Aja Moore’s hotwheel conjures a deeply psychic mood, called into existence through Vancouver’s verdant backdrop. The eight poems contained within transcend common designs of millennial writing by carving a space that goes beyond irony and cultural disillusionment and builds into a realm of profound sentiment. Moore writes with a post-structural consciousness that fuses experimental engagement with a loving reliance on thinkers like Adorno, Barthes, Rilke, and Rimbaud.

“The poems to come are for u,” reads the dedication of Aja Moore’s debut collection, the fifth and final book published in Metatron Press’s Healing Spells catalogue. Quickly, the reader becomes subsumed in this vigilant, confessional exploration of embodiment, selfhood, identity, desirability, and longing.

Moore writes with a relentless curiosity – uncensored, as if in candid, lucid conversation directly with the reader. The speaker fearlessly agitates dominant patterns of thought, calling into critique the reductive modes by which art – even and especially poetics – is absorbed and reproduced within the confines of feminized social conventions. In “I WANT TO TEXT YOU ABOUT ROBERT DUNCAN,” she writes:

Since the process begins in the brain, which, for the sake of transparency, is my brain and no one else’s—the meanings come out in words, but not just any. I don’t think in images so there are very few images in my poems. I am a bad poet and a bad girl, which could be related but hopefully isn’t. I would not be a good girl in exchange for talent.

hotwheel commits itself to transparency, affording full access to the speaker’s churning unconscious, where observations anticipate and transcend their conclusions. Through this method, the poems construct a maze of abstract insights that build, revealing unexpected paths of inquiry:

I want to be both turbulent and edible. Love can’t occur between docile bodies, only between passionate ones who see themselves in natural terms, as tidal, as ruptured, as moving. I am hoping we are blind and accelerating. Here the brightest colours always denote poisons. The brighter the colour the more concentrated the dose. I am still and tasteless and this is how nobody wants me.

Moore brings a profound, critical self-awareness to the millennial experience. hotwheel continuously revisits the emotional and psychological mechanisms that precariously develop in reaction to capitalism’s demands. Her poetic motivation oscillates between metaphysical inquiry and a sharp humour that bears witness to the many absurdities of contemporary reality, in which we all lead largely disjointed, consumer-driven lives. In “TECHNOLOGIES FOR FREEDOM,” she writes:

The Light at the End of the Tunnel
Is just the city
Delivering
Right to yr door in 24 hrs or less
The device that reveals the atrocities
Causes them

and continues:

I think
I would prefer Time and Love
To Money but I think I’d prefer Time
Over Love
*David Attenborough voice*
These
Are desperate times

These poems imagine a spectrum of multiplicity within desire, in which oppositional needs and impulses are negotiated within a politics of care. The text creates a seemingly vast solipsistic landscape, only to repeatedly contradict this setup by submerging in the erotic and interpersonal, a space the speaker uses to consider intimacy, sex, and seduction. In “AFTER DODIE BELLAMY’S WHEN THE SICK RULE THE WORLD, ” the speaker’s thoughts evolve through an eighty-five item manifesto:

1. You must be gentle with the object, right away.
2. The object must be allowed to ask for it rough at any time.
3. The object must be allowed to ask you to stop.
4. The object may demand that it be treated in ways that you may see as in conflict, or even as opposing.
5. The object may feel that being treated gently is what causes the most discomfort, or that being treated callously is most comfortable.
6. The object determines what is felt based on what has been felt.

hotwheel delivers an astute meditation on contemporary existence and the accompanying emotional phenomena. Through lyric and vivid metaphor, Moore’s intuitive poetic engagement invites a re-examination of the minutiae of daily experience. This inspiration continues far beyond the final page; Moore’s poems lodge themselves into the reader’s unconscious, accruing deeper and more complex significance with time. mRb