Echoes of Experience: Anne-Marie Turza’s Fugue With Bedbug

The author of The Quiet (Anansi, 2014) approaches her second collection in a similar way to her first, as she engages in a distinctive philosophical meditation, a creative rendering of the experience of inhabiting time and space. The book’s title, Fugue With Bedbug, offers instruction to the reader on how to approach the work, thinking of both the “fugue” and the “bedbug” as active notions in the form as well as the content of the poems.

Leaping between infestation and coexistence, language and meaning, parasite and host, the reader enters into the book from a bedbug’s eye view. One imagines living with bed bugs as something like living outside of language, suffering welts of semantics—where the wings of flightless insects blur relations. Turza translates the hypothetical into language using metaphor as a bridge. “Our Purpose,” in a slant way, describes blood as a “flash of something” that “preens in us like a red bird.” She transposes thinking, with the metre and cadence of existence, utilising the Heideggerian term, umwelt, to investigate the differences in sensory experience of beings, human and nonhuman, i.e., the plant, the snail, the bedbug.

Pursuing an ecology of thought, in the fugal counterpoint of multiple voices, attention turns and perspective shifts around questions of metaphysics, the various ways of understanding the experience being in time and space. A speaker’s voice that seems to be saying nearly everything at once, makes high velocity associations, as in “The Wedding Party,” reporting this sense that time “moves like future opera.” Turza makes music in this fugue structure. With endless variations on the main idea, “the mind is an interrobang, a zip-filed / mark of kick.” Sense is further enhanced by sound, a strong, spoken performance quality found in the cacophony of consonance. This quantum form of music is put to work to “send ideas around a corner.” Moments like the stretto of a fugue overlap and repeat. Via the rhythmic “leaf, leaf” and “wish, wish,” “we go to the what and touch it, / only in thought: like this.”

And in the ongoing quantum connection of everything, the speaker, in “Slip Minute,” induces the reader to “think on time’s fancy maths.” The particular is up against the all-at-once. The poem, “Slip Minute,” measures a quality of time, one that lengthens and shortens “like a concertina.” Writing through these complex ideas, the poet carefully crafts evocative lines, deliberate in the placement of images—“decades of mosquitoes / in dissolved parliaments”—and use of enjambment—“… lived in handsome parallel / to ourselves.” In “Slip Minute,” the colon in the poem’s final line stands as a clever notation for the quantum condensation of everything, “All at once: all at once.” Even moments of stark humour, in the same poem, a voice reports, “I am still doing laundry, / although I am dead.”

Through the collection, it is difficult not to be mindful of the psychological connotation of the “dissociative” fugue. Many moments of the associative play alongside the dissociative. In “Slip Minute,” the speaker contains unknown multitudes, “not knowing who is who among me.” Lines are encoded with this fuzziness of identity; “I’ll show you a meaning with two animals inside it,” the speaker says.

The collection concludes with a four-part vocal, musical score for a piece that appears earlier, “One Snail Theory of Metaphysical Events.” It is not important if a reader can decipher the notes on the staff. But by encountering the composition in this form, it becomes more clear that what develops through the book is a poetics of “ultrasound.” The reader is on passage into the unknown in which both sound and echo form its imagery. The key, as the reader, is to let the melody play, “All at once: all at once,” listening to a composition of possibility, where even “a footnote is not an endstop.”