MA|DE's ​A Trip to the ZZOO

Reviewed by Jeremy Colangelo

(Collusion Books, 2020)

The latest chapbook from MA|DE, the “collaborative writing entity” comprised of Mark Laliberte and Jade Wallace, A Trip to the ZZOO is an intriguing, cerebral collection of poems the contents of which strike, like any good poetry, in both shocking and inevitable ways.
 
Its opening poem, “Splice/Stitch,” sets out its central conceit: these are not quite nature poems, in the sense of poems about or describing the natural world, the poetic voice working like a distanced spectator that is separate from the world. Rather they are closer to what the philosopher Timothy Morton calls “ecological,” that is, imbricated in the system they describe, aware at all times of the extent to which humans and their observations are a part of the system. So, as the poem begins:

Leap ahead,
go straight to the end:
you can replicate a gene but
you can’t step in a river twice
 
Words, erasing the possibility
of your future reproduction …

There is a comparison here between the reproduction of genetic information and the reproduction of written information, of the small glitches that occur whenever information becomes symbolized and reproduced. To type means always the chance of typing wrong. As MA|DE describes the chapbook on their website, “the title’s variant spelling is a deliberate gesture, signalling to the reader that the poems only share a partial resemblance to the spectacle of animal exhibition at a traditional zoo.” Observation, mixed with a typo – the allegedly transcendent gaze of the poetic voice implicated in its vision by an errant extra “z,” joining the chain of mutation from which all life springs.
 
Indeed, as “Splice/Stitch” concludes:

Wounded deer, broken helix, gutted
lamb, remember: lose is not lost.
 
Stay not, say still not.

A close cousin of error, wordplay performs mutations of its own. Differentiated by their spelling, “lose” and “loose” sound almost identical when spoken. And while “lose” and “lost” differ in terms of tense – present and past – “loose” opposes “lost” at a more fundamental level. One cannot produce the same animal twice, no more than one can enter the same river twice, and so in a sense for an animal to be loose, to be free of human bonds and out in the world, is to potentially lose it, or so one would think. In fact, this loss occurs despite human intervention, and as the wordplay shows is even present at the level of language, that which (despite evidence to the contrary) is taken to divide the animal from the human.
 
In conjoining “wounded deer, broken helix, gutted / lamb,” “Splice/Stitch” locates the continuation of life, the propagation of a species through precisely the process which changes it, with destruction and death. A species that never faces the inevitability of loss can never reproduce itself, and so shall be lost absolutely to extinction, a loss so deep not even errors will remain. To write – an act which for this poem is a mirror image of mutation – thus requires an acceptance of error, of mistakes, of typos, as implied by the extra “z” in ZZOO. To observe is to get it wrong.
 
This theme is consistent throughout the chapbook, and its best poems are less an investigation than an enactment of some variation of this core idea. Take for example the poem “Dog Star,” the middle stanza of which goes:

They [chickens] live sun-lives, we hatch plans at night,
both tending to generation. We root ourselves
in procedures to follow, time contemplating dog,
dog as happy and foolish as any god who thought
that chickens and humans were good ideas.

The poem makes several allusions to a well-known story about the ancient Greek philosopher Diogenes. Having been told that Plato, in his great wisdom, had defined “man” as being “a featherless biped,” Diogenes seized a chicken, plucked out all its feathers, and then strutted through the Academy with it declaring, “behold, Plato’s man!” The story is a warning about the futility of making hard distinctions in the natural world. The title of course alludes to the star Sirius, the dog star, named after the loyal hound of the hunter Orion, and it sets up the dog/god pun which is central to the stanza.
 
In one version of Orion’s myth, he was killed by a scorpion sent to punish him for declaring, with great hubris over his superior hunting skills, that he intended to kill every animal on Earth. Diogenes, frequently associated with dogs himself, seems to imitate this destructive impulse, stripping humans and chickens of their distinctions so as to prompt the question of whether either of them “were good ideas” to begin with. Yet from the dog’s-eye-view of things, the act is less a matter of destruction than revelation, bringing to attention the basic similarity of these two bipedal creatures. The slippage, then, between Diogenes and Orion, the philosopher and the hunter, returns the collection to its thematic focus in “Splice/Stitch” and elsewhere – the unity, at the level of metaphor, of genetic and linguistic reproduction, and the basic act of destruction from which all change and growth derive.
 
All of the poems in the collection hit these basic notes in one way or another, to one extent or another, and there is no need to belabour the point. But it is worth noting how appropriate it is that a chapbook of poems on these themes would be written collaboratively. Wallace and Laliberte have each developed their own highly distinctive poetic voices over many years of publication, and those voices mingle almost seamlessly throughout the collection, producing a work that could not have been the same with only one author. The chapbook, I should also note here, is itself a very beautiful object, laid out and edited expertly by Collusion Books editor Andy Verboom.
 
A Trip to the ZZOO is an exciting, stimulating read, full of poems as thoughtful as they are beautiful. Poetry like this is much like a river – something that becomes different, and makes you different, every time you plunge in. But maybe that’s a good thing. 

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Jeremy Colangelo is an author and academic. His story collection Beneath the Statue was published by Now or Never in 2020, and his writings have appeared in such places as Carousel, EVENT, The Puritan, and The Dalhousie Review.