Jade Wallace (they/them)

@nycterosea.bsky.social

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Poet, novelist, critic, leftist & co-founder of MA|DE. Poetry collection The Work Is Done When We Are Dead (Guernica 26), novel ANOMIA (Palimpsest 24), collaborative poetry collection ZZOO (Palimpsest 25). 🌈 https://jadewallace.a

ZOE WHITTALL, No Credit River (Toronto: Book*hug Press, 2024). Paperbound, 78 pp., $22.95. Review by Jade Wallace From the outset, No Credit River declares itself “an unreliable memoir, in prose poetry” and Whittall’s “first crack at” autofiction. These genre categories stand in uneasy relation to one another; examining the tensions will tell us something crucial about the project unfolding within these pages. As a starting point, it’s worth noting this collection comes 16 years after Whittall’s previous, Precordial Thump (Exile Editions, 2008), which was also categorized as poetry and memoir, so let’s turn first to the pairing of these terms. I’d argue that since 1959 when ‘confessional poetry’ was coined by critic M.L. Rosenthal, there’s been a tendency to assume first-person poetry is confessional unless explicitly classified otherwise. To intentionally frame a collection as poetry and memoir refutes that presumption. As if to say ‘This is work of personal import because I say it is, not because you think it is.’ To label a collection of poetry-memoir as ‘autofiction’ pushes this defiance further still: it asserts the work as rooted in truth, yet warns against concluding every detail is true. In the opening poem, Whittall writes of the “types of uncertainty I can abide by,” as though the precarity of truth were a literary necessity. Similarly, she asserts, “I can’t choose safety as an artist.” For Whittall, to make art is to walk where there is no sure footing—and, perhaps, without the handrails of rigid genre norms. Or, as she says elsewhere, “I may be in control, but I am untethered.” The paradox of poetry as autofiction works here because it’s prose poetry; it’s already a generic hybrid. And the genres have much in common. When Whittall describes autofiction as “a book of ideas,” “mostly style and feelings,” she might equally be describing prose poetry.
Cover of No Credit River by Zoe Whittall with "BOOK REVIEW" written across the front.
Precarity of Life: Ambrose Albert interviews Jade Wallace Fellow fall issue #232 contributor Ambrose Albert talks with Jade Wallace about their poems, “Grape” and “Desert Fauna.” They discuss who poems belong to, online censorship, and how losing our autonomy can be more terrifying than death. Jade Wallace (they/them) is a queer and chronically ill poet, novelist, and literary critic.
Desert Fauna Anybody stalking this dead end road wants something—it’s either your horses or you. Told me that before he left for good some five years past and I believed him. Abhor the gun but the pockets of my jeans never want for rocks. Morning cuts the sky open to show me a stranger. I stop twenty paces back to take stock. His chin is dropped on his folded arms resting atop my paddock gate. His back greets me, his gaze meets the animals’, who abandon their grazing only for a blink before returning. Their shining hides wink at us in the sunlight. My knuckles squeeze white against stone and I call out, Hello, though my meaning is elsewhere. We’re stock-still, quieter than the minute before a quick draw. My God, he says finally, eyes still caught by what’s before him. Aren’t they wonderful? I sidle to him slantwise, ‘til I can see him in profile. His cheeks, his leather boots, are cracking like this arid land, but his hands are too soft for rope. I ease my grip. I’m not afraid of dying, you understand, I’m just not made to be green-broke. This, however, is all right—him talking about the horses as if they don’t belong to me, don’t belong to anyone. Because they don’t—
The Book of Jobs: Poems about Work (edited by Erin Murphy)
Samantha Jones’ debut poetry collection, Attic Rain, is a nuanced articulation of the mindspace of Obsessive-compulsive disorder. Jones uses form—the brevity of haiku, the recurrences of villanelles, the queries of mondos—to make visceral OCD’s reiterative fixations and rituals. Such rituals are conveyed with insightful complexity; they are soothing, grounding, as natural as water moving over the same path repeatedly to make a river, even as the force that propels them is terror. Attic Rain achieves the impressive feat of both portraying and reenvisioning OCD: by drawing it as maps, organizing it into graphs, annotating it as music, and ultimately transforming it into poetry.
The title of Deepa Rajagopalan’s debut short story collection sounds like an exposé of social media celebrity, but it’s so much more. Peacocks of Instagram peels back surfaces to reveal surprising and satisfying depths. Influencer personas are counterpoints in multi-layered lives. There are mothers travelling to India for kidney transplants, spouses misleading each other in dances of infidelity. Rajagopalan throws and pulls problems ordinary as raw clay into 14 glossy, engrossing, interconnected narratives. Amid mundane indignities, her characters find fulfillment glimmering like fresh snow, and slices of righteous revenge as sweet as free cheesecake at a company party.
Villiform Or: Refiguring Our Disabilities as Poetic Constraints Jade Wallace We are confined, the well and the unwell, by the cadenced demands our bodies make. Countable as the beats of a villanelle are the hours that pass until need will compel us to pause and cast for water to slake the thirst that con stricts us, both well and unwell. While we may delay, we cannot dis
"when solutions are concessions to a hegemonic logic, nonsense may become a necessity I want to be a creature inscrutable to a computer 1 w@nt to be a code so 1nconsistent that it’s nothing but 1ntuit1on"