Close-Reading a Poem by Maia Elsner for SPAM

At SPAM, a print zine and pamphlet press based between Glasgow and Cambridge, Alice Hill-Woods close-reads a poem by Maia Elsner called "Transnational Zoo," readable here in the UK magazine Blackbox Manifold. "Reading 'Transnational Zoo' is like peering closely at the fabric of a hessian rug: at first glance it looks safe, almost predictable," writes Hill-Woods. "Nevertheless, the longer you stare, the more complex it becomes, a spectacular weave of interconnected threads." Furthermore:

They say the moon lost her virginity, that night, and the sun shred itself against the rocks. She was dragged. Dragged through Juarez, Zapata, past General Anaya, spread out, finally, at his foot.

Commas, rapidly accumulating, exert dominance on the page, each tiny incision a rhythmic severing of names, places and movements. The ‘shred’ and ‘drag’ of the poem offers the spectator an unsavoury vision, formulated and delivered with sandpaper roughness. Her body, so carefully constructed and fortified, is torn apart, the insides drawn out, ‘antlers removed, her hide skinned’. His body is ‘torn by hairless dogs’. The intensity of this scene invokes horror with its methodical separation of the constituent parts of a whole, removing and disintegrating, ‘trying to unwrite’ the body-as-text. Elsner delivers the blow with potent lucidity, and it brings to mind Elaine Scarry’s The Body in Pain: The Making and Unmaking of the World (1985), in that ‘physical pain does not simply resist language, but actively destroys it’. In a similar way, the zoomorphic self is attacked and reduced to chaotic matter, seemingly analogous to the fleshy fragility of language.