Heavy-Hand Holding: Dwelling in Contradiction with Danielle LaFrance and Anahita Jamali Rad

Heavy-Hand Holding:Dwelling in Contradiction with Danielle LaFrance and Anahita Jamali Rad Ryan Fitzpatrick (bio) and Deanna Fong (bio) In times of crisis, we must all decide again and again whom we love. —Frank O'Hara1 How to explain, in a culture frantic for resolution, that sometimes the shit stays messy? —Maggie Nelson2 INTRODUCTION In the Call for Papers of this issue, the editors ask us to consider the politics and aesthetics of what they term "the forever crisis": "articulations of catastrophe that appear singular or locally-situated, but which are in fact part of a much larger network of interrelated crises (climate change, war, pandemic, capitalist extraction) that threaten the long-term viability of the planet and its many inhabitants."3 Holding apart the "singular" and the "interrelated"—if only for a moment before collapsing that distinction—raises the question: when we speak of crisis, where do we imagine that crisis taking place? That is, if we imagine [End Page 325] crisis as an event—the emergence of something radically new and the aftermaths it leaves in its wake—is its locus the individual (i.e., the "midlife crisis" or "crisis of faith"), or must it to some degree implicate the individual in relation to the structures and forces that they move through and that act on them (the October Crisis, global economic crisis, etc.)? The answer, of course, is yes: its locus is both of these at once, even if crisis may manifest itself differently or unevenly at these scales. Even in crisis, the singular is always in relation to something. Breaking or shifting relations destabilizes life as we know it. Sometimes this destabilization works from the bottom up, creating effusive new political possibilities that were once thought impossible. Other times, destabilization acts from the top down, splintering solidarities to the benefit of those doing the reorganizing. The notion of a forever crisis, however, asks us to reimagine crisis as structural rather than a series of temporally acute ruptures.4 If crisis structures our everyday lives, how do we imagine maneuvering through, or even stepping outside of that structure—as individual or collective subjects? We believe that framing our contemporary set of conditions as a forever crisis involves grappling with the contradictory and uneven ways that crisis manifests. We're interested in a tendency within twenty-first-century poetics that interrogates our long transmogrifying crisis point by grappling with everyday intimacies and the global regimes they nest with. We believe that poetry acts as a useful tool for mapping life in the friction point between event and structure, between crisis and "normalcy" (or crisis as normal). Poetry is able to entreat with everyday life's often contradictory messiness, with the entanglements of different scales of attention, and with the sheer complexity of words and worlds as they join and articulate together. [End Page 326] The poetry of Danielle LaFrance and Anahita Jamali Rad works through poetry's relationship to crisis and structure. We know LaFrance and Jamali Rad as integral parts of Vancouver's multigenerational avant-garde poetry scene. LaFrance is the author of four books of poetry and works as a librarian in the Vancouver Public Library system. Jamali Rad is the author of two books of poetry and since leaving Vancouver, first for Montréal and eventually for Windsor, ON, has been the publisher of the poetry micropress House House and was the designer for The Capilano Review. LaFrance and Jamali Rad both pursue a poetics driven by contradiction and antagonism to open up opportunities to dwell in the complicated aftermaths, to borrow a word from LaFrance, of conflict, abuse, and trauma as they pool up in everyday life.5 To dwell in these aftermaths requires that we confront complexity, acknowledging the uselessness of dichotomous thinking when dealing with the intricate relations between subjects—their bodies, their feelings, their discourse, their desires—and the communities and social structures they are a part of. As a tactic for navigating contraction without rushing toward resolution, we argue that LaFrance and Jamali Rad write poetry that gives us an articulatory view of structure—a claim whose operative terms we want to define with some specificity before...

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