A whorling pseudotranslation of French Symbolist Saint-Pol-Roux’s La Repoetique, The Repoetic: After Saint-Pol-Roux is a herniating long-poem, a w(h)orld built by and for the word. Unconventional and otherwise inconceivable relationships thrive in this unreal space, where hot tub (s)cum, The Tinder-Poem, comes to life to date a mercurial living-meme, the Chose-Coke Poser: sometimes Goblin, sometimes aristocratic variant of the Femboy Hooters meme. The whorld at once a food-tray fastness, a clotted pocket mirror propping open a mouth, and a bloody buffet for twenty befanged criminals seeking refuge from the law. Whorld as ever-unrolling unraveling rug; as yawnsense; as slimey timey oneness; as aerated English, Nu-Cue-Ler Alberta English, used-to-be-the-bottom-of-an-Ocean English, as the trembling timbre of the Tinder-Poem’s voice asking “does your English always fight like this, or just at the holidays?” The Repoetic is the realm of the loser, the cruiser, and the havering grief that an immortal Mother asks of us. Sieve for the unreal, forgotten, and trampled, for Lady Di and Dido and Bart Simpson’s unending boyhood. The cerebral, no-chill, scab-picking, contours flush to contours queertopia, the nemesis to cartopia, straight-time and straight-rhyme alike. The Res Poetica a long-overdue middle-finger to Plato’s no-poet Res Publica. And though no panacea nor samizdat, The Repoetic’s an annihilating solvent; the joke-rupt-by-hiccup haghounding its way into existence twixt split sycamore Pocky sticks; the stretched elastic embouchure of the things we wish we could say yet can’t couch-twirl thru the threshold. The Repoetic a singu(hi)larity, the Poem a noise the Poem annoys.
Check out the book trailer, created by Ry O Toole – https://vimeo.com/804142772.
"The Repoetic delivers poems that are just as ambitious in their refusal of straight and delineated form and thought, acutely aware of their cultural gesture, and in ceaseless and manifaceted interaction with everything that envelops and engulfs the experience of poetry in daily life." – Jérôme Melançon, for The Temz Review
"Reading The Repoetic is like having your head held too close to an artwork of indeterminate genre, so that you cannot guess what image might be visible to a disembodied viewer some ten or fifteen feet further back, but instead you get an amazingly detailed vision of its constituent parts, which include hilarious wordplay, vampires, brain damage, extremely forced wordplay, Canlit social dynamics, and Terry Pratchett; and you get the sense that the parts are all deeply interconnected, or at the very least, stuck together by fluids of one kind and another. Highly recommended." – Hugh Thomas, author of Maze
"The Repoetic is a lush and fascinating repositioning of the citizen subject incorporated in a mélange of syllabic composition. Benjamin Dugdale charts their poetic maze through what they call a “shadow-translation” of Saint-Pol-Roux fused with their own biotext of cultural hybridity. The intensity of this process is, literally, syllable by syllable, the minute particulars revealed in the emergency of discovery and the need to sing it." – Fred Wah, author of Music at the Heart of Thinking
"Reading The Repoetic: After Saint-Pol-Roux is to see modern queer Canadian life in the periphery of your vision. Dugdale captures the contemporary spite of barely living in the aftermath of the 20th century, where all us broke queer dogs fight for scraps of clout among the ruins of the seemingly immortal but perpetually degenerating boomers (a stand-in for a people, a past, and an affluent class). It is a book about disability, periphery, gender, community, and of course, cum. It asks what fires can do and what can be salvaged from the aftermaths of people, places, and works of art. Its existence, especially in the current Canadian poetry market, is proof of the desire to salvage something imperfectly even if your salvagement itself must soon be salvaged; as Fitzgerald’s gravestone reads “boats against the current.” If you are a tired dialectically both young and old queer, with a little too much bitterness about the here and now, you will love this book like a trauma-dumping friend you’re in the middle of cuddling to quiet peace." – autogyniphiles_anonymous, Meme Collective