Gabrielle Tse's Guest Reader Picks
Each issue, we invite guest readers from Scotland’s BPoC writing community to help curate Gutter. For issue #29, we were thrilled to work with Gabrielle Tse, a poet whose experience and work has appeared in ArtAsiaPacific, Interpret Magazine, The Hong Kong Review, and Outcrop Poetry. In today’s blog, she reflects on three of her favourite poems from the issue, and her experience working with Gutter.
*
A lot of things in life can be quite poetic, like seeing cows outside your train window. While working for Gutter, I made a number of train trips to Glasgow, and as a city girl from Hong Kong, seeing animals next to my train was very exciting. Passengers of all ages, as though by reflex, would collectively pause their conversations to exclaim ‘cow!’ or ‘horse!’ Satiated, still alert, they’d then turn to watch the animals recede from view. It’s a bit like reading poetry. A poem gives name to everyday wonder, and when you finish reading, you look up to find that everything’s somehow off-kilter. I would like to take this opportunity to highlight three wonderful poems from my stack of submissions.
The first is Colin McGuire’s ‘Boy Assassin’, which mourns a young would-be assassin of Mussolini. With cinematic sensitivity, McGuire frames a world about to burst open at its seams: ‘[y]ou shot at Mussolini as flowers fell / across the open car’. A mediation on brutality and its incessant ‘coming round / the corners’, ‘Boy Assassin’ feels particularly fitting for the present moment.
The second is Devki Panchmatia’s ‘Watch What Was and Put It Down Like A Dog’, which describes love and loss with aching intensity: ‘Like an axe quits / a gleaming pair of hands, … that’s / exactly what it’s like / when you’ve lost it.’ Panchmatia’s imagery is daring, intuitive: she writes, for example, of the ‘blue fingerwidth’ of memory that ‘shudder[s] and recede[s]’, a line breathtaking in its tenderness and visual acuity.
The third is ‘Appā meets my wife’ by Gayathiri Kamalakanthan. At first, the poem’s matter-of-fact tone doesn’t reveal anything unusual about the hospital scene it depicts. But the poem is as devastating as it is gentle. About the tensions between queer love and traditional family dynamics, the poem grieves the all-consuming ‘sickness … we’ve lived with our whole lives’.
The first few weeks as Guest Reader were quite surreal. I don’t think I’ve ever read poetry so intensely and in such bulk before! (A good friend of mine actually photographed the moment I finished reading the submissions – the look on my face could only be described as a sort of beleaguered satisfaction). In the beginning, I had a slight worry that reading so many works in such a short amount of time would dull my eye, in the way noses become jaded after sniffing too many different perfumes in one sitting. But this didn’t happen: enjoyment is heightened by repeated reflection, and the delight of finding a good poem just never gets old.
Throughout these few months, I also learned a lot about the inner workings of a literary magazine. Each issue is a labour of love, a culmination of many, many hours of hard work and lengthy discussions. I’m inspired by everyone in the Gutter team and their dedication to literature, and feel very lucky to have had the chance to work alongside them.