I found this a hard book to read. At first I thought it might be because I was missing something — there was something I wasn’t getting. But then I realized there is nothing here to get. The images exist each for itself, they don’t connect or lead toward or away from each other. Verschraegen just fires them off at random. As she says in her Forward, “the words are actually blood and dreams and guts and tears and insides, laid out on a white bond tablecloth.” It’s the illusion of unity caused by the “tablecloth” that causes the confusion. The white bond paper, the staples holding things together, the pagination — all these things conspire to elicit a sense of purpose which, at bottom, does not exist. This is a machine-gun massacre of a book, and trying to read it is like trying to reconstruct the bodies after they’ve been splattered against the wall.
chapbook / 27 pages / Publisher: jeremiad / Main Creator: Jen Verschraegen / free / 66 Lindsey Ave., Toronto, ON, M6H 1E3