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And My Heart Crumples Like a Coke Can
Raw and beautiful and completely devoid of pretension, Ali Whitelock's poems will speak to anyone who's ever messed up, been confused, wished they'd done things differently; to anyone who's had an affair and regretted it, who's been loved completely but was too blind to see it.
- GenresPoetry
102 pages, Kindle Edition
Published May 4, 2018
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Displaying 1 - 9 of 9 reviews
December 19, 2018
Crumpling up Bukowski
and my heart crumples like a coke can: by Ali Whitelock
Reviewed by Dr Brentley Frazer
I wish review copies would arrive sans publisher’s assertions and solicited opinions from names dropped on the cover. It’d also help if the review copy has the forward or introduction already torn out. Ignoring all that and getting right to the text of a new author you’ve not yet heard of, or a new book by a writer you deeply admire, requires discipline.
If you set the book down to make a coffee before you dive in, blah blah commercially successful author tells me what to think right there on the cover, and if, because of the wonders of the human mind, I ignore the blaring text, my goddamn subconscious soaks it right up, like an affirmation on the fridge, or the warnings on a packet of Australian cigarettes. I stick post-its over everything except the title, skip right over the praise to the dedication, glance over the chapter or poem titles, then hold my breath and leap into the depths of the writer’s mind. 99% of the time I feel like I dived into commercial sump and come up with black-lung as fast as possible without getting the bends. Sometimes though, soon as I hit the text I want to stay in there and I don’t care if I fucking drown.
Recently I opened a beaten-to-shit Australia Post satchel sent from Wakefield Press that had an apology from the P.O taped on it informing me the package had been mutilated somehow in transit. I extracted the book like taking cogs and sprockets out of a crushed platypus and the first thing I saw before the post-its went on was a comparison to Bukowski and Sharon Olds. I’d rather eat that gangrenous foot on the smoking-causes-peripheral-vascular-disease affirmation you see on bags of rollie tobacco than voluntarily read Sharon Olds, but that Bukowski counter piqued my curiosity. It took a few days to get over this comparison, as Olds and Bukowski are two sides of very different coins. Inspired by the coffee ring graphic under the steady with slight hint of mischief gaze of the author on the cover, I sat down with a pot of coffee and a fresh deck of cigarettes, skipped the intro, read the dedication and found myself happily drowning in the poetry of Ali Whitelock.
The poet hails from Glasgow and, as you would expect, many of the poems in Crumples reflect her (unique) experience of an ex-pat in the colony of Sydney, Terra Australis. Whitelock writes in a playful syntax of obligatory commodores, diseased azaleas (azaleus morbus, hilarious), beige villas and the visual pollution of American franchise, lamingtons, chico rolls, various birds, spiders and other vicious wildlife, hideous architecture and blatant disregard for this ancient country and its precious resources. This is not politics, more of a scathing review of the ignorance in lies about clean coal. Wrapped up in these acerbic quotidian observations are glimpses of homesickness, uttered suddenly like a confessional. This sways the reader firmly in the direction of intimacy with the poet, like she is one of your oldest friends. The winds of Scotland which howl and bite make an appearance several times (see, ‘the blue of god’s fucking eyes and ‘a lake full of fucking swans’) and those feelings of family being so far away are encapsulated in moments of pure and simple beauty:
my mother has sent me crystal doorknobs from Scotland that glisten in a way that knobs do not glisten here. (in kuntry where sun is never stopping shining)
At first I suppose the Olds comparison is fitting, Whitelock’s form is similar, as is this poet’s approach, a sort-of rapid fire psychological landscape of sensoria, but the similarities end there. Where Olds’ poetry laps my ankles with gentle waves of allusion, Whitelock’s work reads like a rip which takes your legs out from under you. There is no swimming against this tide of biting wit and searing turns of phrase; you may as well let her ocean take you to the watery after world. This is where the blurb writer’s comparison to Bukowski is more fitting. Whitelock’s poems are a dark therapy peppered with a sharp satirical insight into the way things really are in this age of machine learning beauty- mode portrait photography. But if you are now imagining a vile corpulent man drunk and hunched in a hotel for men only, writing angry poetry about hundred-dollar whores and getting wasted at the horses, you’d be very wrong, but dirty realism, it is.
Whitelock is more like a Plath from the wrong side of the tracks. Her poetry is intensely personal but just as you expect her to break down and gas the reader as well, she punches you instead, with an oven-sized knuckle-duster. The poems are bound together with a method of inferred image chains, when there is an abundance of beauty the poet hits you with the inverse, even if it’s not there, as in the lines: ‘some days there are whales other days dolphins/occasional jellies and never dead babies’. When she goes in this direction the images are startling and transgressional. More than once I am reminded of the minimalist school of Dangerous Writing, particularly in the poems ‘my friends vagina, ode to an ovary’ and ‘please do not pee in the sink’. The way Whitelock’s internal narratives zoom in puts Carl Zeiss lenses to shame. Something small will happen, as in the poem ‘pakora for starters’ where the poet observes a nurse trying to decipher a doctor’s scrawl on a hospital chart. We are whisked away to a scene of a boy scout in the woods trying to start a fire with a magnifying glass and then lured back to real ground in the nurse’s body, and a right jab is delivered with the fatal sentiment of innocence, like an inviting shallow ocean pool full of blue ringed octopuses and stone fish.
The blurbs on Ali’s book are right, rare as that is. This poet writes poetry of ‘excoriating tenderness; one of the wittiest, liveliest and most moving collections in years; raw and beautiful and completely devoid of pretension.’ You’ll be stung and pierced and sad and bursting out in cackles on the bus as you laugh and drown in Ali Whitelock’s wild ocean of crumpled coke cans, snobby bookshops, panic attacks and Borat mankinis. In these times when antipodean poetry is dominated by stay-in-line competition poets I find this collection by Ali Whitelock honest, invigorating and refreshing. I’m putting this book right on my top shelf of favourite poetry published in Australia.
...
Dr Brentley Frazer
⌘ This review first published by THE POETS' REPUBLIC - IN PRINT, ONLINE, ON STAGE AND OFF-November, 2018
and my heart crumples like a coke can: by Ali Whitelock
Reviewed by Dr Brentley Frazer
I wish review copies would arrive sans publisher’s assertions and solicited opinions from names dropped on the cover. It’d also help if the review copy has the forward or introduction already torn out. Ignoring all that and getting right to the text of a new author you’ve not yet heard of, or a new book by a writer you deeply admire, requires discipline.
If you set the book down to make a coffee before you dive in, blah blah commercially successful author tells me what to think right there on the cover, and if, because of the wonders of the human mind, I ignore the blaring text, my goddamn subconscious soaks it right up, like an affirmation on the fridge, or the warnings on a packet of Australian cigarettes. I stick post-its over everything except the title, skip right over the praise to the dedication, glance over the chapter or poem titles, then hold my breath and leap into the depths of the writer’s mind. 99% of the time I feel like I dived into commercial sump and come up with black-lung as fast as possible without getting the bends. Sometimes though, soon as I hit the text I want to stay in there and I don’t care if I fucking drown.
Recently I opened a beaten-to-shit Australia Post satchel sent from Wakefield Press that had an apology from the P.O taped on it informing me the package had been mutilated somehow in transit. I extracted the book like taking cogs and sprockets out of a crushed platypus and the first thing I saw before the post-its went on was a comparison to Bukowski and Sharon Olds. I’d rather eat that gangrenous foot on the smoking-causes-peripheral-vascular-disease affirmation you see on bags of rollie tobacco than voluntarily read Sharon Olds, but that Bukowski counter piqued my curiosity. It took a few days to get over this comparison, as Olds and Bukowski are two sides of very different coins. Inspired by the coffee ring graphic under the steady with slight hint of mischief gaze of the author on the cover, I sat down with a pot of coffee and a fresh deck of cigarettes, skipped the intro, read the dedication and found myself happily drowning in the poetry of Ali Whitelock.
The poet hails from Glasgow and, as you would expect, many of the poems in Crumples reflect her (unique) experience of an ex-pat in the colony of Sydney, Terra Australis. Whitelock writes in a playful syntax of obligatory commodores, diseased azaleas (azaleus morbus, hilarious), beige villas and the visual pollution of American franchise, lamingtons, chico rolls, various birds, spiders and other vicious wildlife, hideous architecture and blatant disregard for this ancient country and its precious resources. This is not politics, more of a scathing review of the ignorance in lies about clean coal. Wrapped up in these acerbic quotidian observations are glimpses of homesickness, uttered suddenly like a confessional. This sways the reader firmly in the direction of intimacy with the poet, like she is one of your oldest friends. The winds of Scotland which howl and bite make an appearance several times (see, ‘the blue of god’s fucking eyes and ‘a lake full of fucking swans’) and those feelings of family being so far away are encapsulated in moments of pure and simple beauty:
my mother has sent me crystal doorknobs from Scotland that glisten in a way that knobs do not glisten here. (in kuntry where sun is never stopping shining)
At first I suppose the Olds comparison is fitting, Whitelock’s form is similar, as is this poet’s approach, a sort-of rapid fire psychological landscape of sensoria, but the similarities end there. Where Olds’ poetry laps my ankles with gentle waves of allusion, Whitelock’s work reads like a rip which takes your legs out from under you. There is no swimming against this tide of biting wit and searing turns of phrase; you may as well let her ocean take you to the watery after world. This is where the blurb writer’s comparison to Bukowski is more fitting. Whitelock’s poems are a dark therapy peppered with a sharp satirical insight into the way things really are in this age of machine learning beauty- mode portrait photography. But if you are now imagining a vile corpulent man drunk and hunched in a hotel for men only, writing angry poetry about hundred-dollar whores and getting wasted at the horses, you’d be very wrong, but dirty realism, it is.
Whitelock is more like a Plath from the wrong side of the tracks. Her poetry is intensely personal but just as you expect her to break down and gas the reader as well, she punches you instead, with an oven-sized knuckle-duster. The poems are bound together with a method of inferred image chains, when there is an abundance of beauty the poet hits you with the inverse, even if it’s not there, as in the lines: ‘some days there are whales other days dolphins/occasional jellies and never dead babies’. When she goes in this direction the images are startling and transgressional. More than once I am reminded of the minimalist school of Dangerous Writing, particularly in the poems ‘my friends vagina, ode to an ovary’ and ‘please do not pee in the sink’. The way Whitelock’s internal narratives zoom in puts Carl Zeiss lenses to shame. Something small will happen, as in the poem ‘pakora for starters’ where the poet observes a nurse trying to decipher a doctor’s scrawl on a hospital chart. We are whisked away to a scene of a boy scout in the woods trying to start a fire with a magnifying glass and then lured back to real ground in the nurse’s body, and a right jab is delivered with the fatal sentiment of innocence, like an inviting shallow ocean pool full of blue ringed octopuses and stone fish.
The blurbs on Ali’s book are right, rare as that is. This poet writes poetry of ‘excoriating tenderness; one of the wittiest, liveliest and most moving collections in years; raw and beautiful and completely devoid of pretension.’ You’ll be stung and pierced and sad and bursting out in cackles on the bus as you laugh and drown in Ali Whitelock’s wild ocean of crumpled coke cans, snobby bookshops, panic attacks and Borat mankinis. In these times when antipodean poetry is dominated by stay-in-line competition poets I find this collection by Ali Whitelock honest, invigorating and refreshing. I’m putting this book right on my top shelf of favourite poetry published in Australia.
...
Dr Brentley Frazer
⌘ This review first published by THE POETS' REPUBLIC - IN PRINT, ONLINE, ON STAGE AND OFF-November, 2018
September 9, 2018
A brilliant collection of poetry.
January 21, 2021
This is one of my favourite books of poetry. So many fantastic poems to choose from. I adore 'fridge poetry' which is just the best reaction to that situation, 'if you like poetry but do not like conversation' rings so true, the title poem is devastating, and 'in praise of the fairy cake' is perfection, and so many others are just wonderful.... 'what you must do you must keep your mouth shut' really speaks to me as well.
Ali Whitelock is also an amazing performance poet. She reads with such character and expression and you can hear her voice in her poems ever after. She was amazing at Poetica at La Mama in October 2019 alongside the inimitable Ania Walwicz, as well as great poets Wani and Henry Briffa. She also has a collection called 'the lactic acid in the calves of your despair'. They're both definitely worth picking up. =)
Ali Whitelock is also an amazing performance poet. She reads with such character and expression and you can hear her voice in her poems ever after. She was amazing at Poetica at La Mama in October 2019 alongside the inimitable Ania Walwicz, as well as great poets Wani and Henry Briffa. She also has a collection called 'the lactic acid in the calves of your despair'. They're both definitely worth picking up. =)
January 21, 2019
One of the best - most visceral - volumes of poetry I've read in age. A must-read. Ali is a huge talent. These poems run deep - they're instantly re-readable. The anger is palpable. The sense of humour is exquisite. I loved this work. I look forward - straight away - to more!
July 16, 2023
wow i <3 ali. this is the second of her collections that i’ve read and a testimony of her ability to touch me in ways other contemporary poetry i’ve read haven’t. she is by far my favourite poet; her wit is more present in this collection and extremely powerful when paired with her descriptions of longing, loss and her brutal self awareness.
April 23, 2019
Every poem was pure Ali and I loved them all! She has such a distinctive voice that makes her poems so easy to read but hard to swallow (in the best way).
If you’re not in love with Ali by the end of this, I can’t help you.
If you’re not in love with Ali by the end of this, I can’t help you.
March 9, 2024
It was ok - not my cuppa.
January 15, 2020
Just, exquisite.
Read
December 14, 2018Anyone who has heard Ali Whitelock perform her poetry will hear the same Scottish accent when reading her poems on the page. The accent has a certain density that forms a rhythmic backbone to these poems that cross genres between memoir and verse. The pieces are cumulative, unfolding in stories that explore key moments such as the illness and death of a family dog, a sister-in-law’s heart attack, the building of friendship with a once feared praying Muslim, a father’s sudden death, the dislocation of migration, menopause, infidelity, and the perilous state of the world. The poetry manages to be both pithy and almost hysterically funny, not an easy mix to achieve, but that is how life works: the paradox of what we carry and what we experience in each moment. Whitlock captures this duality perfectly, taking a stand-up comedian’s incision to pretension and human foibles. Sometimes these are trivial, as in the pretensions of bad therapists or snooty shop assistants:
Sometimes it’s tragic, as in the death of Whitelock’s father, whose rapid and surprising decline are charted with description that is deeply moving and powerfully visual:
Whitelock sees through the many illusions we create to get through each day, but there’s no judgment here. The work invites the reader to laugh along. There’s deep intimacy in this work, and it’s impossible not to feel the connection and universal in Whitelock’s particulars. Along with the loss that permeates all of the poems, not just as sorrow, but also as anger, fear, relief and confusion, there’s also desire, a new kind of discontent that comes with the loss of youth and hormonal changes. Whitelock writes with an honesty so sharp it’s almost subversive:
As a migrant, Whitelock writes with affection and irritation taking on Australian icons like Holden Commodores, Lamingtons, Coles cooking chocolate, beige weatherboard villas, and Chicko Rolls and even as you’re laughing about the aesthetically bereft suburbs and idle chitchat of the racist, Whitelock slips right into a critique of our damning treatment of refugees (with a very straightforward directive):
The impact of this motion between the domestic and the political is powerful and unsettling, opening out grief and loss through piercing wit and uncanny metaphors.
and my heart crumples like a coke can reads very quickly, like confession, with a performative cadence that rings in the head as you read it (Check out Whitelock’s reading of “water is for fish” here, for an illustration: https://youtu.be/Cu6UR4hmD4Y), but the poems are also self-referential, clever, carefully refined and condensed. The book is heart-wrenching and in ways I can’t quite explicate, entirely affirming. Perhaps is that the language is always a wee bit defiant even when tracing the most excruciating pain, or maybe it’s the way the reader is drawn directly into the circle and made to see how compassion and empathy, even to a lying, aging and sometimes vain self, is the only way forward.
and even though she said she was sorry
she didn’t really sound sorry because
when you are an intellectual sometimes
you do not have time to sound sorry. (“a friend of mine with low self-esteem”)
Sometimes it’s tragic, as in the death of Whitelock’s father, whose rapid and surprising decline are charted with description that is deeply moving and powerfully visual:
i booked myself on writers’ groups on open mics
circled poetry readings I’d attend I’d hop across
to paris maybe berlin fuck it why not Barcelona?
but a quick drop in to see you father revealed
you were a sliver of yourself
a flaked almond of a man
a fragment
like someone took a photocopy
of you reduced it to A5 printed it in grey scale (“water’s for fish”)
Whitelock sees through the many illusions we create to get through each day, but there’s no judgment here. The work invites the reader to laugh along. There’s deep intimacy in this work, and it’s impossible not to feel the connection and universal in Whitelock’s particulars. Along with the loss that permeates all of the poems, not just as sorrow, but also as anger, fear, relief and confusion, there’s also desire, a new kind of discontent that comes with the loss of youth and hormonal changes. Whitelock writes with an honesty so sharp it’s almost subversive:
eventually you will be home for dinner less and less
and you will like to him more and more
and one night you will send him a text saying
you will be back later than usual maybe even the next day
and your lie for this one will be very original and completely
unbelievable but you are now so addicted
to your lies like a kid on nothing but smarties and mars bars
and tob-le-fucking-rones that you just keep right on
shovelling your refined sugar onto the fire of your truth (“eventually you will turn fifty”)
As a migrant, Whitelock writes with affection and irritation taking on Australian icons like Holden Commodores, Lamingtons, Coles cooking chocolate, beige weatherboard villas, and Chicko Rolls and even as you’re laughing about the aesthetically bereft suburbs and idle chitchat of the racist, Whitelock slips right into a critique of our damning treatment of refugees (with a very straightforward directive):
it is time to feed the birds australia
tuppence a fucking bag sure what does it cost
to pipe in a haggis share some tatties and neeps
raise a glass to their health mia council
casa es tu council casa australia the world’s
eyes are rolling in your general direction
and right now you look like some kind of jesus
sandalled arsehole sitting on the veranda
of your ocean front property with your deep pockets
and short arms pretending you don’t even know
it’s your turn to buy the next round at the bar (“mia council casa est tu council casa)
The impact of this motion between the domestic and the political is powerful and unsettling, opening out grief and loss through piercing wit and uncanny metaphors.
and my heart crumples like a coke can reads very quickly, like confession, with a performative cadence that rings in the head as you read it (Check out Whitelock’s reading of “water is for fish” here, for an illustration: https://youtu.be/Cu6UR4hmD4Y), but the poems are also self-referential, clever, carefully refined and condensed. The book is heart-wrenching and in ways I can’t quite explicate, entirely affirming. Perhaps is that the language is always a wee bit defiant even when tracing the most excruciating pain, or maybe it’s the way the reader is drawn directly into the circle and made to see how compassion and empathy, even to a lying, aging and sometimes vain self, is the only way forward.
Displaying 1 - 9 of 9 reviews