MxT

by Sina Queyras

MxT, or ‘Memory x Time,’ is one of the formulas acclaimed poet Sina Queyras posits as a way to measure grief. These poems mourn the dead by turning memories over and over like an old coin, by invoking other poets, by appropriating the language of technology, of instruction, of diagram, of electrical engineering, and of elegy itself. Devastating, cheeky, allusive, this is Queyras at her most powerful.

'Like the central conceptual apparatus, Queyras is smart and insightful in her work to expand and challenge the nature of language and poetry . . . Lend Queyras your ears, your minds, your hearts, your Time. She will reward you, repeatedly.' – The Rumpus

'A collection of gorgeous and cantankerous poems that ask testy questions of all contemporary poets, and for this, the book is a must-read.' – The Globe and Mail

'This year's most devastating and enlightening Canadian poetry collection.' – Telegraph-Journal

Genres: Poetry, Canada, Grief, Queer

104 pages, Paperback

First published March 17, 2014

About the author

Sina Queyras' last collection of poetry, Expressway, was nominated for a Governor General's Award and won Gold at the National Magazine Awards. Her previous collection Lemon Hound won a Lambda Award and the Pat Lowther Award, and she is the winner of the 2012 Friends of Literature Award. She is a blogger for Harriet, the Poetry Foundation's blog.

Reviews

[Erin Emily · Rating 5 out of 5]

this book about mourning and loss was absolutely beautiful. sina queyras' writing is stunning

[Marc Lynch · Rating 5 out of 5]

Sina Queyras explores the texture of "feeling" in MxT (Memory x Time), an oftentimes difficult topic since poetry's stigma is that it's all emotive anyway. Her writing, as always, is precise and works with discordant juxtaposition, repetition and a multitude of different voices and forms. The head of each section takes common electrical (sometimes electromagnetic or frequency) diagrams and replaces the key elements within each schematic with an emotional component, transforming the mechanical into devices for feeling.

Having a pacemaker made of neurosis and melancholy myself, I acutely identify.

Nevertheless, the poems seem to be more an investigation of emotion rather than a lugubrious elegy (in "Elegy Written in a City Cemetery" she even stitches together elegies written by 40 or so other authors). MxT has a fractured, confrontational voice, addressing writers both dead and alive and confronting the art of writing about the sublime.

[Janet · Rating 5 out of 5]

This a beautiful book of poems about loss and grieving.

[Kathryn Mockler · Rating 5 out of 5]

Read this book. So good. Moving and funny and heartbreaking.

[Maggie Gordon · Rating 5 out of 5]

MxT is about grief and this one decided to rip open some of my own wounds. It's a haunting book filled with extensive symbolism and utterly gorgeous language. Queyras uses many different poetry techniques so it was also a learning experience for me, seeing all these different ways of approaching free verse. I still find myself unequipped to talk about poetry in a coherent manner other than "it spoke to me!", but MxT is a very creative, affecting, and weighty volume.

[Hend Hussein · Rating 5 out of 5]

Mr. James happened to lend me this book. I tried to read it on a train to Würzburg but i couldn't go on reading.
I put the book next to my bed a week later and intended to read it. It somehow disappeared but later i found it under the bed. (hu..ops)
Well in a really so dark and sad night probably a Sunday night i started reading this book and crying and seeing somehow Light. i read half of it and on my way home from the University the next day i have already finished it. I loved it! It touched my soul, my fear, and my being.

I am now reading another book by Sina Queyras and i feel more of the beauty of life.

[Susan]

Loved Slip and Lemon Hound. Two very different places.

[Jacqueline Valencia · Rating 4 out of 5]

Look for a small write up on alllitup.ca!

[M.W.P.M. · Rating 4 out of 5]

Sina Queyras belongs to a tradition that includes Daphne Marlatt, Anne Carson, and Lisa Robertson. Queyras's affinity for Anne Carson specifically is evident in the various references to her throughout MxT...

'Do not lecture me from sadness,'
lecture m from after, or under
sadness, from the scraping moment,
your forehead on coral, your feet
in the air.

- Anne Carson, Grief Lessons (quoted on pg. 5)

* * *

Anne Carson is a footnote in the biography of death. Few of us get a mention.

- pg. 58

* * *

You swim into splendidness.

- Anne Carson, Nox (quoted on pg. 71)

Here are a few of my favourite excerpts...

I read Mary Oliver's poem about angels dancing on the tip of a pin and I kept thinking, She is writing about a penis, Mary Oliver is really a gay man and everything is about AIDS, which made me want to carry Mary Oliver in my pocket.

- pg. 12

* * *

I see people, she said,
some so sad they hurl themselves
off bridges,
into traffic, out of moving vehicles,
or more positively, so full of joy they hurl themselves
into the bruise of morning
wanting to have known more,
wanting to have loved more,
and not afraid to bleed, they open
hearts like umbrellas
and leap.

- pg. 22

* * *

There is a war canoe made of conceptual poems. It floats with a small town of angry women, a ghost warrior in a grass cape takes up the rear, the canoe floats high on the inside passage and knows no one's name.

- pg. 38-39

* * *

To arrive is practice, conversation or conversion, a story over a field, my sweet, of concrete or whispering furrows of a path no longer, not sure, was there, and snow combed in curlicues and dog ears a zigzag through January. Sure you are witty, but are you any less romantic? In my remembering, I have undone all my beliefs, it is a luxury to lie unencumbered here, or there, the bones flexed like tendons, the spine like a seahorse, the heart far from a cliché still beating is innocent, though innocence is not as supple as you think, nor as flexible, nor as perfumed, nor convenient, or even clean: between things regret gathers force. I remember the day you turned to me: it was cold and the coffee was tepid.

- pg. 49

* * *

They say we die as we lived, bu I don't believe that. I would like death without judgement. The beheaded know what it is like to lose one's cool. The afterlife does not descend like a bamboo sheet. It may fall, a solid wall of nothing, but I can't imagine someone sorting as the bodies tumble in, like peas for winter, the dark, the sweet, the tainted, rolling into the compost of eternity.

- pg. 57

* * *

I want to be honest with you. I want this urgent message to be clear.

- pg. 63

[Jennifer · Rating 5 out of 5]

As I read M x T, with its diagrams of mourning, its poems reckoning with grief, I thought of how many poetry collections I’ve read this month that have been, in one way or another, about death and loss. I wondered: Is it true that poets are obsessed with death? Or is everyone absorbed with death, but poets turn to writing, the tool at hand, as our way of grieving? Or have I been accumulating a pile of poetry books about mourning, putting off reading them until now, because I’ve wanted to forestall some mourning of my own?

Sina Queyras knew, perhaps, that I’d have such questions. When I reached the end of the book, I found “Elegy Written in a City Cemetery,” a cento composed of lines from 52 other elegies written by poets ranging from Tibullus to T.S. Eliot to Terrance Hayes (and those are just the T’s). The footnotes read like a poem of their own, a litany of mourning: An Elegy for the Past, Elegy for an Hour of Daylight, Elegy for Floating Things, Elegy for a Mis-Spent Youth, An Elegy to Dispel Gloom, Elegy Ending in the Sound of a Skipping Rope.

[The answer to all of the above is, of course, yes.]

[Lara · Rating 3 out of 5]

"Good attracts good and so on."

"The emergency of women is the emergency of the world."

"Give me a woman with a will to read... Give me Time, give me swagger, give me your ears."

"You are nothing if you are not giving."

"You cling to the spines of books."

[Christine · Rating 5 out of 5]

so good!! was not a fan of all the poems but the ones i was a fan of were 💯

[Shannon · Rating 5 out of 5]

KSKS

[Kevin Lawrence · Rating 2 out of 5]

A Manual for Dismembering

"All mature poets understand the need for dry wood chips."*

#

All nature poets understand the need for dry wood hips.

#

All natural poets understand the greed for dry god hips.

#

Hip natural poets understand. (A greed for dry blood.)

#

Nurture poets: understanding, greed, dying, blood...

--------

* This is an actual line/quote from Queyras' collection. Baffling but inspired, apparently. As she sagely writes in the same poem (no pun intended), "...always recharge your batteries before you attempt to cross topics." (And, in a very related vein, never leave home without a recharger!) (And always floss!)

[willowdog · Rating 2 out of 5]

Wonderfully complex poetry on grieving and death. However, not LGBT.