Description
Book SynopsisThe “insistence” in this poetry is how the language calls out the adjacency to its own presence. Each careful syllable feels right next to what surrounds it. A drum hitting out its own “unbridled association.” — Fred Wah
"This is where history began again/where some were told it insisted/itself into a lifelike violence.”
Eclectic, darkly fascinating, and at times apocalyptic, Only Insistence is a protean book where lines and phrases echo back on each other, where images of the natural world are bookended by investigations that delve deep into memory. In this ethereal world, the poet interrogates his relationship with his father, realigns his idea of family after the birth of his son, and bears witness to the isolation, paranoia, and surrealism of the onset of the beginning of the pandemic.
Here pandemic-era streets are “beaches in early April/Bright and bleached and barren” and a lake is “a rage of waves eroding rocks to a pebble beach,/each small stone confident in immanent restoration.” At times languid, at others cunningly sculpted into towering metaphors, Lindsay’s rich metaverse experiments illuminate a world that rewards close attention with infinite possibilities.
Trade Review“
Only Insistence reads as a dream might — each disclosure an unfolding, with its own tightly crimped folds waiting to stretch. James Lindsay develops a language of confessions that pour out beyond their boundaries, as ‘dashes of colour clustering’ through ‘slits of vision’ can knit what's behind a slatted fence. It is a carefully crafted kaleidoscope, where bodies are known by what crowd their edges, and coldness is known by how ‘piercing light prods the blue, [...] low and whispered,’ where many geographies of are explored compellingly, and softly as water tests a shoreline. I enjoy how
Only Insistence is irreverent in its disdain for borders and discrete bodies, in the same way a dream urges us to revisit its many meanings, the ‘flurries it promises.’” -- Tyler Pennock, author of
Blood
