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Reviews
On Kendra Sullivan’s Reps
Ugly Duckling Presse | 2024
reviewed by rob mclennan
I’m entranced by “poet, public artist, and activist scholar” Kendra Sullivan’s full-length poetry collection Reps (2024), gracefully produced by Brooklyn’s Ugly Duckling Presse. Set in a triptych of sections—“Exercises Against Empathy,” “A Typology of Possible Biographies” and “Margaret, Are You Grieving?”—Sullivan’s gestures (both through prose and lineated poems) offer a compelling argument across the arbitrariness of genre. “You’re bent like me.” She writes this, as part of the prose poem “INTEGRITY (ETHICAL)” that sits close to the opening of the first section. “Genealogy is a /type of topology.” Throughout, Sullivan writes of parenting, and the multiple roles one takes as primary parent, writing female reproductive health and biology, and all as a kind of lyric topology. She composes poems that accumulate throughout the collection as points on a book-length grid, providing echoes and threads within each piece that reach out across this vast lyric expanse. “While fertility has a sell-by date,” she writes, as part of the poem “PERIOD (MENSTRUAL),” “reproductive labor is shelf stable. Timeless if not endless.” Or, as the subsequent poem writes:
Biology, then, a circular transaction between “the facts” and the narratives that scaffold the
unknown. Fiction, then, a description of belief.
Her recursive structure suggests an ongoingness to these lyric thoughts, to her sentences, almost as a single, tethered thought that runs the length and breadth while simultaneously set into a sequence or suite of self-contained blocks. The titles work an ebb and flow of poem-clusters, evolving from titles including “ABSTRACT,” “COLLISION” and “INTEGRITY,” for example, to “SPERM,” “MEMORY” and “EGG.” There are echoes of Anne Carson or Lydia Davis, one that sits at the texture of shared tone, while offering an intimacy around the domestic and the personal that is more overt (in comparison, certainly, to the direct and indirect deflections of Anne Carson’s work), offering a softer kind of intimacy and memory. Or, as the poem “MEMORY (RETRIEVING)” closes: “I’m hard-pressed to think of any mode of representation that doesn’t flatten reality to some degree.”
While the opening section is structured predominantly through an array of more than one hundred pages of self-contained prose poems, the second section provides poems of more traditional line-break and lyric, rhythmic stagger, before a third section constructed out of an extended, single-length poem running down the length of page upon page through short lines and phrases. At more than two hundred pages, there is such a heft to this collection, both in terms of physical size and lyric content, and yet, there are ways in which Sullivan utilizes the (presumed) biographical as a means to a structural end, as opposed to an end unto itself (akin to Carson, again). She writes the landscape of biology and biological impulse and consequence; or, as the poem “PASTORAL (GRAZING)” closes:
The bright morning clatter of birdsong in the rough boughs rings tinny and untimely the
ears of twilight creatures waking up slowly in the supple dusk. Each attempt at progress
encompasses its opposite, as in dawn-dusk, but also begin-end, consume-expel, remember-
forget, and others-selves. That’s topology. The existential branch of geometry.
Throughout, Sullivan works to expand the bounds of philospophical thought and aesthetic experiment through the lyric sentence, from the domestic and intimate to the abstract of parents, children and the shifts of power dynamics. “I began again in labour and delivery.” she writes, to open the poem “EGG (DOZEN),” “Midwife to an open pit mine. Blasting a quarry wall with dynaminte is a lot like pushing pitocin on reluctant contractors. My team ensures each blast softens and widens the mouth of the quarry. If I do my job well, a lake takes the place of the mountain in the landscape and the baby takes the place of the mother as the locus of concern in the birthing room.” She writes of what is revealed once one becomes a parent, and even when one becomes pregnant. As the poem “ALEX” offers, to open the second section: “A story about birth as a transfer of power [.]”
The third and final section of the collection further breaks from the book’s established structures through more halting, rhythmic, staggered broken line breaks down a near-single length of short lines; as an extended single poem sequence, down the length of an accumulated twenty-two pages. One might suggest that the length and breadth of the collection circles and swirls through anxieties around climate, loss and parenting until near the end, when it finally catches, is caught, in a lyric that doesn’t let go. As the collection closes, she writes:
I say
Margaret
you’re worth
mourning,
I say
Margaret
be soft
we’re still
falling.
I say
Margaret
be hard
it’s okay
to keep
going.
We’re never
going to get
over this.
I say
Margaret
keep
mourning.
We’re not
there yet.
Keep
going.
I say
Margaret
go!
go
go
Bio:
rob mclennan
Born in Ottawa, Canada’s glorious capital city, rob mclennan currently lives in Ottawa, where he is home full-time with the two wee girls he shares with Christine McNair. The author of more than thirty trade books of poetry, fiction and non-fiction, his most recent titles include a river runs through it: a writing diary (Spuyten Duyvil, 2025), On Beauty: stories (University of Alberta Press, 2024) and the anthology groundworks: the best of the third decade of above/ground press 2013-2023 (Invisible Publishing, 2023). Later this year sees the publication of the book of sentences(University of Calgary Press), his follow-up to the book of smaller (University of Calgary Press, 2022). An editor and publisher, he runs above/ground press,periodicities: a journal of poetry and poetics (periodicityjournal.blogspot.com) and Touch the Donkey (touchthedonkey.blogspot.com). He is editor of my (small press) writing day, and an editor/managing editor of many gendered mothers. The current Artistic Director of VERSeFest: Ottawa’s International Poetry Festival, he spent the 2007-8 academic year in Edmonton as writer-in-residence at the University of Alberta, and regularly posts reviews, essays, interviews and other notices at robmclennan.blogspot.com