Collaborative writing offers a unique set of structural challenges and opportunities for the reader and the finished text. How do the multiple authors’ voices and visions interact with one another? Is it clear who contributed what portions of the text? Are differences between authors highlighted or minimized and what is the effect of that choice on the work as a whole? And so on. anOther Nemesis by Ai Jiang, Angela Yuriko Smith, Eugen Bacon, and Maxwell I. Gold puts its architectural decisions as a collaborative collection on highly visible display; but ultimately I was left with a lot of questions about whether those decisions were really operating in synchronicity.

One question that does not remain is the book’s clear political horizons—all four poets share a feminist anti-colonial perspective that is felt throughout the collection. In that sense, the book is extremely cohesive. It provides an emotionally consistent window into a global multi-racial and multi-ethnic artistic and political project of resistance and forward-thinking imagination. On the surface, the collection is organized very straightforwardly. It is divided into four numbered and titled sections: “The Colonizers,” “Primal Sources,” “Nameless Others,” and “Crooked Ontologies.” Within each section, all four poets have several poems, clustered together by author with a brief “Behind the Poems” note at the beginning of the group. These clusters are always presented in the same order: Jiang, then Smith, then Bacon, then Gold. This repeated structure does give the collection a kind of coherence: Each section has, as a result, something resembling an arc through the work of all four poets since they are encountered in that same order repeatedly throughout the text. In spite of its regularity, though, an underlying formal effect of arbitrariness emerges in the reading, which is the source of my questions.

To begin, I want to look back at the bigger picture of the four sections. Such names signal a clear interest in a conceptual, rather than narrative, organization to the book. [1] Each of the section titles occupies a different conceptual space—“The Colonizers” would be a force to be opposed by the imaginary of the book, “Primal Sources” as an origin of power, “Nameless Others” would take the role of the subaltern subjects in whose name the book’s project proceeds, and “Crooked Ontologies” serve as a framework of theorization of anti-colonial being. Or rather, that is what I assume each section title would want to signify. But the wide range of differences between the kinds of concept that each section title could denote underscores a simultaneous implied radical difference between the sections. These four titles do not denote the same kind of things. In this way, they imply a really strong distinction between the approach taken to the book’s political project in each section. That is, here are not four angles or four stages but four totally separate theoretical or conceptual components to the vision of the book.

Ultimately, however the four sections emerge from the reading experience very similarly because it becomes difficult to impossible to identify why each poet put this specific group of poems into a particular section. Each poet has a unique take on the shared subject matter of both life under the pressures of contemporary capitalism and the unified political vision of feminist resistance to oppressive structures in the present. These visions develop in parallel within each contributor’s groups of poems, but they don’t really engage across the boundaries between the four poets’ work. That is, the poems by each author have relatively little to say to the other authors’ work, even as they share the targets of their social engagement. Although there is usually some sort of discernable trajectory for each author, those trajectories fail to map onto the promises made by the titles of the sections. None of the authors describe “the colonizers” in “The Colonizers” (though colonialism is never far from the poems), and—with the possible exception of Angela Yuriko Smith’s contributions to “Primal Sources” —the other three sections are similarly inscrutable. There are occasional moments—like “A Girl I’ll Never Know,” which appears in Bacon’s segment of “Nameless Others”—where a single poem seems a natural fit for its section, but this doesn’t persist at the level of the full grouping. Even those poems by Smith in “Primal Sources” require a bit of a stretch to assert that all of “Thoth,” “Saraswati,” “Orpheus,” and “Scheherazade” are equally primal, equally “sources” of activist energy, and also more “primal sources” than “Lilith” or “Loki” or “Odin.” (I do think that the stretch is merited, but it does need to be made.) The overall effect, then, is not of the kind of book that the section titles seem to promise, either in the form of a fully cohesive argument across all four sections or in the form of a cluster of little books. Instead, the effect is of four chapbooks on a shared theme that have been chopped up and recombined.

The “behind the poems” notes from each author at first promise to mitigate this problem somewhat, offering an explanation of how each grouping of poems fits into the overall structure of the book and connects to the titles of the sections. Once again, though, these notes fail to make those final connections clear. They’re very interesting and informative; they provide valuable context for each poet’s sense of their own project; and they are often elegant, thoughtful, even moving in their own right. But take, for example, Eugen Bacon’s note to her poems in “Nameless Others,” which begins, “To know that life is an ER, everything a triage. Without a name, you’re a blank photograph, face down. The nurse waits for you to lie still, undiagnosed and overexposed in a wide white room” (p. 55). Evocative and significant, and very impactful in relation to the poems that follow it. But what this note does not do is articulate how the poems it precedes—especially “Misguided”—specifically articulate the position of “nameless others” or how Bacon’s poems connect to the other authors’ contributions to the section, even as it introduces and explores the risk to which namelessness and nonrecognition can subject a subject, especially feminized and racialized subjects. Throughout the volume, these notes operate this way, providing reflections on the composition process and goals of each poet, but actually serving to turn the attention away from the poems’ relationship to the section and the other poets and instead toward their author’s other contributions elsewhere in the book. In contrast to the highest-level structure of the book, the notes—like the section-internal structural decisions—direct the reader to focus on each poet’s individual contributions as a separate object, rather than helping them come together as a collection.

What, then, do the four poets end up doing? If the clearly signposted organization of the book is at odds with what is happening substructurally—the development of four parallel sequences or suites, one by each author—then how does each writer construct their section of the book? The four authors take substantially different approaches. The most distinctively unified project is Angela Yuriko Smith’s. All of her poems are haibuns in the voice of mythological figures whom she brings forward to the present to comment on and respond to contemporary life. Smith is particularly concerned with the effects of our increasingly digitally-mediated world as she imagines her versions of these figures: Circe is a content creator; Cassandra tries and fails to convince of the direness of contemporary crises on social media; Scheherazade is a voice actor and podcaster; Echo a social-media lurker who struggles to speak, and so on. She uses a lot of the same language to describe all of these figures, which does help to drive home the shared vision of modernity that her mythic characters encounter. However, this also results in her poems becoming a bit repetitive. This potentially is offset by her contributions being divided across the whole collection, but that also slows the development of her vision of the present.

AI Jiang’s poems focus on boundaries, borders, and their exceeding. These are some of the most formally and conceptually innovative poems in the collection—especially English, which is a redacted acrostic. They don’t so much develop over the course of the collection as they circle around Jiang’s questions about the structures that limit subaltern and oppressed individuals, including the nation-state. Eugen Bacon explores similar questions but through the lens of a “presencing in” language—less reflective than Jiang’s contributions but sharing an interest in figural intensities. What I mean by this is I think best exemplified by two moments, both from the final section. The first, in “Seasoned Utopia,” is the opening of that poem: “It’s the wetlands. A deluge of platelet florals. Each red blood cell is a glow” (p 81)—this level of viscerality is characteristic of Bacon’s poems. But it’s the second, in “Relax,” that most highlights the role of presence—“xiii. The calmness of the gun before a bullet shatters your face.” (p. 82) These moments insist upon themselves, the physical is so present as to refuse reflection even as it comments on the condition of violence that suffuses modernity. This does make an interesting contrast with the more reflective mode that much of Jiang’s work takes.

I think that Jiang and Bacon’s poems are the strongest in the collection on the basis of their innovation, imagery, and linguistic presence. I have already discussed Smith’s project and Gold’s contribution offers a welcome strand of utopian critique, in poems like “The Assimilation of Gods That Were Never Gods,” and “Here in the Future, There Were No Walls.” But Gold’s poems are also the ones that seem to be taking the least advantage of their position as poems. They end up feeling a bit like a fragmentary treatise in verse, in part because of the sheer directness of their utopian critique. [2] These particularly blunt poems nonetheless offer some interesting thinking and Gold’s notes to his sections provide good context for his vision of the potential of hope and determination in the hard work of making a better world. Although all the authors are explicit about their work’s political vision, and at various times all of them mobilize that directness to a variety of poetic and intellectual effects (including the treatise) it is Gold’s poems that I think approach the treatise most often.

As a whole, I think anOther Nemesis offers an interesting picture of feminist and decolonial social/political poetics and does so with a breadth of focus that is only possible because of its position as a multi-authored text. At the same time, though, the structural tensions of the book’s sectioning and organization cause that vision to shear or even cleave under pressure like a sheet of rock at a fault line. In this way, the book seems to undermine the very advantages that it offers itself in having four authors because it doesn’t manage to construct for the reader a genuinely interactive dialogue between them—either through a series of engagements with shared nodes of meaning in the names sections or through allowing each poet to fully articulate their position and then letting the juxtaposition of them speak for itself. As such, I was left unsure what anOther Nemesis ultimately gains from its position as a collaboration, even though there is a lot in the collection of interest to readers looking for poetry that is not only political or about politics but that takes the political as a core aesthetic virtue.

Endnotes

[1] When I talk about narrative organization here, I don’t mean to imply anything at all about the presence or absence of narrative poems as such. Both narrative and conceptual organization are strategies available for collections of all kinds of short poems. For example, among speculative poetry, R.B Lemberg’s Marginalia to Stone Bird (2016) contains a blend of narrative and non-narrative poems organized conceptually into “Finding Voice,” “Changing Shape” and “Making Journeys.” Lo Kwa Mei-En’s The Bees Make Money in the Lion (2016), conversely is narratively organized into “The Colonists,” “The Daughters,” “The Lionshare,” “The Queens,” and “The Citizens”, though the poems are often extremely difficult to read as narrative individually. In non-genre poetry, these strategies are also common, like D.A. Powell’s Cocktails (2004), which is divided into “Mixology,” “Filography,” “Bibliography” and “coda and discography.” [return]

[2] In this moment, I am reminded of Ursula K. LeGuin’s reflections on The Word for World Is Forest (1972/1976), where she admits somewhat ruefully to having “succumbed, in part, to the lure of the pulpit” (“Introduction to The Word for World Is Forest” 149) and says of the novel she felt, “because of the compulsive quality of the composition, that it was likely to become a preachment” (150)—“Introduction to The World For World Is Forest” appears in The Language of the Night by Ursula k. LeGuin, (1979, 1989, 2024). I am not, of course, claiming to know whether Gold, like LeGuin, feels any conflictedness towards the tendency towards the treatise or didacticism, and The Word for World Is Forest is an extremely interesting novel in spite of LeGuin’s avowed failure to totally lay aside “the pulpit,” even as she might prefer the subtler political thinking of a novel like The Left Hand of Darkness (1969). [return]