I Will Get Up Off Of, the second poetry collection of Simina Banu is a one-location film equivalent of a book, as it brilliantly unravels on the treadmill of life, yet moves freely through moments of surrender and ecstasy. As the title suggests, it asks, “How does anyone leave a chair?.” Not being able to get up is not as easy as it sounds. With almost hysterically honesty and self-awareness, the speaker imagines every muscle involved in getting up, googles the history of chairs, and imagines the mere particles and molecules involved in getting up – revealing where exactly the body is situated.
The poems read like unprompted doodles on the back of a bus card, free and playful, yet are pithy and reveal the instantaneous descriptions of the incoherencies of twenty-first century life. Banu’s form adroitly directs poetry toward a feeling of stuckness, the length of the prose poems grows with the speaker’s inaction, becoming more unpredictable and restless. The poems eventually fracture off into amorphous drawings when the form can no longer contain the spirit.
“Unfortunately the monobloc pins all hope
In a secret part of the body
Who knows where
An earlobe
A toe
Somewhere the art won’t think
To look”
Banu’s language is a cohesion between the internet and contemporary poetry, incorporating Instagram handles and bar codes on the page. Lost in the planted forest of the internet, where one has to make a commotion to get noticed, indignation and appetites are displayed openly, and one can scroll from senselessness to salvation. “‘Get a load of that feeling!’ someone will yell upon discovering my feeling.”: words aren’t set loose, feelings solidify like resin and need an escort to exit the mouth, and syllables break up upon impact, “I’ve got one sentence escorting four thoughts and six feelings.”. Not Being able to get up does not handicap the content – it allows it to cling to a longing for gratitude and, at times, love, therefore turning to the deepest sense of the self.
Simina Banu is a Canadian poet, I Will Get Up Off Of, is her second collection of poetry. Her debut poetry collection Pop received the ReLit Award for Poetry in 2021. Banu’s work has been published in the literary journals untethered, filling Station, The Feathertale Review, and In/Words Magazine, and has published several chapbooks.
