AJ Dolman's ​Crazy / Mad

Reviewed by ​Jérôme Melançon

(Gordon Hill Press, 2024)

The poems in AJ Dolman’s compact and focused collection Crazy/Mad each let us feel part of the experience of the difficulties of being that we tend to group together under the hazy and shifting category of mental health issues. They often establish connections to gender and sexuality, reflecting the tendency to medicalize women and 2SLGBTQAI+ people, all the while working against this tendency. And they relate these experiences to the social structures, environments, and attitudes that define these difficulties as issues that are thought to belong to those who are made to suffer from them.
 
What makes these poems work so well, and do their work so fruitfully, is the disorder (dis-order, undoing of order) they create. Throughout the collection, we find shifting voices, narrators, and observers; shifting tones; and shifting forms and sonorities. Shifting, or perhaps alternating, as a way to present more facets of experiences and events and to destroy any capacity to force a single perspective that might pretend to a complete truth.
 
Internally, these poems run across the surfaces of what is not free to exist. Their touch is light enough to leave things undisturbed, yet firm enough to pick up dust and carry their smell, to feel their textures, to notice where splinters have already emerged, where some blood has been left behind and dried. These poems let things and people be, and force the reader to do so as well by outlining and highlighting what things and people know about themselves and let us see of themselves. In “Tabula rasa mindset,” one of Dolman’s speakers spells out an extreme instance of leaving things be, in documenting how parts of the body are left behind: they list “Parts I have abandoned”, which include “recycled skin shed to dust; / milk teeth banked in my mother’s pillbox; / tonsils in a hospital incinerator.”
 
Other poems present lists that are even less expected, even as they defy the logic of the list poem. “Task-unrelated thoughts and images” includes lists within lists, adjectives and descriptions within more substantial matter, giving us “Each gravitationless ion, / freefloater, flack, ombuds, / integer, every mean ingredient – amber, molasses, milk, etc.” and leaving us with no sense of what vastness this et cetera might refer to. Dolman places calculation, consumption, and the very materiality of being on the same plane of existence, undoing whatever privilege we might give to one thing or aspect of things over others.
 
In one of the collection’s few prose poems, “Somatic indicators,” the respective linear organizations of chronology and lists end up competing, clashing, and dis-organizing one another: “Pain. Then gone. Rabbit in the hole. Sometimes days, or weeks. Then back. Tight up under your left rib. Or curled up, a ball, behind the lungs. All-consuming. You tell no one. One day, behind the right knee. Slip on the stairs. Leg out from under. Grab the railing. Look at no one, avoid eye contact. Hope there’s no one here you know[.]” The elided period lets us feel that there is more to come, that there is no resolution, even as the shortness of the line transforms the elision of repetition and transition into a rhythmic jabbing, imitating the apparition of pain.
 
Indeed, Dolman makes remarkable use of elision throughout the collection. The absence of final periods tells of what hangs in the air. The elision of words allows thoughts to slide in and shift the direction of thinking without interrupting it or leaving it unfinished, as in “Despondance”: “When I write about / you, I still cry, stupid pen // skips, unbalanced, so I start / over, or want to        just / the minutia of frozen water / drops, crystals of skin / or sand, little gatherings of intent.”
 
The tone of the collection taken as a whole is created by the movement between harshness and inebriation. Many of the poems are harsh, but of a harshness they return to us, a harshness that has its origin outside the body and the self. This harshness can be overt, as in this dis-ordered list: “Canada, I don’t know if you’ve noticed, /      but you’re run by a minority. / Canada, if I still had an ice floe … / Canada, I’m so grateful I present as a white woman / so I can just be medicated instead of missing.” It can also be found in the interplay of words: “Tree shadows / wrap language like a noose, suffocate // soft-light focus, scenes of teatime, reading / days, leaving the world old and willing.” This playful approach to syllables and sounds often feels inebriating and full of promise of renewal and joy, even as the experiences these assortments of words carry feel hopeless, as in “Slippery slope thinking”:

​A passage, then clumsy tangle, snag
in the carpet where hammer toe catches
scuff of prairie dust to knee, hairline tear
in cloth, a rift in a nail
going all the way down, unhealable,
ass to floor, a magpie pecking
at another bird’s nest
outside the sliding door

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Jérôme Melançon writes and teaches and writes and lives in oskana kâ-asastêki / Regina, SK. His third chapbook, Bridges Under the Water (2023), follows Tomorrow’s Going to Be Bright (2022) and Coup (2020), all with above/ground press, as well as his most recent poetry collection, En d’sous d’la langue (Prise de parole, 2021). He has also published two books of poetry with Éditions des Plaines, De perdre tes pas (2011) and Quelques pas quelque part (2016), as well as one book of philosophy, La politique dans l’adversité (Metispresses, 2018). He has edited books and journal issues, and keeps publishing academic articles that have much to do with some of this. He sometimes translates poetry for periodicities as well as other text in other places, and is currently working on translations of books by Denise Desautels and Phyllis Webb. He is on various social media under variations of @lethejerome.