Unmeaningable

by Roxanna Bennett

Winner of the 2020 Trillium Book Award for Poetry and the 2020 Raymond Souster Award, Unmeaningable welcomes you to the freak show, where the monster on display is a culture that stigmatizes sickness and a system that shames the sufferer. Behold the wonder of the ages, a human mind in a human body, dissected and displayed for entertainment. Witness the ritual of surgical sacrifice! Observe the indignity of institutionalization! Be astounded by the indifference of ableism and ignorance! This uncanny collection of “crippled” sonnets features a thrilling display of cannibals, chimeras, and the crucial What meaning can be made of a life lived in pain and isolation?

Genres: Poetry

Unknown Binding

Published January 1, 2019

About the author

Roxanna Bennett is the author of 'The Uncertainty Principle' (Tightrope Books, 2014).

Reviews

[Radiantfracture · Rating 5 out of 5]

What a stunning book this is.

The central thread, around which myth, popular culture, and other intricately woven (and frayed) intertextual elements twist, is the experience of living as a queer human female body in the medical system, needing care and having to submit to medical regimes of thought, behaviour, bodily and emotional controls, to get that care -- all yet while labouring to maintain a self in the face of both this regime and the speaker's bodily and psychic pain.

Intertextual, playful, lyric, agonizing, gorgeous -- poetry, self, and embodiment that refuses to yield itself to power, yet yields to its reader so much extraordinary language and thinking.

[Jules · Rating 5 out of 5]

There are things seen and unseen in our world, acknowledged pain and suffering, and suffering and pain that go unobserved. The work comments on disability as alienation, as intersectional, as unique to the sufferer. In addition, the theme of invisibility, being passed over for entrance into a space of healing, makes this a commentary on how one can be and not be something, how the public labels and assigns meaning to human lives, without getting to know an individual's story. What if one's identities are not readily seen? What if one's pain is passed over? What if one's life is ignored? Unmeaningable sounds like nihilism, but the work is more existential, seeking the meaning that is drawn out of the title. The poems are not un-able, like the background of the title, but more than able to communicate a deep-seated pain coupled with invisibility. So many readers will find meaning in this, and the beauty of also unmeaning, that indefinable essence of human nature.

[Liadra · Rating 4 out of 5]

A hard read, but worth it.  Interestingly enough the author has circular poems, where the last line of one poem begins the next. And mixed in to these are other poems. Lots of mythology. Anger. Frustration. And introspection.  

[Paul Vermeersch · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book blew me away!

[A.J. Dolman · Rating 5 out of 5]

Brilliant book. Absolutely brilliant.

[Tera · Rating 4 out of 5]

I liked Roxanne's most recent poetry collection, so I looked for a previous collection. I found it a bit harder to get into, but no less important.

[L · Rating 5 out of 5]

"Remember language of flowers:
seven moonseeds sprout in a hidden chamber
seven serpents survive winter's white whisper
seven daughters grow grimgaunt with hunger
seven sons set fire to the church basement manger"
- 'Star Follows Tower After Catastrophe', pg.32

"My fatheris a serpent unsorry"
- 'Aphagia', pg. 22

"one confesses one's crimes
{longing of the soul to vex itself}
one's sins one's thoughts & desires one's illnesses & troubles
one goes about telling with the great precision
whatever is most difficult to tell
{we have two bodies before & after death}"
- 'Mandrake the Magician', pg. 46

"Unlike her comparatively lauded male counterpart - the eccentric - the female neurotic lives a shamed existence."
- 'House of Psychotic Women', pg. 58

"Some bodies worth less than the dust some other bodies leave"
- 'Naked Lunch', pg.63

[♡ rey · Rating 4 out of 5]

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