Poetry zine, Jacob Wren, Paper Pusher, Paperpusher.ca, $10
Someone who doesn’t experience or understand pleasure, according to Jacob Wren, is someone who has lost faith in poetry. He makes this clear in the collection’s titular poem, along with the central claims that poetry is “something marginal and irrelevant,” incapable of instigating change, let alone pleasure. At the same time, the poems, in which he ironically communicates his disenchantment, are nevertheless poignant and rather quite elegiac. Instead of demonstrating the failure of poetry that he claims, Wren makes it beautiful, introverted, while distant, and thus renders his existential anxiety as something fashionable rather than something actually disconcerting. Contrary to avant-garde predecessors who suffered the same anxieties — the Dadaist, surrealist, L.A.N.G.U.A.G.E poets — and nevertheless created from despair, Wren merely complains. His lines seem to derive directly from anti-capitalist manifestos, with an all-encompassing anomic sensibility piercing through each syllable and punctuation point. SWDEP is however, an honest portrayal of the current state of poetry, bemoaning the futility of language even at this very late point in the game. (Annie Wong)