Bad Appendix

By Jen Crawford

Jen Crawford's bad appendix may be the most daring book of poetry published anywhere this year. Crawford often writes about everyday, apparently uncomplicated subjects - a walk down the road, a kiss, a patch of grass with sun on it - but her language is dense and mysterious. Reading bad appendix is like walking through a formal garden that gradually becomes a tangled forest.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Titus Books
• Release date: Aug 20, 2020
• ISBN: 9781877441769

Book preview

driving to hawera, leaving at one

the sky greying up to show

  needles on the road

all pointing in one direction

must be a mistake – look

how the old shed falls

  in the frost stained

paddock it’s pick-up sticks

  it’s everywhich  ’79

& insect flight  the crazy-

  branching macrocarpa

& white

    fissures through

a body

of ice

ahead

arrows

give way

at pumice beach

we move me to a queen

then blink:

you’re gone. small teeth tick; air

pops at the mouth

of this cave, that, I squint

deep to the nests, to the crumbling warmth

of the biscuit self, its falling-into parts,

the dough-roll, the salty crystal sulk

at the hamlet’s eye.

what you didn’t want

you shan’t   see. this 

is a terrible speed,

at which I miss

your telescope wave

your vitreous ease

extending

a tunnel through silence – stars! smooth

as baby molerats, and blind, and bucktoothed –

it’s the dark. we let

our whiskers

talk

the gift

our child draws the sun: circle, two dots for eyes

and the bend of smile he extends, and extends

until it is no longer a bend but an inner circle,

eyes obliterated by the mouth that becomes a whole

from which the first shell falls.

all day light peels down like pencil shavings

and his grubby fingers gleam.

soon I hear him feeding pennies

to an ancient, hungry toy. the melody is sheared

by ball-in-socket squeal;

the clank of iron arm against an iron breast

speaks the ringing night that he was made –

sticks and dust. you loved a painting of hounds and wheels

and foaming horses, sought its ghost

in what he scratched into the earth and found

a blank geometry; repetitions laying claim

to dry fields, as though they went on forever

and he could write them all.

so I loved a songbird

as it rippled my favourite line to death,

dissolved the links between the notes

until they fell like unstrung beads

and my fingers misread keys into

a tune I