Gillian Sze's ​An Orange, A Syllable

Reviewed by Amanda Earl

(ECW Press, 2025)

​On a cool night in early October, outside at a patio table of one of my favourite cafés, I do my first reading of An Orange, A Syllable. I read it straight through to the end as if it is one long, continuous line. I think about language, I think about first contact with words. I think about the difference between linearity and dimensions. I think about connection between people through language. I think about intimacy and the lack of it.
 
In thoughtful and clear prose, Gillian Sze offers me an opening to these contemplations. I feel an intimate connection between speaker and reader. Sze writes about language through the lenses of parenthood, relationships and art.
 
She gives an account of a child's acquisition of language, her attempt to treat half an orange as a syllable, cramming it into her mouth. She gives an account of a relationship mired in different orientations of thinking: the binary of absolutes vs the rhizomes of possibilities.  She offers Chinese pictograms as examples of how language transforms in different states. Sze makes me want to enter a gallery and look at what is beneath the black framed square.
 
I think of the Argonauts, Maggie Nelson's book on language, relationships, philosophy and motherhood: once you name something, you cannot see it the same way again. When Sze renders the child's acquisition of language, does she take us back to the blank, help us to undo our own relationship with language, our own baggage?
 
It's 5 am on a Friday morning.  In bed in the dark, I have three of Sze's images on my mind:

1. crown shyness: trees that don't touch but form a canopy of light
2. the child trying to push shapes through a box
3. the blank postcards the speaker's partner sends

​In my second reading, I notice transformations vs attempts at solidity, at containing language.
 
The opening epigraph by Yoko Ono: “Watch the sun until it becomes a square.”
 
The book opens with the solidity of the dark and the ball of air formed by language. A child's cry is “nicks of light.”
 
In An, Orange, A Syllable, Sze makes language tangible and urgent. She tries to fit it into the boundaries of a square, even on all sides. This is mirrored by the book's form: squares of prose left and right justified and centred horizontally to appear in the middle of each page. Regularity. Predictability. That is what is longed for.
 
These closed forms are juxtaposed with openings: a gaping mouth, the bloom of lilies. Instinct versus intellect. To understand meaning is satisfying; however, “words are always hungry for that fullness of sense. “
 
But it spills out. It refuses to be contained. Krishna contains the entire universe in his mouth, and it is chaos leading to speechlessness.
 
I found the book to be a fascinating and tangible exploration of language and a yearning to keep things clear and solid, while understanding that this is not how the world works. Sze shows the in-betweenness of things: relationships between parents and children, couples. There’s also lots of wonder here, such as the beauty of the French “verre de mer”, as opposed to the English “sea glass.” “Verre de mer soaked in what I imagined to be the appalled light of blue stars.” This is a beautiful but startling image. The whole book is like this: Sze describes eating cherries as “red ripped from our chins.”

For beauty is nothing but the beginning of terror
which we are barely able to endure, and it amazes us so,
because it serenely disdains to destroy us.
Every angel is terrible.
― Rainer Maria Rilke, Duino Elegies

​Language in its own way is a terrible beauty. It can both destroy and heal, it can be clear but it rarely stays contained. It spills out. It refuses binaries. It makes art. It disintegrates in the mouth, like an orange, a syllable. 

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Amanda Earl (she/her) writes, publishes, edits, reviews and mentors fellow writers on the unceded territory of the Algonquin Anishinaabeg Peoples. Her current work-in-progress is “desire, a footnote,” a long poem in six parts about relationship anarchy, radical love and cherished friendships. Amanda and her husband, Charles, intend 2026 to be a year of creative collaborations offered as one-off limited editions of handmade books, hybrid work, and whimsical connections. More information is available at AngelHousePress.Square.Site.
 
Earl is managing editor of Bywords.ca and the editor of Judith: Women Making Visual Poetry. Visit AmandaEarl.com for more info or subscribe to Amanda Thru the Looking Glass for ukulele songs, cost-saving recipe tips, quotes of the week and other trips down the rabbit hole.