Selvage

A selvage seals off the edge of a length of fabric so it does not fray. Kate Siklosi’s debut collection, Selvage, places the edge at its center and considers what it means to live at the periphery—of belonging, of language, of records: “language spoke in edges, cuts. outside restricted documents, they existed, no one knew.”

As she moves through the stages of a pregnancy, the speaker reflects on her Hungarian ancestry, imagining her grandmother (“nagymama”) as she slips “under a crack in the iron curtain / the rubble of Budapest at her back.” And she considers how the origins of a nation are (over-)written and obliterated through official documents, here Canada’s Charter of Rights and Freedoms. The legalistic “notwithstanding” tolls throughout the book, as in “no notwithstandings or whereofs to be heard. longing is a leaving held guttural” and “notwithstanding chromosomal chatter,” culminating in a scoring out:

notwithstanding anything.

 

something notwithstanding.
notwithstanding everything.

 

breathing notwithstanding.
to stand with, despite everything.

Such ideas are balanced by flashes of sensory brilliance. In one poem, the poet lists current cravings:

 

warm vanilla of fresh sawn oak
[…]

 

word fragments caught in teeth
sour sumac

 

a person’s right to not be pregnant

 

vine-fresh tomatoes
the dorito aroma of dog paws

This list, with its startling interjection midway, captures in miniature how everyday moments in Selvage are embedded in the political.

Some of Siklosi’s most innovative work uses scanned plant matter, such as leaves, and found instructional diagrams, which she relabels to form “grief maps.” The theme of roots recurs as she considers the different roots her unborn child will need:

how we live like trees:
the networks we leverage
the darkness of roots
in stilled hours you
can’t ever fully forget

In a sense, birthing a child means helping to form their roots, and a child might tether a mother. Both aspects are made vibrantly clear in a dream of a tree pulled out from between the speaker’s legs:

a splintered tip crowned
followed swiftly by the swoop
of a bough with twigs […]

i brought its slick roots
shivering to my bare chest […]

i thought to myself:
this thing could
make this world
more bearable.