Jessi MacEachern’s second collection with Invisible, Cut Side Down, follows 2021’s A Number of Stunning Attacks’ poetics as communion with other writers. Alongside a constellation of contemporary, Modernist, and semi-fictional poets to guide and/or bedevil her, MacEachern plays out phantasies for the hyper literate. Well-staged motif (the colour yellow) and gesture bind three sections: [1] a retelling of Woolf’s Orlando through [2] a madcap literary salon/seance to [3] an extended memory piece. Funny and formally adventurous, MacEachern performs as a poet who’s negotiating, wrestling, sometimes dancing around familiar agonisms in writing life: influence and big-capital-H ‘History.’

In the first sequence, “Ravishing the Sex into the Void,” MacEachern inhabits Orlando as Orlando, Woolf’s immortal non-binary hero poet (whose poetry’s unread in Orlando), as they’d write as a contemporary post-modern feminist. MacEachern explicitly personifies time’s slippery effect on consciousness and reification of gender:

History reflects
—my wildness
—History is
a testament of my foolish & impossible
—imagination
Part snow, cream, cherries
— & furs
—sex

Pretty explicit, but so was Woolf. With the austere goddesses—Purity, Chastity, & Modesty—who induce Lord Orlando’s metamorphosis, Lady Orlando’s buffeted around English lit history by the “Spirit of the Age” about as often as by the weather. Staying faithful to the text’s narrative (there’s even a kingfisher), MacEachern adapts the character to her own voice and excellent ear. Anachronisms and exclamations, “I mean the ass on her” punctuate the poems, rendering Orlando as just as funny and lusty as Woolf.

Woolf shows up as herself in the second sequence, “Do I Enjoy the Work,” with Lorine Niedecker as her co-psychopomp, doing dances in the background. Charles Olson arrives “in the mail like a frantic black poodle.” But Renee Gladman, with her Ravicka novels, is central to MacEachern’s narrator: “It is true that I am reading Event Factory / like everyone I know and everyone I don’t.” After reading Gladman and Clark Coolidge while experiencing writer’s block, MacEachern adopts many Gladmanisms: wending declarative sentences, everyday theorization, and full-body gestures. The impression captures the peculiar distress of owed inspiration: “Renee, I now think / all this talking is not / reaching your avian ears.” Poem to poem, style metabolizes in the closing ode, “Those Unheld,” an incredible sequence of lines oscillating between feminist inquiry and familial grief.

MacEachern closes with “When a Folk, When a Sprawl,” interpolating Charles Olson’s Maximus Poems in its titles. Olson himself, however, is absent. MacEachern’s notes describes his influence more ambivalently. Is the verse projective? Sure, it uses the whole page, but MacEachern’s focus is on a family’s history and doesn’t bother much with Olson’s classical preoccupations (though there is a little tarot). Tightening the previous movements’ fantastical lines, imagistic fragments build characters: a troubled uncle, a betrayed mother, “Whose rough-guise. Whose road-gyre / The smoke made it so // The wuzz-or-whir. The monologue will not revive / My memory of her.” We return to the fantastic though, as her biography ends in ascension to a bathhouse Valhalla of “decorated amazons” as more poets, mentors and peers in workshops real and dreamt, make their entrance for the finale.