Unmeaningable

By Roxanna Bennett

Winner of the 2020 Trillium Book Award for Poetry and the 2020 Raymond Souster Award, Unmeaningable welcomes you to the freak show, where the monster on display is a culture that stigmatizes sickness and a system that shames the sufferer. Behold the wonder of the ages, a human mind in a human body, dissected and displayed for entertainment. Witness the ritual of surgical sacrifice! Observe the indignity of institutionalization! Be astounded by the indifference of ableism and ignorance! This uncanny collection of “crippled” sonnets features a thrilling display of cannibals, chimeras, and the crucial question: What meaning can be made of a life lived in pain and isolation?

• Language: English
• Publisher: Gordon Hill Press
• Release date: Sep 1, 2019
• ISBN: 9781928171843

Roxanna Bennett

The disabled poem-making entity known as Roxanna Bennett gratefully resides on Indigenous land. They are the author of The Untranslatable I (Gordon Hill Press, 2021) and the award-winning Unmeaningable(Gordon Hill Press, 2019).

Book preview

The Trick

Let me be a poet of cripples not

a patient etherized upon a table,

not a brain floating within a body.

In a moment I must be a body

in the place incision produces in a body,

previously intact. Inert, poor body,

inarticulate. Pain flees from the word pain.

Between meaning and the unmeaningable

is the trick of thinking I can fix what I can name.

Inertia insists on comfortable

contraries, less on chastened patients.

Let me be any other word, any other body:

stone, swan, sycamore. Perform patience

full time; retirement a normate luxury

I will not be afforded. My need to mean

alien to the pain, yet I remain, unseen.

Bag of Holding

for TMZ

My need to mean alien to the pain,

yet I remain, unseen. I use words

but what occurs is the ontic, sustained

state of ­– This bag of holding holds worlds

not mine but hers, minefields, Mercury,

mothering. Can a body think, can a body be

a protagonist? Outside lives are inconsistent,

uncontrolled. Routinely hide need, insist

on routine. Argue with myself, this body

needs outside. Need, regret, go solo. So sorry

all acts mean nothing. No shame in need,

yet seem less alive when not believed

to be in need. I am sorry no one is sorry. No, this

body can’t leave. So sorry you understand this.

Waiting List

for TMZ

No, this body can’t leave. I am sorry

anybody understands this spectrum

of failing the spectacle. I am sorry

for invasive intakes, speculums,

slipped discs, staircases, September.

I am sorry for landlords, lost bus passes,

side effects, editors, icebergs. Remember

being a person, or performing what passes.

What passes is self’s need to be fixed

or named. Names for states of loss,

for mothering like mourning being missed.

Is it better to be patient. Want less

if I leave I lean towards losing. Can’t stand.

Losing. What would I be losing if I left.

Waiting Room

What would I be losing if I left but

the next invasive intake, the next

skeptical examiner, the next cut

that leaves another scar, the next

bargaining for the next ineffective

anodyne, the next vain elective

abscission, the next insurance claim,

the next question that causes shame,

the next cursory callous checklist,

the next remote rejection. The next

hour spent enduring the next cyst

rupturing, the next test, the next test,

the next stranger’s failure to explain.

"Reason, Reason" is my middle name.

My Toad Oracle

Reason, Reason is my middle name,

between rocks and a bent net caught

on a cracked ribcage. Reason is pain

that flees the word pain. Pain we allot

to reason, without which, unnamed,

I am left, unfixed. Resistance is futile,

like stones, swans, sycamores. Shame

a fixture like churches that specialize

in gold. Gold chokes the river, gold guards

the white tower, gold strangles the garden

we buried you in, O Heart, the wards

are wearing off, the warden