Ryanne Kap's goodbye, already​

Reviewed by Adam Nadir Mohamed

(Frog Hollow Press, 2021)

Ryanne Kap’s goodbye, already, published by Frog Hollow Press in 2021, models a plenitude of grief that does not simply mourn lost objects, places, and people, but is additive in its conjunctive desire to endlessly compose what is lost. In this chapbook, what is lost is what is made. The title, goodbye, already, suggests at once a frustration of not being able to say goodbye, of not being able to decisively crease the folds of grief and overcome an object in understanding and settling its absence. There is a sense of frustration in repeatedly finalizing a grief that refuses to cooperatively end. And indeed, throughout the collection, there is a running desire to overcome what is lost, to “tie up / every loose end” and to produce “an end to all the endings.” Yet, this ending “still hasn’t come.” In a different register, the title refers to a hesitation of pronouncing a goodbye or closure that might be desired too soon or too late in the passing of loved ones or the ending of a relationship. 
 
The striking cover of Kap’s chapbook presents a grief that longs for closure but is also an evocative process of the sprawl, in which the phenomena of grief are curatorially splayed onto a canvas to productively create what is lost. On the cover of the book, we see a series of butterflies packaged in a ziplock bag, a metaphor for grief in which the baggage—trauma, pain, but also beauty of loss—is neatly zipped up and stored away. Yet, opening the book, we are met with an inverted image that moves from the attempted closure of grief to its opening: unpackaged butterflies carefully adorn the frontispiece in a self-exhibition where grief spreads out in novel arrangements to make what is lost. This curatorial display conceives grief as an endlessly creative process that carefully unzips and tacks trauma, memory, and loss for exhibition and self-study, compartmentalizes it in a ziplock bag, and then starts the process of splaying anew, exhaling and inhaling grief. 
 
Poems like “projections” explore the rhizomatic and affective way grief enters the quotidian daily experiences of the speaker. Grief is not conjured calmly as a recollection of absence, but actively works its way into the speaker despite their resistance. Visually, grief obtrudes on the reader and speaker in its physical magnitude: the poem spans most of the page like a prose block. The poem’s stream-of-consciousness slips from “uncomfortable chairs” and “sugar water … settling in the stomach,” to the logistics of “who will carry the coffin” and the banality of a world that will “keep going on anyway because that’s what it does.” The speaker’s psychological interior churns everyday experience into the periphery of a loss never confronted directly but instead kneaded into flecks: vertiginous fragments of a “coffin” and “the thing [they] must not think about” even while thinking it through in bits and pieces. Grief, far from a calm recollection of something absent, stretches between the blinds, cut by the transitory flux of the speaker’s on-going thoughts. 
 
If grief is never confronted directly, it’s not resummoned as a longing for what is absent. In “things i keep meaning to tell you,” the speaker notes that a lost person is “stuck” in all the poems they’ve “been trying to unwrite.” Grief is not an act of remembrance that quiets what’s lost, nor is it the speaker’s refusal to “admit [their] loss,” thereby prolonging it, but rather a continual process of un-writing what’s lost in novel ways, each editorial pursuit a project of “excavation” that ironically “hold[s]” what’s lost by unwriting it. This excavation also turns back on the speaker, where they note in “mixed metaphors” that they “buried [themselves] / alive” in a lost person from whom they will now excavate themselves.
 
Other poems are perceptual detours into the pre-births and posthumous lives of grief. “an incomplete list of last times” recounts the speaker’s experiences, mapped like itinerary items, that mix a life before loss only through a life after loss. The expectations of a grandparent “who said he’d make it before graduation” weld with the speaker’s thought of wearing a graduation cap to the funeral. The prayers for “car crashes / heart attacks” that would “serve as an end to all endings” never comes even after death. This psychological listing of memories is not archival, since it retrospectively mixes and re-creates memories before loss, after loss. The incomplete nature of the list, the random numeral indexing and non-chronological ordering of the list, mirror the speaker’s mind processing and re-making snippets of experience: a suggestion that the speaker can only process grief in portions because “quantify[ing] the dead,” as the speaker notes in “things I took from my grandparents’ house,” possibly results in their love “divid[ing] into smaller/ and smaller/ pieces.”   
 
Perhaps what is most novel about Kap’s plenitudes of grief is that the site of this making occurs in more than one subject—there is no one mourning subject of grief, but a nexus of selves. This is why in poems like “Reflection,” the speaker stares into a mirror that does not reflect back a simple image of their face. Rather, the face intimates both archeology and genealogy outside itself. The speaker organizes the parts of themselves that “belong” to someone they’ve lost, such as the “eyes the nose if not the hands if not everything.” The speaker’s subjectivity might be the only entry into which they can “frame [their origins],” because the alternative of “pictur[ing] a history” of their loved ones results only in “blank pages.” Slivers of selves—an “eyebrow” that resembles someone else’s, a “laugh” belonging to their “great-aunts”—are ways of imagining and creating lost loved ones through the site of extensive bodies that belong to no one individual. If loved ones are imagined through selves, they are also inseparable from the selves that mourn them. In “coda,” the speaker announces their burial “in that empty apartment” with what is lost, one of many selves left “miles away [their] heart burning in the distance.” In “the one about the time travelers,” the multiplicity of selves is explicit in the speaker’s dialogue, with “20-years-from-now me,” “20-hours-from-now me,” and “20-minutes-from-now me” all conversing about living with and through grief. The splitting of selves, whether to bury some of them with what’s lost, or to create them as different versions of a growing identity, suggests a grief never ached in one body.
 
If many of Kap’s poems are about grief that creates, they’re not constrained only to the subjects who grieve. Kap instead explores the perspective of grieved people who develop and subsist without subordination to subjects who mourn them. In “last one to leave,” one of my favourite poems in the collection, the speaker becomes an object of grief. It is the speaker who assures the addressee that “they won’t even remember if / [they] needed” the speaker. It is the speaker who understands “how ugly it goes / wasting all the love / [they] wanted.” And it is ultimately the speaker who will not be “the one who asks for / one look back.” Even though the speaker asserts that the addressee won’t have to “grieve [them]” because they will “always / be here waiting,” the speaker doesn’t mourn a lost relationship, so much as they develop—as a mourned person—without anyone necessarily mourning them.  The speaker persists as a mourned person who refuses the passivity of being sublimated, who endures as an image reflected in windows that doesn’t want an addressee “to catch / [their] reflection,” that doesn’t want returning glances. The speaker not only grieves but becomes the object of grief that doesn’t want to be grieved.

While “coda” ends the collection with a desire to leave “two griefs” in the “distance,” the collection by no means asserts the completion and overcoming of a sublimated loss because the coda is both a belated desire for closure, for the libidinal replacing of lost things, and also a curiosity about what grief imagines. This is why even if the speaker “let[s] [the addressee] go,” they will still love them differently, proximally. The thread pulling through the speaker and who they’ve lost changes frequency and distance but is never severed. What Kap approaches in goodbye, already is a poiesis of grief in which everything lost is always already here waiting to be re-made, whether it’s an adoptee’s relationship with “home,” a past relationship, or lost grandparents.

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​Adam Nadir Mohamed (he/him) is a PhD candidate in the English Literature department at the University of Western Ontario. His current research concerns the interdisciplinary nature of poetry and philosophy in British and German Romantic literature. He is also interested in the relationship between Deleuze and Guattari’s philosophy and Romanticism.