Poetry

Aja Couchois Duncan, The Intimacy Trials (University of Chicago Press), 96 pp. Paperback, $18.00.

The promotional text for Aja Couchois Duncan’s new work, The Intimacy Trials, indicates that it is “a postapocalyptic Native poetry collection.” But readers should not expect a series of verses in the vein of the Mad Max movies or the Fallout video games. Catastrophe here is much more akin to what Gerald Horne has called “the apocalypse of settler colonialism.”

Couchois Duncan, who identifies as a poet of Ojibwe, French, and Scottish descent, turns to traditional Anishinaabe narratives to render a Native world largely destroyed by the violent incursions of European colonists and industrial capitalists. In doing so, she positions her work in accordance with that of Native scholars such as Lawrence Gross, who has suggested the Anishinaabeg are characterized by “postapocalypse stress syndrome,” and Nick Estes, who has insisted that “Indigenous people are post-apocalyptic.”

Rarely blunt in their apocalyptic descriptions, these elusive poems instead slip ever so slightly beyond the reader’s grasp, deferring the finality of ultimate revelation.

While The Intimacy Trials is a collection of short poems, these clearly work together in their depiction of a natural environment and spiritual community deeply—perhaps irreparably—harmed by the brutality of conquest. It begins, for example, at the beginning, with the breath of the Creator, Gichi-manidoo, and dawning movements of Creation, Aki, an Anishinaabe deity representing the earth and life upon it. In subsequent verses, Couchois Duncan traces “the ligaments of loss.” The displacements of settler colonialism work hand in hand with the catastrophic global effects of climate change, resulting in a “precarious diaspora” in which “there is nowhere left to go.”

The book’s title is especially resonant throughout the poems. What occurs on the page are the trials and tribulations of human beings who have lost their intimacy with the natural world. Skin itself—dermis—is a recurrent feature of the poems’ imagery; just as erstwhile lovers might drift apart and lose the touch of physical intimacy, humans here have lost the intimate feeling of the earth’s outer layer—especially after such intimacy has been destroyed by the rapacious activities of resource extraction.

But the trial here is also a legal one. In some poems notable for their lines’ alignment with the right (rather than the left) side of the page, Couchois Duncan observes that

A trial requires

standing,

the right to

stand on top of an-

other, to occupy

their sedges …

Who has proper “standing” in an intimacy trial? Who has the right to stand on a particular parcel of land? And what is to be done about the land upon which we may no longer stand—land that is taken away or destroyed, ““hectare by hectare / year after year”?

In appealing to a postapocalyptic worldview, Couchois Duncan is most suggestive when she compares the narrative “arc of history” (the “one that bends toward opposition, mirroring every consequence”) to Noah’s Ark, an act of preservation against total annihilation. The characterization of time is cyclical rather than linear: “Catastrophe is the arch in our crumbling structure. It is how we look backward / and forward. How we retain our sense of anticipation in aftermath.” The position of the line break here—“backward / and forward”—is a nice touch. For The Intimacy Trials, “postapocalypse” and “preapocalypse” ultimately merge.

The most profound effect, however, is conveyed not through dexterous wordplay or enjambment but by a larger sense of omission. A great deal of white space appears on most of the pages in this book. Often a few lines at the top of a page will cease, allowing an ominous blankness to fill the rest. This whiteness could suggest the snow and ice of the upper Midwest, but it inevitably also signifies an apocalyptic emptiness—as well as an eerie silence or quietude. That effect is the most lasting element of The Intimacy Trials.

Also notable, however, is Couchois Duncan’s choice use of Anishinaabemowin terms—such as “bineshiinh” (bird) and “nishiime” (younger sibling)—peppered throughout the otherwise English verses. Most evocatively, she describes the manner in which the divine spirit of the earth cannot simply be taken by force:

Before the thaw, before

generations bled

into one another,

mizhagaakoba’iwe,

she slipped

beyond their grasp.

According to The Ojibwe People’s Dictionary, run through the University of Minnesota, mizhagaakoba’iwe means a figure “lands running off the ice in flight from someone.” While the act of fleeing connotes a sense of being preyed upon, of being in imminent danger, the icy terrain also suggests a chaotically graceful skating or sliding, the slippage that Couchois Duncan offers in her stanza. This might even be considered a central image for The Intimacy Trials. Rarely blunt in their apocalyptic descriptions, these elusive poems instead slip ever so slightly beyond the reader’s grasp, deferring the finality of ultimate revelation.