Edmonton AB: Red Nettle Press, 2009.
Limited edition of 40. $25.00
Reviewed by rob mclennan

Exploring the differences and distances between the genders, the collaborative chapbook on bondage, by Lainna Lane El Jabi and Trisia Eddy, begins with a quote by May Sinclair from her “The Three Sisters”:

He hated to think that she should know any joy that had not its beginning and its end with him. It took her from him. As long as it lasted he was faced with an incomprehensible and monstrous rivalry.
And as a man might leave a woman to his uninteresting rival in the certainty that she will be bored and presently return to him, Rowcliffe left Gwenda to the earth and moon. He sulked and was silent.
Then, suddenly, he made up his mind.

Composed in Edmonton and produced by Eddy’s own Red Nettle Press, is this aphoristic sequence a long poem or an essay on women held captive, whether through men or through culture (arguably the same thing, given the period)? In terms of style, the chapbook on bondage carries a very Victorianesque image on the cover, yet depicting a corseted woman with eyes and head turned away, becoming absorbed with the extended right arm of a gentleman caller, tentacles spliced together from his through her left hand and forearm. Is this an essay on the period itself, beginning with Sinclair, the pseudonym of Mary Amelia St. Clair (1863 – 1946) who was, as well as the one who came up with the literary term “stream of consciousness,” an active member of the Woman Writers’ Suffrage League in her native London?

This beautifully produced chapbook is composed of twenty-two lines, each including footnote (and parenthesis), and a brief interruption in the middle, written out as a collection of direct statements. As the website press release reads, “on bondage is an experimental collaboration incorporating a romance of alter egos against the backdrop of the Great London Exhibition of 1851, the unbound aphorism, and disrupted ideas of gender.” But is the unbinding in the aphorism or the tension between the period, being bound, and the contemporary?

Whatever evil a man may think of women, those are characteristics of his own soul⁷, for you are nobody if not in fashion.

________________________
⁷ plucking, smooth scandal face (graying visage, p. 139)

This is a collection of aphorisms that work their way through the Victorian treatments of women, writing out the tensions and imbalances between the genders during an infamous period of forced female docility. As the “Victorian Lady Detective” in every episode of the extremely subversive Aaagh! It’s the Mr. Hell Show (2001-2002) said, “Alas, I am but a woman,” these pieces push hard against the idea, and seem to exist exactly within the tensions between the aphorisms themselves, and the adept, particled footnotes.

Both have been publishing in little journals here and there for a couple of years, working together briefly as part of the editorial board of the literary journal Other Voices, both appearing in publications such as The Garneau Review, The Peter F. Yacht Club, and chapbooks produced through Edmonton’s Olive Reading Series as well as in various other publications, including Rob Budde’s stonestone, ditch: the poetry that matters and ottawater. Eddy’s work has even appeared in the chapbook what if there’s no weather (2007), and collaborative (with myself) recycled cities (2008), both appearing as well with her Red Nettle Press.

With a publication so intricately made, limited to a forty-copy edition that I know hasn’t completely been produced, that I wonder, perhaps, if this magnificent collaboration falls victim to its own success and labour-intensive process. As the press release tells, on bondage is “Printed on Somerset acid-free, 100% cotton rag paper, with archival quality ink. Handbound with satin ribbon using classic Japanese stab binding. Original screenprints on cover and fabric / text insert, enhanced with Japanese Chiyogami paper.” Is there an irony to creating something on bondage that then catches the authors/publisher in a similar bind, holding something so beautiful and worthy back, or is this entirely deliberate, a commentary of a further kind?

Men who marry wives of money are very much themselves an object¹⁶ of superior currency.
________________________

¹⁶ holds mind, vice (songbirds, p. 413)

Bio
Born in Ottawa, Canada’s glorious capital city, rob mclennan currently lives in Ottawa. The author of some twenty trade books of poetry, fiction and non-fiction, his most recent titles are the poetry collections gifts (Talonbooks), a compact of words (Salmon Poetry, Ireland), kate street (Moira, Chicago Il), wild horses (University of Alberta Press) and a second novel, missing persons (The Mercury Press). An editor and publisher, he runs above/ground press, Chaudiere Books (with Jennifer Mulligan), seventeen seconds: a journal of poetry and poetics (ottawater.com/seventeenseconds) and the Ottawa poetry pdf annual ottawater (ottawater.com). He spent the 2007-8 academic year in Edmonton as writer-in-residence at the University of Alberta, and regularly posts reviews, essays, interviews and other notices at robmclennan.blogspot.com. He will be spending much of the next year in Toronto.