Lavender Cats

by Tenaya Nasser-Frederick

“Lavender Cats (August 2020) forgoes the mylar slipcover that the other books ship in, packaged instead with a folded sheet of brown paper. Printed on its face is the first piece from the collection, a concrete poem whose characters only occasionally approach signification and do not linger long. “The plane climbed yellow in teh autumn sky ao r sandy r f os from toot a  af clams”, one line reads—by far the most coherent on the page. The book continues like this for almost half of its length, with flashes of clarity becoming gradually more frequent.

If it were simply gibberish, there would be no merit to the struggle it makes of reading, but the little that is intelligible is enticing. Even the inscrutable crackles with sentience. “U pu er tongue writ e on a z es lump in we throat” seems a line worth pausing over, yielding different meanings depending on how one resolves its contradictions. Elsewhere, “a grave in heat” is an intriguing piece of solid footing in the morass.

Toward the book’s center, the once-dense blocks of prose become more spritely. Finally, the automatic writing machine cycles down, and distinct poems emerge. Some are dated, all from the darkest weeks of New York’s Covid-19 outbreak. On April 15, Nasser-Frederick writes, “it seems to me regular speaking isn’t true to the irregular interior, isn’t even false.” The sentiment seems almost a statement of purpose for the entire project, which admits only irregular speaking, valiantly choking on itself along the way. Its stream of consciousness has flooded its banks.” — Maxwell Paparella

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