Lisa Jarnot: Some Other Kind of Mission

Lisa Jarnot, Some Other Kind of Mission. Burning Deck Books, distributed in UK by Paul Green, 83b London Road, Peterborough, Cambs PE2 9BS. 110pp A5. ISBN 1 886224 12 9.

Best opener is to say that when I took this out in a pub at a table of non-poetry-readers, it did a half-hour grand tour, everybody looked at, puzzled at and actually read some of the text; finally somebody borrowed it. Somewhere in these prose poems there is, I think, a road movie: "Obviously the problem. We were going out of town. He was not hiding from other people in the store. I remember only that he was taller than he really is. It looked okay on him." The book is interspersed with hilarious, mindlessly scary pages of collaged typescript, drawing, notes to author, everything else: like Adolf Wölfli deprived of his medication, unlike anything else. The photographed notebook pages comment on and refunction the text, the text is unmissable ("there are no "e’s" in the other language. in the other country it never snows in march. the natives are involved. i have used the word "prawn" where appropriate. formerly women carried baskets. "almost" and "never" are specifically interchangeable. cf. the food is better and its subsidiaries."), the titles rather good ("FOUR: Often I am Permitted to Return to a Salad Bar", "Interlude (Chickens)", "NINE: Ferrets are", "Later in the Drunk Tank of Semantics"), the quality of the litho reproduction by Burning Deck is so high that you can read through many of the erasures and cancellations (one page of typescript shorn of all its letters but "e" turns out to be "thought to have been made by nuns in strasbourg, ca. 1710"). Fantastically good.

---

This review first appeared in issue 8 of Object Permanence magazine.

Return to Book reviews and other writing.

Return to