Oil Spell

Canadian poet Stancek (Mouths) demonstrates a belief in the power of cacophony to raise consciousness in this complex, multifaceted second collection. Like a fiendish deejay, she mixes the discourses of drone warfare, environmental crisis, English Romanticism, and American mass media culture to produce poems that thrum and careen across the page: “neither but both/ and between space of fang & voiced/ flesh-growl bray-sob & BLAST half blast.” Radically defamiliarized words, aural puns, and altered quotations take the place of standard English syntax, punctuation, and diction. Even the typographic design defies expectations in its use of crescent moon symbols, curved text, and half-tone fonts. Unlikely whiffs of Dorothy Wordsworth and Ann Radcliffe merge with the ghosts of endangered species that circle the smoldering ruins of bombed compounds in Pakistan and Afghanistan. Each poem is a crypt: “darkness spreads fucks up borders between things.” Discordant phrases (“fang vision spell,” “bite the head of a live dick”) recur, as if to ward off the numbing effects of everyday acts of injustice. Euphemisms drawn from the news (“Officer-involved shooting”) are spun and re-spun, revealing the linguistic violence inherent in the obscuring of agency. By book’s end, unlikeliness and counter-intelligibility come to feel like the order of the day; Stancek’s linguistic and conceptual derring-do make for a bracing, if challenging, experience. (Apr.)