The Poem's Imperfect Groundsmen

Lotte L.S. , ENDS: Selected Poems: Auric Press (US), Veer2 (UK), 2025

Reviewed by Khashayar "Kess" Mohammadi

Its hard for me to begin speaking of a book like ENDS: Selected Poems. In a way the act of the review works best for me (and I'm sure many others) as a reverse performance, where the personality of the reviewer dissolves in its due processes. I think of reviewers often as servers in a restaurant, who are there to provide the diner with a performance, and any act of upstaging diminishes that experience for them. But what to do, when the author herself, has staged the entire book as a reverse performance, leaving space for the reader to germinate with their own thoughts?

Lotte L.S. begins the book with:

"As certain as there is cum on the pillowcase

she could not                           see to see"

And with two easy lines, the book that could've been is put aside in service to the book that has materialized in the actual. The book on the certainty of the "cum on the pillowcase" has been written many times before, even by a previous Lotte L.S. perhaps. It has been finished and discarded all so it can move aside to make room for the book we hold now where:

"and the lyric waited

for the lyricism to begin"

ENDS: Selected Poems, is a process of feeding inner complexities into the simplicity of form. In the Summer of 2021, while interviewing Canadian anticolonial poet Canisia Lubrin on the often perceived "Opacity" of her writing, I received an answer that I often quote when facing challenging works of poetry.

Lubrin told me: "If poetry is transparent, it is leading you to what you already know" and therefore claimed a certain opacity is needed to take distance from the status quo and force new thinking from the audience. What stands out in Lotte L.S.'s writing is exactly where this very opacity is placed within the work. L.S. has quickly acknowledged and left behind "the pillowcase", to speak truth to the power.

"j'en ai assez!"            the lyric no longer had the right to remain quiet

And as simple as that, the reader is lead into material reality. But what we read is not a poetics too wrapped up in complex theory and unreachable language. What Lotte L.S. has done is to create a highly educated poetics where "the masses" are not only subject and object, but listener-participants in every act of the poem. The constructive "opacity" of Lubrin here takes a very different form. We read in "The Significant Others Scale":

"the assertion of people as single letters

suggesting

that the I seizes this experience and let it become sentences

too tired to try it again"

"Opacity" here means a setting aside of common thought for the sake of the exceptional. L.S. finds a way to dissolve her "I" voice early on. But calls upon all "I" voices to ponder the very concept of their "I" voice. This dissolution of the "I" voice however, does not remove the personal embedded within the political, it has dissolved itself to beckon the capital P Personal into its narrative for not just the narrator, but all. The personal is strong within the collection of poems, baring witness to the unfolding of rebellion within a crumbling world.

In "The State of" we read:

"I flirt with the idea of how we slept:
                                    squatted over our own bodies
                                    the waistband with or without grenades.
                                    that technique most commonly known as celibacy;
            my body its unfathomable practitioner"

L.S. Never leaves the Other behind. In this book she often documents the movements of the rebel Othered in tension with the climate, patriarchy and capital.

ENDS: Selected Poems is a delightfully strange book. One that uses such differing modes of engagement with the sentence, the phrase and the word. In this way L.S. is a true stylist. Considering the book covers a 7 year timeframe, it shows the multiple modalities that L.S. successfully inserted herself into where each consecutive project makes her voice more critical.

As the book begins with the putting aside of the pillowcase, and the She who "could not/ see to see", the book ends with her being "thankful for the seeing". A book of witnessing.

With ENDS: Selected Poems we partake, as the Othered masses, in the witnessing that has been orchestrated for us. With Lotte L.S. we too give up our "I" voices in service to the natural.