Contenu
"Intruder, Bardia Sinaee's bold debut collection, explores with vivid and precise language themes of intrusion and encroachment in contemporary life. Touching on such hot-button subjects as migration, xenophobia, urban sprawl, and disease in tones that range from bemused to droll to demagogic, acclaimed poet Bardia Sinaee's much-anticipated debut collection evolves in three stages. The first section, consisting mostly of plain-spoken poems about city life, is influenced by the poems of James Schuyler and Karen Solie. The second spools out in a sequence of imagistic sixteen-line poems that progress via quiet observation and associative logic, and it takes its cue from works like John Ashbery's Shadow Train and Ben Lerner's The Lichtenberg Figures. The poems in the third section are slower, minimalist, and aphoristic, at times reminiscent of the work and style of Rae Armantrout and Fanny Howe. This final section also includes a recent sequence of poems, "Half-Life," written during and about the COVID-19 lockdown and referencing the poet's self-isolation in Toronto with imagery that underlines the pandemic's global scope. Throughout the poems, the poet's cancer diagnosis and two and a half years of chemotherapy are not made explicit, but instead provide a background note of vulnerability and anxiety that haunts this timely collection."--