Nat Raha, apparitions (nines)

 

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grrrl // if we arecitizens
of nowhere, a threat tothe tone &
image;; composed / lacecute
we divine femmes no hereto disse
-ct your impositions >>
so late in the day, barkorgans
in casual violence: yourpleasure
excruciate living / &
the beauty about oureyelines

Thelatest from Edinburgh, Scotland-based “poet and activist-scholar” Nat Raha isthe poetry title apparitions (nines) (New York NY: Nightboat Books,2024), a fragmented, fractalled, book-length sequence. This collection wascomposed, as she writes in her four-page “Afterword,” “during a periodexperienced as temporal reversal, rupture and compression, 2017-2021. On June14th, 2017, seventy-two people—the majority of who were Black andbrown—were killed in the fire at Grenfell Tower, a twenty-four-story apartmentblock in West London. For many of us engaged in housing struggles, and in theradical history of London and the UK from anti-racist and anti-colonialperspectives, Grenfell was the amalgam of everything we knew regarding the ‘organizedabandonment’ and neglect that comes with private property oriented towardsmaximizing profits and a state that considers poor Black and brown people,especially Muslims, to be disposable.”

Setin nine sections of nine, each poem-fragment comprised of nine lines, offeringstaccato and stagger of word fragments, twisted syntax, and flagrantpunctuation and hesitations, she writes small moments, accumulated andelectrified, punctuated and piercing. “detached / formulaic / our / saturateeyes / chroma,” she writes, as part of “[ iii/7 ],” “-tic , brittle  , split, flaked w/out [.]” Her poems are expressive,and gestural, blending lines and references from other sources when required,whether a poem “after Anne Boyer,” or “with lines from Frank O’Hara’s‘Homosexuality’,” as Raha’s accumulations provide a layering effect acrossher narratives around social upheavals, human requirements and demanding,despite capitalism, that humans treat each other with at least a modicum of respectand dignity. “schema di/vesting black & brown / breath burnt ab/andoned /nest synthetic pale on pray / screech bitter salvation prized,” she writes,through the poem “[ vi/6 ],” “light disdain calls benevolent / neoliberal tearscellular / carbon based/carbon torn / stones & plaster time contained tofail // continues its ordinary [.]” Her narratives, as apparitions, shift withthe difference of light, of shadow, as she closes her “Afterword”:

            The poetics of the last one hundred plus years have demonstratedpoetry’s power as a direct mode of communication that can cut through times ofdiatribes and violence. The niner is a form attuned to speed and constraint. Theyare brief containers to feel through, polemicize, and remember—to communicatethe stakes of the everyday harassment and structural violence that are thelives of ourselves, our friends and our loves. For possibility, contradisposability. They shed light on the glitter and heat of our creopolitian,queer, and trans lives, in and through their collective formations.

Thepoems are staccato, and highly structured, as visual as they are performative,and I’d be curious to hear how any reading of these pieces would hold to thevisual notations sparked across these pages. As she writes at the opening, in“A NOTE ON THE FORM”:

The niner is acontemporary form of the nine-line poem, typically in sequences of nine poems.More recently, the niner consists of lines of nine syllables and/or othernumerical orderings in the number of sounds or words related to the numbernine.
            Coined by the poet Mendoza and adopted by variousinnovative writers, the niner is seemingly a “sonnot,” resembling a sonnetwhile radically departing from its conventions; a perverse sounding that adoptsa masochistic containment. In this book, the nine-syllable line reads as abrash, punk, or post-punk response to the metrics of Anglophone verse. The formhas allowed for experiment and study in dialect and accent, and their effectupon the language, contained in a line of nine syllables or beats.