by Kate Bolton Bonnici
Boiler House Press, 2023
Paper: $16.99
Genre: Poetry
Reviewed by Alina Stefanescu
“Every fiction feigns,” said literary critic George Steiner, reiterating what Plato found troubling about tragic theater and poetry. Every fiction feigns, and such feigning appeals to our feelings. The poet cannot be trusted, Plato insisted. The tragic drama works the mind into a froth and abandons reason.
Imagination has always been dangerous to dictators. Let’s imagine to spite them: imagine a book that grins at Plato’s shadow and sets out to challenge the foundational knowledge that gives us heroes. Imagine a publisher willing to explore “the new paths that criticism might take. Imagine a writer who uses the two forms Plato feared—poetry and tragic drama—to reconfigure an epistemology of archives.
The single criterion for Boiler House Press’ Beyond Criticism series is that the text “discovers.” Kate Bolton Bonnici’s hybrid text, A True & Just Record, meets and exceeds this criterion by practicing what the author calls “immersive marginalia,” a “rhetorical intervention/invention” that employs a dialogic method from tragic drama called stichomythia. Characters interrupt each others’ thoughts and speak in short bursts, mingling their urgent voices, and convoking a time outside of time in which “the archive and I (and others) speak across the page,” in Bonnici’s words.
Invoking Jean-Luc Nancy’s phenomenology, Bonnici tells us that “the absent presence of the accursed holds her space.” Although dedicated to the author’s grandmothers, the book speaks to all the silences collected in the archives of various witch trials.
Asterisks, citations, and a wide-ranging bibliography (including Giorgio Agamben, Virgil, Ovid, Shakespeare, and queer theorist Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick) enrich and complicate the dialogic verse by working across temporal and grammatical registers. Bonnici preserves the archaic Old English spelling; the reader finds “fiftie years” in the same stanzas as “17 years ago.” Time is not chronological here: the patriarchal past seeps into the pageant of the patriarchal present.
“Utopias: A nation invented by men’s fancies” moves across images, exhortations, and asterisks in a study of Thomas More, who gave us the word “utopia.” A mesmerist of juxtapositions, Bonnici also plays with the implied music between homophones: “how to distinguish the oath from the elegy — or / more troubling? – the hymn.)” Two stanzas later, another more appears: “Roy Moore had 2.6 tons of 10 commandments in Alabama.” Quotation varies by piece and is usually designated by italics. In this case, the poem quotes More’s Utopia as well as Nalo Hopkinson’s “Riding the Red,” drawing two very different historical times and interpretive gazes into the room where meaning is made.
Joan of Arc makes an appearance, as do women executed for “invocation” or “witchcraft.” The author works in dialogue with records depicting the criminalization of women speaking. She works in dialogue to unbind their spell. Closing with a two-couplet poem titled “The Last Story My Grandmother Told Me,” Bonnici clutches the varied forms of knowledge in a memorial gesture:
We were never scared, playing
Each day among the graves.
Read the headstones, we knew
How we knew: sing the names
This dazzling book resists the documentary reading of archives and offers, instead, a bewitching dialogic study of fragments among the possibilities of the unsaid.
Alina Stefanescu is a poet, writer, translator, and essayist. Her recent published works includes DOR (2021), a poetry collection that won the 2020 Wandering Aengus Book Prize, and the prose chapbook RIBALD (Bull City Press, 2020). Her work has appeared in Prairie Schooner, North American Review, World Literature Today, Pleiades, BOMB, and Crab Creek Review, among other publications, and in various anthologies, including Best American Poetry 2022. Her latest poetry collection will be published by Sarabande in April 2025.
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