Amanda Earl Reviews:

AJ Dolman, Crazy/Mad, Gordon Hill Press, 2024
Concetta Principe, Disorder, Gordon Hill Press, 2024

In two recent poetry collections from Gordon Hill Press, Crazy/Mad and Disorder, the authors take on the often-taboo subject of mental health. Gordon Hill Press should be commended for its focus on mental health issues, and its amplification of the voices of women and nonbinary writers. 

In Crazy/Mad, AJ Dolman resists the bleak and dangerous conformity to patriarchal, hetero, capitalist and ableist norms through the use of language play, incantatory lists and visceral imagery. The book’s dedication—‘To the worried, the lost, the uncertain, and the afraid’—feels like a reassuring address for those who are often forgotten in a society that rewards capitalist success stories and erases or harms those who are marginalized. The work is an unflinching portrait of contemporary realities, whether they are the relentlessly boring labours of miners in the snow or the panic of someone about to give birth. The book makes the point throughout that living with mental health issues, and dealing with social injustices, isn’t unusual but common. Crazy/Mad shows the struggles of the invisible and centres them.

Divided into sections entitled Hysteria, Neurosis and Melancholia, Crazy/Mad features poems that use traditional categorizations of mental illness, such as those referred to in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders. Dolman takes these categories and renders them highly personal by providing concrete examples of what it means to live with these conditions. They examine the consequences of a social and political unwillingness to address the issues. 

Crazy/Mad opens with the poem ‘Overthinking,’ which communicates the difficulties of language to articulate mental health issues. It serves as a preface, offering the themes of alienation, fatigue and system breakdown, and using wordplay techniques that serve to disrupt normalized thinking. These themes and techniques permeate the entire collection. The repetition of short ‘i’ vowel and hard ‘k’ sounds in ‘thickets/of linguistics,’ for example, evokes impatience and frustration. 

Throughout the book, common expressions are made uncommon, transformed into witty and apt phrases you can’t skip over, such as ‘language pack, a two-four of/thinks’ in the opening poem or ‘hiss and hearse’ in ‘Atheism.’  

‘Incorrect Thinking,’ a poem dedicated to deceased Ottawa-Gatineau writer and musician John Lavery, echoes his linguistic pyrotechnics, as does ‘Transference’: 

someone who makes a go of things,
made a went of things

Dolman uses computer imagery to refer to a disruption in the speaker’s ‘operating system’ and their failed attempts to articulate. A tongue is ‘tangled.’ An eye ‘drags computer brain.’ Existence is a struggle. This one small poem is crammed with mentions of languages: Latin and Dutch, English, Espagnol and Français, but in the end, we are ‘without/language for this shit.’

Recurring images of invisibility and feelings of a lack of self-worth and not fitting in occur throughout the book, such as in ‘Nonconformism,’ when Dolman writes, ‘a depressed, invisible queer falling out of time makes/hardly any noise.’ Descriptions of unseen or barely seen particles, such as neutrinos, ether, dust, sunlight, ash and snow, are common. 

In poem after poem, images of emptiness complement those of invisibility: ‘empty sheets,’ empty speakers, empty rooms ‘brimming with furniture,’ the ‘empty drop’ when swimming in the ocean and ‘empty stone facades.’ 

Dolman queers language, making it stand out from the ordinary by turning nouns into verbs: ‘the rains/that misery us past the broken point’ and ‘Anger fibres from the carpets.’ A collective noun such as ‘a murder of crows’ becomes, in Dolman’s reimagining, ‘a sorrow of stones.’ This queering of language feels like a way to combat the invisibility of mental illness and social injustice. It’s easy to gloss over and categorize societal issues into neat boxes and then forget about them. By enlivening the narrative of mental illness with figurative language, using word games and coming up with apt variations on collective nouns, Dolman makes these experiences real and memorable. 

In Crazy/Mad, joys are fleeting and ephemeral, crowded out by fearless portraits of the Gothic horrors of reality. The speaker is invisible and unheard in an unjust society where work is rewarded with more work. Despite this difficult terrain, the book is imbued with a sense of hope and resilience, which comes from the clear-eyed intelligence and acerbic wit of the speaker as well as Dolman’s playful, defiant approach to portraying the bleakness of this struggle. 

Concetta Principe’s Disorder opens with an epigraph from Anne Carson, a poet who also challenges and pushes the boundaries of genre. The line, ‘I run among the ruins,’ is from Carson’s poem ‘TV Men: Artaud,’ from her collection Men in the Off Hours. It describes an experience of madness, from the perspective of the French artist Antonin Artaud, who ‘stayed close to the madness. Watching it breathe or not breathe.’ The figure of Artaud, via Carson, is a fitting introduction to Disorder, as Artaud believed in shocking theatre audiences from their complacency, often by use of sensory overload. Principe takes a similar tack, exploring her diagnosis of high-functioning borderline personality disorder (BPD) by depicting—and producing—sensorial overwhelm throughout the collection. 

Principe’s speaker is overwhelmed by her surroundings, day-to-day experiences and childhood memories. The lack of distance between her and the outside world makes her feel uncomfortable, angry, frightened and distressed. 

For example, in the opening poem, ‘Running from the Sunshine of My Life,’ the sun is described as having ‘radiant decibels’ and screaming ‘so effing loud/my head aches.’ In ‘Cut Lilacs,’ a pencil rasps at the sheets; in ‘Sad Thighs’ foundations weep; and in ‘I Have a Theory,’ rubber ducks roar. Adding to the sonic nightmares within these poems are equally unpleasant odours. Sorrow’s pigment stinks in ‘The Sublime.’ Neediness is represented as ‘the cloying perfume of a dying animal seeking repair.’ 

Like the Artaud of Carson’s poem, Principe keeps close to the madness, inviting us to enter it from within. The result is an immersive work that both illuminates and obscures her experience of mental illness and trauma. Engaging with both the literal and figurative meanings of disorder, Principe uses disorder as a formal element too. This becomes clearest when we reach the last two sections of the book, moving from poems to a hybrid blend of poetry, essay and memoir, the latter sections repeating, mirroring or amplifying what has been touched on earlier. 

‘Window,’ the final section of the book, is particularly striking, opening and closing with stanza-based poems as frames for a moving and chaotic nine-part essay/rant, ‘Portraits of a High Functioning Borderline Personality Disorder,’ the key part of the book for me. Introducing ‘Window’ is a second epigraph: ‘I am out with lanterns, looking for myself,’ from one of Emily Dickinson’s letters. The inclusion of this second epigraph signals a shift in the collection, while Dickinson’s words suggest an emphasis on personal revelation. This section is undoubtedly personal, though it’s written in the third person. The ‘I’ is left behind, as are the more restrained lines of the earlier poems. Here, the sentences are looser, piled one on top of the other. The rest of the book radiates outward from this section, creating a structure that is not linear but rhizomatic, perhaps challenging conventional structures or showing what thought processes might be like for the speaker due to BPD. For instance, references are mentioned but not explained until later, like ‘2001,’ which is referred to several times in the ‘Portraits’ essay; only until the final section do we learn that the speaker is referring to Stanley Kubrick’s film 2001: A Space Odyssey. 

Principe describes BPD as a feeling of losing grip on reality: ‘It’s a physical feeling of psychic weakness. A kind of carpal tunnel syndrome of will.’ Elsewhere, she calls BPD a ‘psychic house without borders.’ She continues that thought:

Or perhaps those borders are red lines that get crossed, again and again, back and forth, so that in the end all that’s left is an ugly maroon stain of Raggedy Anne executions. A kind of cutting away, you see, of the things she loves.

An intimate, undaunted portrayal of disorder—as illness, as experience and as a lens through which to view the world—Disorder shows us BPD from the inside, among its crossed-out borders and ruins. 

—Amanda Earl