Faceless - Poetry

    FACELESS, poetry
    (Signature Editions, 2007)

Jacket Copy

In Faceless, Genni Gunn explores "the impulse for the edge," a magnetic field between the gloss of the topside world and the grit of the world beneath. Both these landscapes are fascinating and treacherous, haunted by faces that are obsessively worn and shed, torn off and replaced, where identity itself is arbitrary. Impersonation, even of oneself, is the rule. In a piano bar, the musician is a chameleon adapting to the faceless men who sit around her piano. The faceless cadavers in the notorious BodyWorlds exhibits stalk the rooms while, in Gunn's title poem, an ordinary French woman finds redemption in the world's first face transplant after being mauled in a strange accident by her pet dog. To be anonymous in today's urban places is to be free yet isolated, to be in a constant flux of longing for and fear of "the dead and beating heart," both in one's own breast and those faltering in the chests of others. The countless faces that Gunn confronts on the streets of the city or behind closed doors make her important new book such a compelling read–as does the "delicious anxiety" she sees hanging in ecstatic, sometimes terrifying suspense in the liminal spaces between.

Review Quotes

 "As a central metaphor, “faces” are an interesting one to explore, ripe with echoes of surface and depth, geography and biology, semantics and connotations. Faceless explores these themes with vigor and scope, collecting almost every poetic angle on the subject of the face into a group of image driven, largely narrative pieces. . . This is a book about conjoining memories to landscapes, spaces to letters, fusing poetic techniques to linear and lyric storytelling." - The Dansforth Review, November 2007

"Cog, outcast, ghost, cadaver -- Gunn encounters them all in this concentrated collection that finds rhythm in life's inequities and perils. At the heart of it is a quest for something beyond the masks and facades, something to connect with." - Event, Winter 2008

Excerpt

wEstSCAPES

To live on the edge of a continent is to understand

the finite property of things    delicious anxiety 

fear of falling optional suicide  measures B jump

into cold bluewater   submerge  float out to sea

Inland  Toronto, continuity is unsettling   the rush  

the thick of people   things    a constant distraction

no oceans to dream beyond     no balancing

on perilous cliffs     no hypothesis of death    Faces

stare out of windows envisioning  perhaps  a mountaintop

the slow   smooth glide through air    the soundless parting

of waves   Here where a continent rises

and falls  the possibilities for disaster are endless:

an earthquake   east and west fault lines  or a tsunami

monster quenching its thirst in English Bay

swallowing the West End whole   or a torrent of rain

steeping the mountainside in mud   a steady flow to the sea

To balance on the outer edge is to accept paradox

equilibrium   a faint horizon between impulse and rationale

We erect amulets: THIS IS A NUCLEAR-FREE ZONE

in the shadow of US destroyers which slice  intermittent

the depths of the harbour    point to the words   hold up

banners   bob on small lifeboats in the path of steel

no more effective than one small man in China

waving his shopping bags to stop an army

To live on the edge of a continent is to have both

a clarity of vision and an unshaken belief in myth:

how in semi-darkness  totems stalk us  carved eagles fly

frogs swim the water of the eye and bear claws

scratch tremors in the spine  or how the downtown

city face is a thin mantle crust beneath which

arteries pulse with spice and opium  cards  knife

blades   plunging into the centre of the earth

or how we ski in morning light and swim in afternoon

the impulse for the edge is a magnetic field

insul/isolation   and we create a story: this is the last

chance for utopia, a new frontier