“Split” by Juana Adcock (Blue Diode Press, 2019)

A Poetry Book Society Choice. Poems from The Dark Horse, etc. Over 150 people are named in the acknowledgements.

The book begins with "The serpent dialogues" - 26 fragmented pages of Woman and Snake in dialogue, with footnote-asides. This is Day 25 - "I post a selfie// take myself sweetly// to the altar/or the stage// bring myself flowers/and rain". There's also

• "Religion was not created to repress desire. It’s just there to help guide it and use it " (p.12). Does the serpent really think that it's just there for that?
• "All we’ve/ ever/ really/ wanted/ is/ to be seen.// To be scene:/ watched, contemplated/ accepted" (p.25)
• "The broken musical instruments/ their tune like the skeleton/ of a mouse in formaldehyde" (p.26). In what sense?

On p.46 what does "the roe/ behind my neck where the row is the roe is the row is the roe that gestates" mean?

I think "Stellar's Use of Verbs ..." is a 2.5 page bore.

I like parts of the 6 page “Letters to Global South”. I know it’s not all meant to be subtle, but too much isn't. Several lines are trendily crossed out. I like more of “On Love and Dying Languages” but again her tipping-point determining whether a line merits inclusion isn’t the same as mine.

I’m puzzled by some simpler lines too – in “Lines of Algebra” there’s “I lay awake,/ a Tibetan hungry ghost/ whispering grains/ of sand:// one by/ one/ falling/ from my lips/ to his ear”. Why all the line breaks? Who is whispering grains? Whose ear do they fall into? Are the characters supposed to be confused? Is "I" the ghost?

How are readers supposed to interpret “the way a bubble full of water bursts” (p.83)? What is surrounding the bubble? Is "bubble" the right word?

“We light one word         with the previous like a chain smoker” (p.92) is an idea that's been used before (for a start, I think Armitage used it about line-breaks). And why the gap?

I like the approach of “Thirteen ways of inhabiting a language” – bits of poetry and essay using several languages – Scots, Spanish, etc. 9 pages though - I think it could have been far shorter.

Other reviews

• James Herring (I found some of the writing self-indulgent and was not as impressed by the opening section)
• Sandeep Parmar
• Arianne Maki (Adcock’s pauses then, can be read as deliberate testaments to the work of these unsung everyday heroes, many of whom are women of colour — a demographic all too quickly silenced in anti-capitalist discourse. ... Adcock assumes her final role as magician, turning blank space into reflections of the world around us.)