Mohammadi LaFrance

Danielle LaFrance's #postdildo

Reviewed by Khashayar Mohammadi

(Talonbooks, 2022)

Before I begin describing what this review IS, I'd like to begin by stating what this review ISN'T.

At this point I've spent more time delving deep into the intricacies of Danielle LaFrance's #postdildo than I have done with any other book of poetry in my lifetime. I've engaged with it in every which way it has allowed me, and I've decided not to make light of certain interactions that are, in reality, the majority of my day-to-day experience with the book in the few months of me carrying it around. My aggressively marked and dog-eared copy of #postdildo has traveled to five Canadian cities and I need to start this review with a clear declaration of my aims and hopes. There are a few reasons which will become clearer as the review develops, but believe me when I say that the housekeeping notes are not only important, but absolutely necessary to the heart of this "review," if we can call it one.

This isn't a performance in response to #postdildo. It doesn't aim to "Yas Queen" its way into feminist allyship. It doesn't aim to snap fingers and scream #postdildo's snappy lines back at it.

This isn't an analysis of LaFrance's (or in fact anyone's) feminism. This isn't even an analysis.

This isn't a product review. I'm not interested in whether or not this book is worth "purchasing". In fact, this book may perform best when found on the street. It traces its theoretical lineage to garbage and the ambient texture of industrial waste, so it's only fair that it operates best as garbage: resilient and infinitely recyclable.

And lastly, this isn't an objective review. I've put every ounce of my personal narrative into this writing. I have become obsessed with this book. I have loved and misunderstood this book and I want to convey my path, however flawed. I refuse to fall into the trap of "objective" book reviews.

Now let's get into it.

Danielle LaFrance's #postdildo is a book I've lived with from October 7th 2023, when I opened it up for a third reading on a rainy Vancouver evening. I had just spent about three hours in Vancouver's Gastown with my high school friend and his dog, gone from the worries of this world, and as I entered my Airbnb on East 36th street, I threw my feet up and began #postdildo mere minutes after seeing the headlines about Israel's bombing in Gaza. I carried this book in my bag for reading, referral and consulting until Wednesday February 21st 2024, when I finally finished taking all the notes I felt I needed in my Etobicoke flat by lake Ontario. I had spent the most tumultuous part of yet another insurgent autumn with #postdildo, and some of its maddeningly warm winter, too. I made a final revision to my notes and reviewed the material on a short trip to Ottawa between March 23rd and 25th, making the final span of my thoughts on the book about 5 and a half months. Today, on June 22nd 2024, I'm finishing up the draft after 259 days of sitting with this book.

While settling into #postdildo's poetics, LaFrance's vi(r/t)al poetics became a lone flashlight in the room where elephants seemed to outnumber people. By that, I mean #postdildo contains a nuclear paradox within its core. #postdildo is the vulgar whispers of a world that we choose to "unsee" in its painful entirety everyday in order to assimilate into the liberal psyche. In the beginning of my process, I handed the book over to a friend who scanned it for 5 minutes and said that she thoroughly enjoyed "the sex writing". She is a poet, and a truly introspective one, but in our short lunch date at a Mexican restaurant, I didn't see fit to open up that industrial-sized can of worms. Instead, I used the sudden mid-winter warmth to walk along Bloor Street and question myself about why I don't consider #postdildo "sex writing".

In "The Crystal Text", Clark Coolidge wonders how much poetry is "unprovoked thought," and it made me think that when I read #postdildo, it simply makes me realize that LaFrance has refused to omit the infinite microaggressions that have "provoked" their poetics.

#postdildo has an impressive vocabulary. I don't mean it in the literary way. #postdildo's vocabulary reaches unbelievably widely into the aspects of its material existence, assuring me that for Danielle LaFrance, poetry is a fully integrated aspect of their living practice. The book's vocabulary covers the widest reaches of daily life, philosophical investigation, and internet existence, in an astutely didactic way that will be expanded upon later.

#postdildo is shaped around readings sessions curated by LaFrance and around conversation and response. #postdildo is the prosthetic memory of a limb whose original identity no longer matters. #postdildo is the reinvention of eros from the immediacy of material. LaFrance's writing is built around what I perceive to be small "units" of proximity between the body of the subject and the greater wills of Patriarchy and Capital. These units are developed throughout the book's chapters, or, as the book itself considers them, #sessions, in reference to reading sessions held in the process of developing the book's thought system. I consider the use of + in the poetry to annex these abovementioned "units", augmenting them into the shape of poetry, creating an efficient emotional economics. These "units" can be found in every single page of the book, so I open #postdildo to a random page in an act of bibliomancy to receive an example:

Refusing to be legally bonded, Refusing to
Reproduce, + Refusing to Liken Identity to a Sexual
Position

The symbol "+" previously appeared on the very title of LaFrance's previous book FRIEDNLY + FIRE, and has continued its usage deep into #postdildo. The "+" instrument has now joined "#" and the embedded asterisk (e.g. "g*d" instead of god, as used in SEO debilitation) to create a sense that #postdildo is language embedded within online discussion. The introduction by LaFrance discusses the foundations of the project to be a response to #MeToo, specifically the discussions produced from #MeToo that promote White, Liberal feminism in opposition to radical intersectional liberation.

And that's what LaFrance is doing with #postdildo. Liberation is centered in #postdildo, whether as a reading project, as a book or as a lasting ideology. LaFrance's poetics is never charmed. I'm not here to repeat one of those "the fact that you don't like this is the message itself", creating yet another entertainment industry around rage as opposed to finding a space where the rage is the point itself, and not an exercise in catharsis. In #postdildo, LaFrance shows that to be a poet is not to be enchanted. Perhaps for LaFrance poetry is to starve at the feet of philosophy, to make every "Unit" of speech an ecstasy. #postdildo is a limit experience, an asphyxia of the auto-erotic. LaFrance moshes at the hurt-pit, earning their familiarity in the dance.

One of the reasons my review of #postdildo took me months to even start was that I first took it upon myself to read the majority of the reference material mentioned in the rather long bibliography, but the most generative ideas bloom in #postdildo's interaction with its reference material, which I'll be exploring in short bursts.

Where Byung Chul Han of "The Agony Of Eros" considers "Libido" to be an act of being "primarily invested in one's own subjectivity", #postdildo subverts this to create a purely "Objective" libido where pleasure is created from consensual non-autonomy. In the book's introduction, LaFrance mentions that a great question of their post #MeToo thinking was "How to fuck without causing harm," and they explore that in the poem "#postdildo or PLAIGARIZING PAUL B. PRECIADO":

[...] I don't want to know
more. Sign manifestos until a signature signs itself
            Not only do You +
            I use a dildo You +
I adorn a funny tinfoil hat while becoming one
Yoked together my homo
            + my normative. my homo
            + my national. Declare You +
I are all holes willing to
            THWAP

While at a coffee-date, deep in the poetics of #postdildo, my friend looked up from her phone and said, "this guy... he keeps wanting to teach me how to fix my bike. I wanna say ITS OK MAN U CAN JUST FUCK ME" and I jot it down S****'s experience as #postdildo's groupthink. #postdildo sits (!) on an imperative long enough to dissolve its reverberations into the clandestine hands of ideology. #postdildo the idea (here larger than the sum of the #sessions and the #book) is a tornado of ideology with many circling hands, but driven by its vacuous centre.

#postdildo is about pleasure, but also about alternatives after delight. #postdildo's is the #dildo with a will to return to the organism. A #postdildo is a limp #dildo with prosthetic memories of the authentic non-autonomy of an authentic SELF-organism. The question of authenticity itself becomes unimportant or obsolete (as LaFrance mentions, the #dildo is lost in origin and etymology as well). A #dildo is phallic tool that offends the patriarchal ego by supplementing and then surpassing the man. So a #postdildo is #postsex, meaning after sex, or as we began here: After delight. #postdildo is #postorgasm.

#postdildo is the excess of the profane. The POST magnetizes the poem towards the ambient chatter that LaFrance has collected through vigorous research and community building. #postdildo is speaking back at everything that can and will talk back.

LaFrance loves words. They love the play of sounds and letters. There are countless puns in this book that create proximities. LaFrance produces sound bytes so that some systemically-besieged body can commit libidinal generosity with it.

This criticism, this review, this analysis, is a tool I insert into #postdildo like a dildo. The critical urge to IMPART and INFORM, INSERT and ANNEX, but how to INFORM when severed?

#postdildo is "writing" in a sea of "content". A certain methodology that has decided if it can't be the cure, it can be the disease. The cure never spreads like a disease does, so it pours into viral poetics of hashtags and webspeech to spread wide into the long-gone hope of a true internet utopia.

#postdildo returns to Bataille and limit experience many times; however, LaFrance's limit experiences are the ecstatic limits of eros. From "Bear, I love you... Pull my head off" in Marian Engel's Bear to "Brother I love you!" of Anais Nin's House of Incest.

Anais Nin's House of Incest also holds "I looked with chameleon eyes upon the changing face of the world, looked with anonymous vision upon my uncompleted self" and "Our love of each other is like one long shadow kissing, without hope of reality"

#postdildo's "ME? NO. I'M A DUST WORM" has the lines:

Oh daddy
Don't stop. You make loving fun
for a gold-dust worm
never going back again
for a side o' mayo.

or in DEAREST BULL we read.

Dearest Bull
It seems I am a loss
for words. Losing blood
wishing for You.

In my research, I read LaFrance's past two books with Talon, FRIENDLY + FIRE and JUST LIKE I LIKE IT. The endnotes of JUST LIKE I LIKE IT contain the following:

I used to wail at an ex, "Make 'it' stop" as though it were a symbiotic parasitic feeling crawling through my insides.

Anais Nin's House of Incest says: " I walked into my own book, seeking peace. It was night, and I made a careless movement inside the dream; I turned too brusquely the corner and I bruised myself against my madness."

Notes of JUST LIKE I LIKE IT respond: "I am so lonely now without it. I am so full now without an ex"

Anais Nin's House of Incest replies: "As I move within my book I am cut by pointe glass and broken bottles in which there is still the odor of sperm and perfume."

The patriarchal ego seems to be in constant struggle to alleviate the paradox within this very situation. The patriarchal ego cannot understand the parasympathetic contradictions of desire.

Through their life, through their writing, LaFrance struggles to forget. Their mind is a maximalist closet with the greatest tragedies of our generation trapped in eveningwear waiting for a cocktail party.

LaFrance's sustained use of profanity (for the lack of better term), whether by its proximity to what it discusses, or by sheer tyranny of will, reminds me that funnily enough, use of profanity has become a cliche and its users oppressed like anyone who frequents the voice, the bodied speech, the realized vernacular.

Yet in a poem, the word "God" is obscured to "G*d" in a simulacrum of Search Engine obfuscation.

#postdildo holds many precognitions of violent sexual incident, made sexual metaphor. Kathy Acker had a knack for this. Her characters would explode in sexual violence at the moment of meeting, since the looming patriarchal oppression of "expected" violence was then lifted immediately and speech could begin. That's how she could castrate her men the fastest

the examples are numerous. Poems IN SLUTS WE THRUST, DEAR BATAILLE and A BEE GEEIAN ODE are examples of LaFrance starting #POST dildo by frontloading the violence.

#postdildo moves in waves of compression and expansion. Like my writing on it, the book holds many sections that compress ideas INTO #postdildo in a series of "#postdildo is" or its grammatical equivalents, only to let #postdildo expand out later on.

The subject of POETRY looms heavy in what I'd like to call the HR-induced silences of #postdildo. #postdildo is an HR nightmare.

#postdildo's great aspiration is to become a Royal Blue Times New Roman Wikipedia Tab of itself. An infinitely generative ritual of writing that can outweigh the accumulated micro- and macro-aggressions of patriarchy, colonialism and capitalism.

#postdildo is an artefact of adaptation and participation, however involuntary, in the social contract. #postdildo is a #book where each word has its own Belle Epoque.

Khashayar “Kess” Mohammadi (They/Them) is a queer Iranian-born, Toronto-based Poet, Writer and Translator. They were shortlisted for the 2021 Austin Clarke poetry prize, 2022’s Arc Poem of the year award, The Malahat Review’s 2023 Open Season awards for poetry, and they are the winner of the 2021 Vallum Poetry Prize. They are the author of four poetry chapbooks and three translated poetry chapbooks. They have released two full-length collections of poetry with Gordon Hill Press. Their full-length collaborative poetry manuscript G is out with Palimpsest Press Fall 2023, and their full-length collection of experimental dream-poems Daffod*ls is forthcoming from Pamenar Press.

Danielle LaFrance's ​#postdildo

Danielle LaFrance's #postdildo