
Doubt and Safety: A review of Samantha Jones' Site Orientation
My interest in Samantha Jones’ Site Orientation stems first of all from my own lifetime of experiences with OCD, and my interest in considering OCD through poetic form. Although every obsessive compulsive’s themes (what we obsess over), triggers (what prompts an obsession or compulsion), and rituals (the compulsive routines one does to manage OCD anxiety) are different, this chapbook speaks to my own sense of overwhelming danger and the unsolvable need to check, to fix, to “make right” the world around me. I touch stove burners eight sets of eight times; I check my sleeping pets for signs of breathing; I often need to return home shortly after leaving just to check that the door is locked an additional eight times. All of these rituals stem from deep anxieties about the unpredictability of the world and my own experience of it. They are ways to keep overwhelming chaos and uncertainty at bay for even a moment. OCD experiences close down the world and often force one to stay at home, close to the things that require checking, close by if the imagined disaster occurs, and away from a world of greater danger and uncertainty. Site Orientation speaks to this experience of the world, especially the domestic world, as unpredictable and dangerous, and in need of constant vigilance.
Site Orientation speaks to this experience of the world, especially the domestic world, as unpredictable and dangerous, and in need of constant vigilance.
Site Orientation takes up Safety Data Sheets, used to designate hazardous material at worksites, as a poetic form. The chapbook centres on experiences of obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD) and anxiety, and it orders these experiences thematically as each triggering scenario receives its own “Safety Sheet.” Each page of the chapbook contains “Product and Company Information,” which lists objects of fixation, such as “Attic,” “Cords and plugs,” “Interpersonal interaction,” and “Door locks.” Jones also created symbols that indicate the types of associated hazards for the chapbook, such as “Intense worry,” “Creating scenarios,” and “Repeated checking,” among others. Below the data sheet information that orients the OCD trigger and its accompanying reassurance, each “Hazard(s) Identification” section contains a brief lineated poem. These poems serve as associative and experiential commentary on the trigger, and detail the process of obsessively fixating on, and compulsively addressing, each item or scenario.

Although presented through the form of factual and pragmatic statements of hazard, each page in Site Orientation develops the maddeningly internalized logic of obsessive-compulsive experience. The widely used data sheet format becomes a way to represent and recreate the lived experience of OCD as an ever-present danger. Although the reader encounters an identifiable poem at the bottom of each page, the chapbook forces one to consider the entire Safety Data Sheet as a poetic object. It employs associative visuality and subjective categorization that develop and establish the context for the lyric expression of anxiety and worry. Site Orientation demands engagement from the reader through the need to flip between data sheet and symbol interpretation key. The resulting connections in information develop a picture of OCD.
Conventional data sheets provide a clear and detailed plan for managing threats to physical wellbeing. Site Orientation shifts this focus to the mental world of obsessions and compulsions, and the ways we might soothe anxious distress. In the poem associated with “Cords and plugs,” for example, the speaker gives themselves advice, stating:
ground yourself
you’re going to need it
when the lights go out
and the room starts swirling
grab hold of your anchor
As the grounding of a surge protector resonates with self-soothing techniques to calm an anxious mind spiralling into a fixation, the anchor promises a firm tie to the material surety of the world. Yet, as anyone with OCD can tell you, the relief one gets from checking or fixing a source of anxiety is always transient and demands further checking and fixing. A later poem, on the subject of “Door locks,” reminds that
a quick jiggle, should do the trick,
don’t let it do the trick
of convincing you
to start over
The “trick” here serves as both the solution—“a quick jiggle”—and the nagging worry that makes one “start over.” The mind and its ability to rationalize, assess, and memorize is presented as both the solution to OCD anxiety and the source of its power. Rationalization becomes a repetitive trick that holds one tight in a loop of compulsive action.
Rationalization becomes a repetitive trick that holds one tight in a loop of compulsive action.
OCD changes the world around us. It heightens assessments of threat, reduces memory as the anxious mind flits around frantically, and deprives us of the experience of a preventative action feeling completed. Even if I’ve checked the stove eight sets of eight times, when I leave the apartment, I still have a nagging doubt that I didn’t complete that check of the stove at all. On the safety sheet’s hazard statement for “Attic,” Jones writes, “is there anything there / if you never check?” The form of the safety sheets lends a sense of objectivity to individual and internalized reactions to the world, but this objectivity is fleeting. In The Literary and Linguistic Construction of OCD: No Ordinary Doubt, Patricia Friedrich writes that OCD “can throw one’s brain into a never-ending loop in which doubt cannot be resolved. Worse than ‘doing something wrong’ is never really knowing if [one] actually did” (6). The repetitive loops are generated through doubts, fears, and language. Site Orientation presents such loops and their internal contradictions as poetically generative, if personally frustrating.
The formal conceit of the safety data sheet in Site Orientation draws out the absurdity of OCD’s over-application of logic and repetition, but it also highlights the devastatingly constant vigilance required of the obsessive compulsive. We seek a sense of surety, and the safety sheet ironically offers us the ambiguity of poetry; we seek an organized and objective model for dealing with an unpredictable world, and Site Orientation offers us a speaker’s individualized taxonomy for navigating distress. “Stick to the script,” the poem at the bottom of the sheet for “Household item in need of repair” advises, since “you may never achieve consensus.” Jones employs lyric poetry’s voicing of the internal and the experiential as an analogue of intense and disruptive OCD anxiety. The speaker addresses themselves from within an ongoing experience. In Site Orientation, Jones imagines a hyper-specific world of warnings externalized as a public safety statement, putting the reader in the place of the person living with OCD, an undoubtedly new experience for many readers.
The language and logic of OCD might appear absurd and easily dismissed to those who do not experience it firsthand. The “emergency contact” section of each entry reflects typical responses from the normative world to OCD anxieties. These responses state flimsy and rote reassurances, such as “I’m sure it’s fine,” “Don’t stress,” and “Stop worrying.” If the emergency contacts cannot understand the gravity of the anxiety or the overriding squeal of doubt and worry, one is stuck inside the experience, inside the fear. As much as the safety data sheet offers an externalized expression for these fears and worries, the text, too, remains at a critical distance from a wider world of normative logic.
Site Orientation is an innovative and well-crafted work, published in a manner that brilliantly accentuates its formal conceit. The Blasted Tree presents this chapbook as a vertically opening full-page pamphlet bound by two metallic rivets. It has a plain red cardstock cover without cover image, and a protective plastic sheet. As a material object, the chapbook feels industrial and functional, much as workplace safety documents are usually presented. Site Orientation’s physical form accentuates the conceptual form of the text, creating an immersive reading experience.
The sites of Site Orientation are the spaces of OCD experience: domestic and mental spaces where one finds many of these triggers and fixations, and where one might feel trapped for fear of something happening, something going wrong. The internal mental loops in the routines in domestic space vibrate with an anxious poetics. Site Orientation externalizes the experience of OCD, rendering it visible as a formalized system for the general readership.
On the page for “Door locks,” the external “Emergency Response” counsels to “Just let it go.” Yet OCD is, unfortunately, often a chronic and debilitating condition, and Site Orientation is not a poetry project that offers easy solutions. Rather, communication, language, and the immersion of poetic experience move readers toward a better understanding of a widely misunderstood condition. The page for “Door locks” acknowledges that it will “trigger extreme back and forth” and the only solution, from within OCD anxiety, is to “plan accordingly.” In Site Orientation, Jones offers a compelling and accurate formal structure for imagining states of obsessive-compulsive distress in poetry.