To read about a feeling one has experienced in language that is both accurate and original can bewilder us into a kind of liberation. This is one of the amazing powers of poetry. It frees us not from the feeling itself, but from the isolation it can be mired in: “I feel that way too.” jaz papadopoulos is a writer and artist based in British Columbia, and their first poetry collection is full of such power—it’s utterly arresting.
A lot of food
went bad that week. (33)
i feel that way too revolves around rape culture and sexual assault, and papadopoulos’s treatment of these themes is multifaceted as well as engrossing. The book is divided into a number of sections that take us from ironic advice and critical analysis to vulnerable subjectivity, then to a formative youthful experience and finally to a love story delivered via an absurdist reworking of self-care language.
When the trial hits the radio
I shut off like an oven light (43)
The Jian Ghomeshi trial, in which the Canadian celebrity was accused and acquitted of numerous counts of sexual assault, was one of the impetuses for this collection. In the opening pages, papadopoulos applies critical analysis to data and historical precedents related to misogyny, sexual assault, and the Canadian justice system to demonstrate how women are groomed by a society to be victims of—and blame themselves for—sexual assault. papadopoulos’s calm, assertive discourse is utterly damning. Through it they create an informed atmosphere in which to read the book while also inserting images and words that repeat throughout the collection and reveal a personal stake.
In the later poems, cool irony is replaced by vulnerable subjectivity. A tender narrator describes their experience of trauma with a guilelessness that is startling. Trauma cleaves the person experiencing it from their regulated place in the empirical world. papadopoulous shows how things that should serve us simply don’t anymore: beds become glue traps, heads become balloons that float away, handles grab back at hands. The originality of papadopoulos’s writing is extremely powerful—their imagery is imbued with the freshness of shock.
Dawn comes
to the softest parts (91)
papadopoulos seems ambivalent towards the self-help industrial complex but values the ethos of care and paying attention. The penultimate section begins with an absurdist mash-up of mindfulness prompts and obscure archetypes. It’s a detox that makes way for love poems. The protagonist is falling in love with themselves and this is a release. The “I” shifts to “we” and the poems revolve around people in a relationship, tender encounters, and reciprocal care. Love, sex, and surviving do not diminish vulnerability, but in these final poems they show deeply set strength. On the last page, a lucid dream is described in which the dreamer conjures a former self and in an idyllic landscape “we unlatch our mouths and scream.” Anger, release, joy—here is a person united with their pain and their strength. They are not diminished, neither are they heroic. For papadopolous, writing provided them with the thing they yearned for—connection, expression, a listener. And for others caught in sickening nets of awfulness, their pages can provide the balm of recognition, as well as the irreverent bravery to hope.
Standing in the ocean at sunset
I dare myself to get all the way cold.
I close my eyes, imagine my pelvis
buoyant, radiant as the moon full of wishes. (87)