review: VERY AUTHENTIC PERSON by Kat Sinclair

There’s a blog post on Poetry Foundation that I think about whenever I sit down to write. Hannah Gamble, who worked with young children while in graduate school, shares some of the more extraordinary turns of phrase she found in the barely-legible poetry of her fourth-grade students. (Even if you have no investment at all in this review, I highly recommend reading the baby poetry. I first read it in 2014, and I have never forgotten ‘But it lives where I live.’)

Gamble compares the work of the fourth-graders to poetry by middle- and high-school students, and observes that

“By middle school/high school, the average student has learned how normal people talk. The resulting language is underwhelming and predictable—the safe regurgitations of a thoroughly socialized consciousness.”

Reading Very Authentic Person, it is evident that its author has rediscovered how to overwhelm. This is by no means to suggest that it’s undersocialised; it’s wired-in to the world, returning repeatedly to social media, citing ultra-specific modernities from David Davis to highest ever grossing film Avatar (2009). Even the title of the collection has a very online wryness to it. I mean to say that Kat Sinclair has found strikingly fresh and affecting ways to treat her own life. The result is a thesis on alienation and exhaustion that is world-weary, and that belongs to the world that has worn it down, but is no less compelling or substantial for it.

It lingers over specifics, though never for too long; each poem runs its fingers, cherishing, over life’s precious mundanities one at a time. A car show, or a spider hanging from the ceiling, or an ice lolly as a gesture of forgiving comfort. Perhaps it lingers where it can afford to linger because it is always, one way or another, in motion. It is quivering on the bus, or it is reading and rereading on a platform, or it is walking down a hill to the station. The body is home, because the body, at least, is always present. The body is a house (“Can we queer the structure of the house please,” asks ‘Body Quadratics,’ “I want to be a door and ajar both at once”), or a clothes-horse, or some other object that can be arranged to the most pleasing effect.

But the body is also fallible, and a site of spiralling dread. The collection circles back to guts, to the uterus, to memory and to death; it dwells on the pillar of salt that Lot’s wife, trying to look back, ultimately became. It worries over a mole — “the mysterious screaming orb on my shoulder” — as a grim omen, even as it insists that it’s fine, really, the presence of the mole can be tolerated because it’s kind of a whole-ass mood. It’s like reading someone’s trip down the anxiety rabbit-hole by way of a long-distance bus. (It is hard to read Very Authentic Person without thinking of the X5 bus between Oxford and Cambridge, which meanders through the Midlands for more than three hours, and which bore witness to a new existential crisis every time it circled back around to the Grafton Centre in 2014.)

Hyper-aware of the meaning contained in every day-to-day tableau, every photograph, every threadbare Twitter opinion, Very Authentic Person interrogates its own authenticity at length. “There is nothing new in me now all that I am growing is / regurgitated and beautiful,” writes Sinclair in ‘In .avi Format,’ and she’s not wrong: the regurgitations, which Gamble identified in her middle-schoolers as safe and thoroughly-socialised, are stunning. Recollected details accrue and layer and crystallise. It’s a lens that affords an arresting perspective on well-worn subjects — which are well-worn, in a sense, because we keep turning them over and over in our minds. Examined from the right perspective, they still have the power to devastate.

Very Authentic Person will be released on 13 November 2019 from the 87 Press. (You should totally pick up a copy.)