’t know
but because I’ve lived
this long and not want-
ed to.
Why are stories about
boarding school so
exciting? Insert notes
on nature here.
There’s nothing
so wrong with a
prolific poet.
Especially a girl.
You and your dirty
I. Remember the belt-
less napkin you dug
out from someone’s
grandma’s undersink?
What is it I can do
it, says the man not
doing it. I am not like
other mothers—real.
The day she says she
hates me is near.
There’s an ongoingness to Doller’s lyric, one that is as propulsive as it is expansive, composed nearly as a series or sequence of journal entries across the lyric, across the prose poem, writing deep into and through the bones of American culture. “Today is the fifth day of the rest of my wife. If I were to sit across from you in the board room,” she writes, from within the sequence of single-stanza untitled prose poems that accumulate into the book’s second section, “meeting room, interview and say read me, fine, tell me all the things, you could say , card shark, first, then blond card shark, then trickster, muffin, potato acer, ship runner, overland corner, movie longer, Garbo hoarder, with a wrinkle under you so’s your uncle for your favorite rock. I am looking forward to a time when I can compete.” The poems find their foundations in language, in sound, and utilize the building blocks of attempting to navigate, whether slant or direct, a culture increasingly hostile towards healthcare and women. “I am formal parenting.” she writes, “This guy talks like a rebus. She wears her face like Sesame Street. You want to have a conversation.” Referencing the poem “[Show me a depressed mother],” a piece included in the second section, as part of her 2024 interview via Touch the Donkey, Doller offers:
This piece is part of a piece—it’s been one hell of a decade! This is part of my ongoing verbal investigation into gender trauma, as relates specifically to mothering and womanning. It’s something to realize the past 10 years of life have been occupied quite publicly by a kind of unfettered misogyny on the American political stage—all the while, personally, giving birth to a female child and caring for a partner with multiply recurring life-threatening cancer. The responsibility of bringing a future woman into such a world weighs on me—even as my hope is that gender dynamics are upended and changed by the time my daughter is conscious, in a teen or adult way, of these forces shaping her life, I am also aware that even being born into and existing in this time is both better and worse for her than ever. Is that all in this piece or in all the pieces all together always saying, it was the butler, the butler did it.
rob mclennan is the author of nearly fifty published books of poetry, fiction and non-fiction, the latest of which is the book of sentences (University of Calgary Press, 2025), listed recently by the CBC in their "Best Canadian Poetry Books of 2025" list. A further title, edgeless, a suite of long poems, will be out this spring with Catlin Press. His above/ground press, which now has a clever substack, will be thirty-three years old in July.
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