Split

Juana Adcock
Blue Diode Press

Juana Adcock’s English poetry debut is a tender exploration of language and life in our contemporary world. Her ruminations on transculturalism, technology and late capitalism cast a poetic eye across modern schisms with ease and grace. Exporing these phenomena, Adcock’s experience as a linguist and translator allows her to spotlight the word with calm ferocity.

Her experimentation with form lends itself to her themes, multiplying potential readings through a variety of structures. Take, for example, ‘Il Mago Guarda’. Stanzas are sequentially aligned left or right, carving a centred zig-zag of blank page. As you read, your eyes move down and across until the zig-zag becomes a falling spiral, or a silent thread. 

This thread appears everywhere throughout Split, provoking a quiet dialogue within and between poems. It’s either referenced, like in ‘The Serpent Dialogues’, or takes centre-stage, as in ‘Skirt of Snakes’:

the statue
of Coatlicue
wears a skirt of woven snakes
a necklace of human hearts and hands
her breasts heavy from gravidanza
the clasp of her belt a skull.

This quietness, representing unseen, ignored connections, speaks volumes. The threads in the hems of your sleeves are easily forgotten, but in those threads are the lives of labourers. 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. 

Silence also plays a key part in ‘Steller’s Use of Verbs When Describing the Sea Cow, Hunted to Extinction within 27 Years of its Discovery by Europeans. De Bestiis Marinis, 1751’. A found poem composed almost exclusively of verbs, omissions point to two of language’s almost paradoxical traits: incompetency and immediacy. No words can ever fully represent the extinction of the sea cow, we get a feel for the intangible: the devastation caused by colonial pursuits.

Adcock is builder and seamstress. As she weaves together seemingly contradictory parts, she paves the foundations for a new language of resistance. While anti-capitalist poetry formed from blunt statements and capital letters is necessary, it is refreshing to see the subject handled with sensitivity and lyricism. 

Adcock assumes her final role as magician, turning blank space into reflections of the world around us. She redefines feminised labour as heroic and the mundane as extraordinary. Text is twirled into sound, image, brick and bridge. For anyone interested in a different take on work and word, Split is a necessary read.

—Arianne Maki