DISCLAIMER: Elisabeth Blair is a friend of mine IRL.
I recently finished polymath Elisabeth Blair‘s provocative chapbook “We He She/It,” published by Chicago’s luminous Dancing Girl Press and you should order a copy for yourself.
I always think of Elisabeth’s writing as associative and anachronistic in the very best of ways: it’s a bit like stumbling into someone’s bedroom that has been sealed up for a half-century and is stuffed full of treasures and oddities that all seem of a piece. And so “Daughter of tyrannosaur –” runs on its first line, prose poetry, “perforated on the bottom so she can tear, tear, tear! Till we must do a maneuver to bring her in, then carry her over the Seine, passing a little man in a cape and further down, his mistress who stands and waits.” We’re well on our way to the archduke and the Greek dawn. In another poem, a character “scatters crumbs, but they demand wine and tofu,” never minding, or caring, what’s happening to her beloved flowers.
“We He She/It” is permeated with a palpable sense of anger. Different kinds of anger — sometimes understated and smoldering, elsewhere rising up as a clenched fist, a proclamation — all in response to a relentlessly antifeminist and heteronormative social landscape. And so, from “Honestly” we read: “The betrayal mankind stands on: the appearance of a bounty, but a lack of any inks. Write with these, the country commands, and so the yellow falls from her hair, like severed weeks from the calendar.” The anger responds to marginalization, neglect, pigeonholing, and closed-mindedness.
Potent stuff in a slim volume.