Review: Biometrical by Emily Osborne // Jeremy Luke Hill

The cover of Emily Osborne's poetry chapbook Biometrical, from Anstruther Press, features an image of a stylized fingerprint, which I think is an apt metaphor for the quality of Osborne’s poetry, characterized as it is by the intricate textures of its language. Taking up subjects as diverse as diacriticals, isolation, and migraines, Osborne’s poems attend closely to the sound and tissue of the words they employ, drawing unexpected aural connections between them. These connections are made most obviously with closely related internal rhymes, as in the prose poem “Four Drawers,” where Osborne writes, “a magician’s box, in cryptic pockets wadding socks and tops,” layering three instances of near rhyme (and one of slant rhyme) in close proximity. The next poem, “Brute Facts,” provides another example, this time more subtle and broadly spaced, reading: "I know nothing ex nihilo moves / mountains, that their vectors poured / red through necks of seared earth." Here, ‘ex,’ ‘vector,’ and ‘necks’ echo each other through the stanza, with ‘red’ adding to the assonance if not the near rhyme. However, much of Osborne’s aural play is more subtle than this. In “Diacritics” she writes, “but now we carve grave and caret,” constructing the line so that ‘grave’ plays immediately on the second syllable of ‘carve’ and then ‘caret’ plays on the first syllable, forming a delicate interplay between the three words. “Four Drawers” contains a similar construction, where Osborne writes, “In sullen summers you will not open, rollers swollen.” In this case it’s the latter word, 'swollen,’ that has its second syllable patterned in ‘sullen’ and its first in ‘roller.’ In this case also, the aural effect is heightened further by the sibilant alliteration between ‘sullen,’ ‘summer,’ and ‘swollen’ and by the unstressed rhymes of ‘sullen,’ ‘open,’ and ‘swollen.’ These kinds of techniques give a subtle textural quality to the poems in Biometrical, where the words seem to interpenetrate each other, becoming ever less discrete, ever more hybridized. Everything rubs up against everything else, laying out almost tactile motifs of sound and meaning, inviting the reader to look past the unity of the finger to the complex multiplicity of the fingerprint.

Jeremy Luke Hill is the publisher at Gordon Hill Press, a literary publisher based in Guelph, Ontario. He is also the Managing Director of Vocamus Writers Community, a non-profit community organization that supports book culture in Guelph. He has written a collection of poetry, short prose, and photography called Island Pieces; three chapbooks of poetry called CanCon, Trumped, and These My Streets; two poetry broadsheets called “Grounded” and “Indexical”; and an ongoing series of poetry broadsheets called “Conversations with Viral Media.” He also writes a semi-regular column on chapbooks for The Town Crier. His writing has appeared in The Bull Calf, CV2, EVENT Magazine, Filling Station, Free Fall, The Goose, HA&L, The Maynard, paperplates, Queen Mob’s Tea House, The Rusty Toque, The Town Crier, and The Windsor Review.