Review: 7,2 by Prathna Lor & Pleasure Dome Poems by Cody Caetano // Jeremy Luke Hill
Toronto chapbook publisher knife | fork | book may only have been around since 2016, but it’s already established itself sufficiently to launch a new imprint called What Queer Reading, edited by Toronto poet Fan Wu. The first releases in the imprint are 7,2 by Prathna Lor and Pleasure Dome Poems by Cody Caetano, both printed on Antique Zephyr Laid paper with hot pink titles on otherwise stark white covers.7,2 is a petite volume, just 24 pages in length and measuring only 4.25” x 7.5.” Its contents are similarly sparse. Many of Lor’s poems run only a few lines, and one of them (the only one beneath a title—“Love Poem”) is a mere four words long. Even the longer poems are structured as composites of brief, discrete images, connected more by proximity than by unified meaning. They attempt less to form an intellectually coherent whole, than to provoke a sense of climate or condition.Perhaps because of this sparsity and disconnected meaning, and certainly because of its attention to rhythm, the poetry in 7,2 often sounds like an incantation, like a language just slightly too foreign or ancient or mystical for satisfactory understanding. Take, for example, the following passage:
morning blends a soft locktriple jump into high stakesloaves cantaloupe mooning the firstanimus – dreaming in slow moving light.
There is little by way of denotative meaning to be found here, little by way of aural device, little by way of defined image. All the energy of these lines derives from their lilting rhythm and the proximity of their dream-like, undefined images. They strike the ear as an otherworldly invocation.
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Caetano’s Pleasure Dome Poems appears at first to be a much different kind of book than 7,2. Not only is it physically bigger in both dimension and page length, but its poems and even its individual lines are also longer. The poetry is robust, full of energy and word play, as in the opening lines of the book:
If only this THC and Portuguese rotisserie didn’t bake me and my cats back to when they were kitties, or make my brain pics pretty as a pixel-eyed fly with fruit gusher vision
The frequent rhyme here, and the repeated use of the spondaic foot—“bake me,” “brain pics,” “eyed fly”—creates a driving rhythm, which is further propelled by the through-line of the narrative voice that Caetano uses here and in many of the volume’s other poems. Beneath these obvious differences, however, Pleasure Dome Poems is similar to 7,2 in that it too is often more concerned with creating a sensibility rather than a legibility. Even if it is in point of fact more legible, Caetano’s poetry is like Lor’s in that it is unafraid to discard coherence in the service of creating a particular sense or atmosphere, as when he writes,
cries an earwig in its cozy baby caverns between cottage cheese walls
These kinds of lines ally Caetano’s poems more closely with Lor’s than a first impression might suggest, and this commonality between the two poets is perhaps a reflection of Fan Wu’s editorial impulse. On his Academia profile, Wu’s tagline reads, “more palpable than legible,” which is an apt description of the place where his first two selections for the What Queer Reading series overlap most closely, and perhaps an indication of the editorial eye that he brings to Knife | Fork | Book’s new imprint.
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; four chapbooks of poetry called Poetry of Thought, 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.
