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Twoism
Part roving eye, part devotion, you wander hotel corridors, entering rooms not quite yours, trying on clothes, blankets, skins. Arguing with the body's limits and its trickery, you are always in disguise. Sometimes you're Leda; sometimes the swan. The rooms are haunted with gendered injuries of the past...but messengers arrive to guide you.
In this stunning debut collection by Ali Blythe, every poem is unerringly built with hatches and escapes. Every line shimmers with life and shivers with fleeting materials. Someone or something is always leaving. The early poems, almost claustrophobic in their double vision, gradually give way to poems of aching beauty, erotically charged by the myth of completeness. Ultimately, whether you emerge or disappear, you are transformed.
In this stunning debut collection by Ali Blythe, every poem is unerringly built with hatches and escapes. Every line shimmers with life and shivers with fleeting materials. Someone or something is always leaving. The early poems, almost claustrophobic in their double vision, gradually give way to poems of aching beauty, erotically charged by the myth of completeness. Ultimately, whether you emerge or disappear, you are transformed.
64 pages, Paperback
First published September 15, 2015
2 people are currently reading
80 people want to read
About the author
Ali Blythe
5 books20 followersAli Blythe is author of critically acclaimed poetry collections that explore trans-poetics.
His poems and essays have been published in national and international literary journals
and anthologies, including The Broadview Introduction to Literature,
Best Canadian Essays, and Best Canadian Poetry.
He has held roles as guest editor for special editions of literary magazines including for the League of Canadian Poets, Arc Magazine and the Malahat Review, and as editor-in-chief for the Claremont Review, an international literary magazine for youth.
Blythe is a winner of the Vallum Award for Poetry, twice finalist for the Dorothy Livesay BC Book Award, and recipient of an honour of distinction from the Writers Trust of Canada for emerging 2SLGBTQ+ writers.
Hymnswitch was named one of the best books of 2019 the Walrus.
His poems and essays have been published in national and international literary journals
and anthologies, including The Broadview Introduction to Literature,
Best Canadian Essays, and Best Canadian Poetry.
He has held roles as guest editor for special editions of literary magazines including for the League of Canadian Poets, Arc Magazine and the Malahat Review, and as editor-in-chief for the Claremont Review, an international literary magazine for youth.
Blythe is a winner of the Vallum Award for Poetry, twice finalist for the Dorothy Livesay BC Book Award, and recipient of an honour of distinction from the Writers Trust of Canada for emerging 2SLGBTQ+ writers.
Hymnswitch was named one of the best books of 2019 the Walrus.
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Displaying 1 - 11 of 11 reviews
January 2, 2018
Ali Blythe has a deliciously skittish and edgy voice. Sometimes, it's impossible for me to discern what's happening in his poems, and I crave a just a little more map, but I so want to go where I'm being taken. And I want to be taken there with all the ferocity Blythe can summon. One of the strongest, strangest, sharpest voices to come out of CanLit in a long time. These poems make me want to roar and roll under the covers and rip my skin off. So good.
Ten is in my bed. Ten's shirt is off.
Ten could care less and pretends
the sheets are liquid by making
a summer rippling motion from
hips to chest. Ten is a lake-headed
two-thing. gender-gender fish.
Ten is in my bed. Ten's shirt is off.
Ten could care less and pretends
the sheets are liquid by making
a summer rippling motion from
hips to chest. Ten is a lake-headed
two-thing. gender-gender fish.
January 17, 2016
This was a superb book of poems! I interviewed Ali about the book here: http://www.quillandquire.com/authors/...
Read
November 5, 2015Not a lot of poetry sufficiently considers the costs of eros and devotion, so Blythe certainly made an impression this way. Also, for a book about queered sadness, I found it kind of uplifting (in a desperate, passionate sort of way).
January 26, 2022
just not a personal favourite. genuinely don’t like the style. is there something wrong with the poetry? absolutely not… it just didn’t… yeah
December 2, 2017
It's umbrella weather
in the leaking plywood
tunnel of the chest.
Good morning, my unattractive
tendency, I've made coffee.
I struggle for words for this collection. It makes labour and pain look easy. It's somehow both a dark, mossy, earth-scented forest and a blindingly antiseptic hospital bed. It pretends its heart isn't open, beating, bleeding, in front of you, but it is.
in the leaking plywood
tunnel of the chest.
Good morning, my unattractive
tendency, I've made coffee.
I struggle for words for this collection. It makes labour and pain look easy. It's somehow both a dark, mossy, earth-scented forest and a blindingly antiseptic hospital bed. It pretends its heart isn't open, beating, bleeding, in front of you, but it is.
August 22, 2018
It took me a little while to warm up to this one, most likely due to my own bad habit of reading too fast which does not work so well with poems, particularly ones with such a strong backbone of specific and careful usage of words.
Ali Blythe's writing feels both stark and bare while also being incredibly visual. While individual poems felt like they gave snapshots into the bigger picture Blythe is trying to get at, the themes and repeated imagery wind together throughout the text forming what felt to me like an oppressing sense of inevitability-desire and change while also fear of things retuning to their beginning (perhaps most blatantly pointed to by invoking Ouroboros).
A friend from Vancouver recommended this to me over a year ago when I was visiting and I'm so glad the recommendation did not slip my mind.
Poems I particularly liked:
Buttons
Playing Dead
Scintillating Grid Illusion
Shattered
The Umbrella
Elusive Structure
Goodnight
mise-en-scene
Ali Blythe's writing feels both stark and bare while also being incredibly visual. While individual poems felt like they gave snapshots into the bigger picture Blythe is trying to get at, the themes and repeated imagery wind together throughout the text forming what felt to me like an oppressing sense of inevitability-desire and change while also fear of things retuning to their beginning (perhaps most blatantly pointed to by invoking Ouroboros).
A friend from Vancouver recommended this to me over a year ago when I was visiting and I'm so glad the recommendation did not slip my mind.
Poems I particularly liked:
Buttons
Playing Dead
Scintillating Grid Illusion
Shattered
The Umbrella
Elusive Structure
Goodnight
mise-en-scene
January 11, 2016
Fairly, this would be 3.5 stars.
2.5 for the first half, which I could not wrap my brain around for love nor caffeine. I think it was about some kind of medical emergency--there was lots of hospital imagery.
4.5 for the second half, a series of really wonderful love poems. Great strong language, vivid images, and an atmosphere of being punch drunk on a new relationship.
2.5 for the first half, which I could not wrap my brain around for love nor caffeine. I think it was about some kind of medical emergency--there was lots of hospital imagery.
4.5 for the second half, a series of really wonderful love poems. Great strong language, vivid images, and an atmosphere of being punch drunk on a new relationship.
November 7, 2015
Pack your bags! Twoism will take your mind to new places and you'll find yourself thinking about the poems long after you've closed the book.
April 8, 2019
Thoughtful, with lines that stick to your bones.
January 18, 2022
I lie with my cheek to the carpet
and peek underneath Two's door. Two lies
on the floor too, watching for monsters
in the ceiling pattern. I locked the bolt.
Two will never be one of those predators
that lurks in bathrooms with ambiguous desires.
I slip Two hormone blockers.
Two's matchbox build is psychology
disconsolate, lonely and invisible, hugging
the poor old radiator for heat. Two is so cute.
* * *
Ten is in my bed. Ten's shirt is off.
Ten could care less and pretends
the sheets are liquid by making
a summer rippling motion from
hips to chest. Ten is a lake-headed
two-thing. gender-gender fish.
Ten often tells me about being lifted
from the utter, the wider, the water,
and imprisoned in a land of knife-edge
eyes that slit then dressed Ten in a sick blanket.
* * *
Your disguise cloud
is about to be whipped off.
The contents of which
are what exactly.
I'm full of the storm
coming. Naked in your
vague walls. Suggesstive
in the drugged seat.
Jupiter circles Io. Is this how
it's supposed to go.
You are captaining forever.
I can't take leave.
* * *
In the vast ocean
of repetitive
undertakings
my thoughts part
for you and keep
a you-shaped hole.
I take the hole
and put it
on my face.
From this deeper
nullity
I'm watching.
* * *
You push open the door
I smell coffee and wake
slowly telling you I dreamed
you were a small dress
of infinitely breakable sticks.
I am going to try you on
now, I said in the dream.
Even knowing what patience
and care it took to piece you
together last time.
A bare bulb made cagey
shadows of you as you
were lowered over me.
I tried not to move too much.
It wasn't a dream, you say.
and peek underneath Two's door. Two lies
on the floor too, watching for monsters
in the ceiling pattern. I locked the bolt.
Two will never be one of those predators
that lurks in bathrooms with ambiguous desires.
I slip Two hormone blockers.
Two's matchbox build is psychology
disconsolate, lonely and invisible, hugging
the poor old radiator for heat. Two is so cute.
- Two, pg. 10
* * *
Ten is in my bed. Ten's shirt is off.
Ten could care less and pretends
the sheets are liquid by making
a summer rippling motion from
hips to chest. Ten is a lake-headed
two-thing. gender-gender fish.
Ten often tells me about being lifted
from the utter, the wider, the water,
and imprisoned in a land of knife-edge
eyes that slit then dressed Ten in a sick blanket.
- Ten, pg. 24
* * *
Your disguise cloud
is about to be whipped off.
The contents of which
are what exactly.
I'm full of the storm
coming. Naked in your
vague walls. Suggesstive
in the drugged seat.
Jupiter circles Io. Is this how
it's supposed to go.
You are captaining forever.
I can't take leave.
- Paraphilia, pg. 29
* * *
In the vast ocean
of repetitive
undertakings
my thoughts part
for you and keep
a you-shaped hole.
I take the hole
and put it
on my face.
From this deeper
nullity
I'm watching.
- Mask, pg. 38
* * *
You push open the door
I smell coffee and wake
slowly telling you I dreamed
you were a small dress
of infinitely breakable sticks.
I am going to try you on
now, I said in the dream.
Even knowing what patience
and care it took to piece you
together last time.
A bare bulb made cagey
shadows of you as you
were lowered over me.
I tried not to move too much.
It wasn't a dream, you say.
- A Small Dress, pg. 57
August 5, 2020
I'm reading so much queer poetry and I really like it here ngl
Displaying 1 - 11 of 11 reviews