Paul Vermeersch's ​NMLCT

Reviewed by ​MA|DE

(ECW Press, 2025)

​‘Reality’ is the only word in the language
that should always be used in quotes.
— My Life with the Thrill Kill Kult, ‘Nervous Xians’

In Paul Vermeersch’s latest collection, NMLCT, ‘reality’ is contested space, imperfectly mediated by technology and by the sensory and intellectual capacities of the animal body. The back cover synopsis describes poems that “raise hope for the possibility of escape from MCHNCT (Machine City) to NMLCT (Animal City), where the promise of ‘real life’ still exists.” The quotation marks around ‘real life’ here are intriguing. They suggest a tentativeness about the promise being offered. They ask: What is this ‘real life’ that exists only in NMLCT? What makes a life more or less real? And: What is its opposite … a fake life? A falsehood? Don’t expect NMLCT to answer these questions, at least not directly or conclusively. (In general, it is perhaps unreasonable to expect poetry to definitively answer anything.) Still, we might usefully consider, as we read, what makes an animal city different from, and therefore an alternative to, a machine city.
 
In “MCHNCT” and “NMLCT,” the two core sections of the book, Vermeersch opts for a continuity of form, each poem structured as four quatrains, for a total of 16 lines per poem; the lines typically run long, often closing in on the edge of the page. Do these numerical choices have something to do with the poet’s preoccupation with squares, cubes and other geometric figures? Possibly. In any case, it’s formally striking. The prosaic impression this lineation gives is emphasized further by the narrative impulse that often guides the poems; they are dense and richly populated, rather like actual cities. Pages teem with allusions and characters, setting up rendezvous between unexpected cultural touchstones with a very post-high/low sensibility. Porsches and PayPal, theremins and Einstein-Rosen bridges all seem to co-exist with an urbane ease, regardless of which city they inhabit. These narratives tend toward the science fictional, and not in some hazy, dream-ensconced, metaphorical sense; the poems are actually articulating speculative realities that reflect our current ‘reality’ back to us in an inwardly distorting, Kusamaesque way—even after the collection suggests there has been an ‘ejection’ from the infinite, illusory echo of the mirrored box.
 
Vermeersch’s narrative tendencies are perhaps best exemplified in a work like “Nine Lives,” which depicts the November 1969 issue of Playboy —featuring a story by Ursula K. Le Guin, after which the poem is named—half-buried in a forest beneath the glaciers of Antarctica. The poem riffs on the teenage thrill of finding pornography hidden in the woods, partially reclaimed by the wild, and how it becomes a kind of public property there. Playboy, a magazine known for its juxtaposition of polite eroticism and highbrow intellectualism, seems an apt reference point for the collection, a locus at which unexpected elements meet. That it is the November 1969 issue of the magazine invokes other historical details too: it was the month Apollo 12 landed on the moon; it was the month Sesame Street first aired; it was the middle of the Vietnam War. The present is full of overlaps between the mundane and the catastrophic, and one of the functions of narrative is to chart these overlaps.  
 
Throughout NMLCT, harmony is achieved through the precise narrative crafting of the quatrained texts, which function rather like ‘Snakes and Ladders’ poem-formations, where repetitions and resonances create unexpected connections that shift the reader’s attention up and down, forward and back, across lines, stanzas, pages and sections. These patterns and logics carry across the collection, more easily spotted the longer one reads, bridging the sections like root (or fibre optic) systems. This bridging is also assisted by the three innermost sections of the book: “Inside a Mirrored Box,” “Diagram of the Known Universe” and “The Forest,” which appear sequentially on the reader’s journey between the two cities. Together, these act as a kind of hinge, first disrupting the poetics of “MCHNCT” with stricken-through stanzas, then offering a diagram of the two worlds in parallel, then bringing the reader through the forest, which is commonly used symbolically as psychic/transitional space, before leading us into “NMLCT.” 
 
If there is ultimately a difference between the two cities/sections, it is largely a matter of emphasis: what is foregrounded and what propagates most abundantly. Indeed, these differences are often subtle, partially obscured by the more obvious similarities between the two (psycho)geographies. “MCHNCT” is populated by pornbots, perfect circles, 8-bit snakes and cubic wolves—a world where ‘The Algorithm’ takes the place of the exalted Oracle of Delphi. And yet, nature is not excised from its poems; technology, as we see, is an overlay, a set of “superimposed geometric forms upon chaotic systems.” Nature remains, creeping beneath the glittering surface of virtual reality, “like dangerous plants at the edge of an abyss.” And when we journey to “NMLCT,” we encounter objects and technologies intermingling with its primary plants and animals: bears with six black wings in movie theatres, inexplicable profusions of eels, glowing alphabet blocks abandoned in a forest, hermit crabs housed in dolls’ shells …
 
MCHNCT cannot subdue the animal aspects of humankind; NMLCT cannot return us to a pre-tech pastoralism. The ‘promise’ of NMLCT, if there is one, is that the world will again be covered in “Barnacles. Black mould. Bacteria.” For that is what it means to give up our quest for dominion over nature. NMLCT is no Garden of Eden. Rather, Vermeersch seems to suggest, if we intend to mitigate the effects of technological intervention, and allow some flourishing of natural life, we must also accept that death and violence are written into the genetic code of the world, and admit that we can never fully control them. In the collection, as in the universe, existence is nothing if not ouroboric.
 
We have already described how “MCHNCT” and “NMLCT” sit on either side of the three middle sections that bridge them. But there are also two brief sections at the front and end of the book, which are formally similar to the middle sections (four pages with four lines per page), that function instead like bookends or planetary poles, delineating the edges of the work, holding the concepts in place. Where the first section, “On Monstrosity,” is the most tech-dense of all the sections in the book, the final section, “Deep Water/Amnesia,” is the most creature-dense. The bottom of the ocean, it would seem, is the last place on Earth largely undisturbed by human interference, a place more animal than NMLCT. Yet even here, creation and destruction remain symbiotic, equally powerful. “[I]n the brightest shoals, a tiny thought—neon, glasslike in its smallness—is born and swims and is swallowed by a greater thought” and “even the largest of them plunge to the eternal.”
 
The lovely, mapped symmetry of NMLCT is something you can only appreciate once you have read the collection in full. Whether Vermeersch has succeeded in proving the necessity of an Animal City is not as clear to us as it has been to other reviewers. But if you can accept that poetry need not formulate an irrefutable argument, if you can accept that thought and movement can be a sufficient purpose for art, the trek through NMLCT is undeniably one worth making.

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MA|DE (est. 2018) is a composite creature, a unity of two voices fused into a single, poetic third; it is the name given to the joint authorship of Mark Laliberte and Jade Wallace. MA|DE is the author of four chapbooks, including the bpNichol Award-shortlisted A Trip to the ZZOO from Collusion Books. MA|DE's first full-length poetry collection, ZZOO, came out with Palimpsest Press in early 2025. A subsequent collection, Detourism, will be out with Palimpsest in 2028. Subsequent collections Alphabeticals (Popnoir Editions, 2027) and Detourism (Palimpsest Press, 2028) are forthcoming. More info at: ma-de.ca