Steven Zultanski Reviews Wendy Trevino's Cruel Fiction

Commune Editions published poet Wendy Trevino's new collection, Cruel Fiction, this month. For Frieze, Steven Zultanski contextualizes the collection, writing, "A recurring concern of leftist contemporary poetry is how to express the affective and historical experience of collective formations." From there: 

How to capture those flashes of togetherness with strangers which ground political struggle: the crowdedness of a march, the tediousness of a meeting, the frenzy of being dispersed by the police, the solidarity of singing along to a pop song. The focus on interpersonal connectedness in post-Occupy, post-crisis poetry – and at the centre of Wendy Trevino’s new collection of poems, Cruel Fiction, which was published this month by Commune Editions – is not a sentimental celebration of abstract unity, nor a daydream about an undefined different world lurking within our own. Rather, it’s the expression of hope for concrete social movements through which the specifics of a different world could be imagined. 

But, as we know, such struggles are thwarted and repressed. Trevino’s poems begin here, at the point at which any possible collectivism is divided by the ‘cruel fiction’ of the title: the construction of race and the enforcement of borders. The first poem, ‘From Santa Rita 128-131’, records the sights and sounds of 54 hours of incarceration during Occupy: ‘I saw 5 slices of bologna stick to a white wall. / I heard harmonizing coming from a tank 2 times. / I heard 1 person recite 1 poem to 2 pigs. / I heard I had 1 welt on my back. /  I saw at least 5 bruises on each wrist. / I heard 1 woman suggest not admitting injury unless it was severe.’

Read more at Frieze.