My Word Against Yours

Francis Cooke
If We Knew How to We Would by Emma Barnes (Auckland University Press, 2025), 80pp, $25; Wearing Today by Wes Lee (Chapman Books Aotearoa, 2025), 109pp, $20; show you(’)r(e) working out by Liz Breslin (Dead Bird Books, 2025), 82pp, $35

‘It is a simple thing to want to be without pain’, Emma Barnes writes early in their second collection, If We Knew How to We Would, the title itself speaking back to the poem. The instinct is understandable, familiar and impossible, as the three new books from Barnes, Liz Breslin and Wes Lee explore.

Barnes is one of the most sensual poets currently writing in Aotearoa, and If We Knew How to We Would begins with a suite of poems that are intensely physical, the poet tracing their body and the bodies of others into the text, detailing faces, mouths, hands, stomachs and skin. ‘I never thought of myself as anything to desire until I did’, Barnes writes in ‘Famous knots of history’, and through the opening of the collection desire runs rampant. ‘I am a circle’ tracks the progress of a kiss, from the moment of contact (‘[f]eeling my body become a tower as I go to pointe as I feel my ligaments lengthen’), to the moment where physical touch ascends towards the sublime: ‘All things are possible, all things are counted and made and rebirthed and let out into the night.’ ‘Chain of connected resentment’ recalls a former lover ‘who scooped out parts of me like a melon baller. Like a finger dragged through pudding, through onion dip.’

This first part of the collection tracks a relationship (or several relationships), from inception to ‘the unbelievable mess’ of its end to the slow reconciliation to its loss (‘I narrowly avoided destroying the entire universe’). But then the collection takes a sudden, juddering turn. A loved one dies by suicide, an actual personal universe ended, and the physicality of the writing turns on itself as the poet moves through grief and their own suicidal ideation. ‘I feel all this in my arms’, they write. Later, ‘My body is a bruise.’ An earlier image returns, stripped of its previous eroticism: ‘I want to scoop my insides out with a melon baller, or some other device that makes this possible.’ Stitching and sewing is another motif that runs throughout the collection, and now and again it shifts from a metaphor for intimacy to signify emptiness and loss rather than a binding together: ‘I sew myself shut’, Barnes writes in one poem. In another, they observe matter ‘leaking through the seams of time.’ Words—or at least a specific, but unspoken, ‘word’—are made violent: ‘The word might just rip me apart. I might attempt to rip the word apart. Either way something is getting destroyed tonight.’

Nearly every poem in If We Knew How to We Would is written as a single unbroken paragraph of āprose, but Barnes uses this simple form to great effect, even at the risk of monotony—while the repetition of the approach also means that the one poem that breaks it, ‘If we knew hoāw to stay alive we would’, comes as even more of a disruption in the middle of the book. In this near-titular poem several stanzas are broken into two uneven columns, a fault-line running through the text, presenting the reader with deliberate absences and elisions. ‘I have not done the thing I said / I would do but I did do something else’, the poet writes—the thing said and the thing done are left outside the text. At the poem’s conclusion, the physical and the emotional again intertwine, in a new form:

My palms felt a little worn afterwards. Worn back to nothing, to bone. Worn from a different labour, the labour of birthing something else. I am worn from the labour of birthing your sense of hope. If we knew how to stay alive we would.

In the final section of If We Knew How to We Would, Barnes turns their perspective onto themselves as they navigate their way through the grief of the middle part of the book. Their body, and their body in relationship to others’ bodies, comes into particular focus. Sometimes with tenderness—‘The body is interpreted differently by different brains with different requirements. Softness is actually a pleasure, actually. Though at times, they tell you it’s a big fucking problem.’—and other times as a rejection of others’ perceptions—‘It always has to be noticed and explained. Please don’t say eye-candy. Please don’t refer to any part of my body as anything ever.’ The poems, in emerging from the grief of the earlier sections of the book, embrace defiance—‘Still writing about men. Still doing it. Because they still require confrontation. And I tend towards it. I tend towards confusing and upsetting.’ And this, too, is a path out—living with grief and loss, confronting the pain that comes with living in the world, being confusing and upsetting. Barnes’ collection, refusing to give up the difficulties of life, still feels like an embrace of it.

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The poems that make up the bulk of Wes Lee’s Wearing Today follow an even more rigid structure than those in Barnes’ collection. Drawn from Joanne Burns’ ‘keyhole’, each of the 54 poems in the first section of the collection has the same starting point (‘Wearing today like …’) and unfolds in couplets of short, sharp sentences, almost all of which begin either a new simile or list a new object picked up and offered to the reader by Lee:

Wearing today like the sudden flare of eyes
before the microphone in Blue Velvet, delicate

as phosphorous before a match; a fingerprint
on blu-tack. Like Tutankhamun’s death mask:

eight little capillaries in the corner of each eye.
A painted fingernail, a capsule, new blue meds;

those ’90s colours named after the four horsemen.
The gazebo in The Dead Zone silenced by snow.

Like your lipstick ten years after your death, a raised
rash on my lips. The first night I took my emergency

meds I watched moths pour from the wall as if from the
entrance of a cave. Wearing today like the truth.

Lee almost exclusively uses the second person throughout the ‘Wearing today’ poems, sitting alongside the reader observing the cavalcade of images and guest stars: Philip Larkin, Joseph Merrick, Frances Bean Cobain, Steve McQueen and more jostle for space within the collection.

Lee uses the rush of disparate images and ideas throughout these poems to sketch out the personal story within the ephemera, as references to hospitals, medication and death recur: ‘Like the bruise / on your doctor’s cheekbone. Like a pill you take / to slow your heart.’; ‘Wearing today like losing confidence. / Bone marrow. The raw materials. Like a line / that needs attending to.’ Pain is often referenced, the second-person perspective asking the reader to share in the experience of it as the author moves through the anxieties and setbacks of treatment. As with Barnes’ adherence to form, Lee’s repeated structure risks the pieces in the sequence feeling like one long poem, but they also echo the repetitive structure of medical treatment: keeping consistent habits, repeating medications and actions over and over to work towards recovery.

In ‘Aubade’, the long poem (or, alternatively, a sequence of short, untitled pieces) that concludes Wearing Today, Lee moves to the first person and speaks more directly in a moment of early morning clarity:

Today I want to live. Ask me tomorrow
when pain squashes in: an overgrown branch
at the window. When I am amassing medical records
in a zip-lock bag. The body becomes a coral reef
with its constant maintenance.
Unseen night fish scrape and peck.

The shift in perspective and form works to Wearing Today’s benefit—yet, as taken as I was with the formal repetitions of the book and the exploration that can occur within a rigid structure, the shift in register at the book’s conclusion made me look forward to more variation and expansion in Lee’s next collection.

· · ·

Liz Breslin’s show you(’)r(e) working out, in its opening section, deals with another source of pain and damage. In one of the introductory poems, the speaker unexpectedly sees a man in a restaurant, and the poems that follow sketch out unwelcome and intrusive memories of a suffocating and, it is strongly implied, abusive relationship. Elisions again are used to draw the reader’s attention to what is being omitted. In ‘My word against yours’ these are literal absences in the text, and in the block text of ‘The pattern’ the suffocating, unpunctuated repetition of daily placations (‘if i go to work and come straight home if i put the washing better if i don’t spend if i dress less gay if i learn to be more like her if i keep the kids quiet …’) inevitably guide the reader to what is being left unsaid, what the speaker is trying to avoid with their rituals.

But while show you(’)r(e) working out opens with these poems, its focus is far more squarely on recovery and the ecstatic possibilities of the future after pain. The book shifts in its second section to an historical mode, drawing on early colonial texts—in particular the diaries and other writings of colonialist Ernest Hayes, and his writing about his wife Hannah. In ‘Colonise your own adventure’, Hannah is offered the choose-your-own-adventure possibilities of her life as Hayes’ wife and mother of nine children, or the prospect of a new relationship with another new arrival in Aotearoa, Miss Fox. The links back to the present-day narrative of the earlier poems are obvious, even before Breslin takes us to ‘Scissors everywhere’, a cut-up poem made up of a letter by Hannah Hayes herself and various, more modern, texts about scissoring.

From there Breslin returns to the present day and a series of poems where nearly everything and everyone—Sharon in the Speight’s ads, reality TV housewives, mannequins in Kathmandu—bristle with the possibilities of queer domestic bliss. Even where the hand of one of the mannequins breaks (‘fuck / we have broken the lesbians / we have broken the lesbians’), Breslin has an opening note to assure the reader that ‘no actual lesbians were harmed in the making of this poem’. Much of the poetry in the book feels rough and unstructured and, even where a nominal structure is imposed (as in the acrostic ‘I thought I hid it well’), the poet immediately breaks the rules. But this, it seems clear, is what Breslin is writing towards—more joyous and unconstrained work after the troubles of a more constricting past.

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FRANCIS COOKE is a Pōneke Wellington writer and a co-editor of Starling journal online.