Like Fugue Body, Jessi MacEachern’s Cut Side Down spans different time periods and voices. The work takes inspiration from Virginia Woolf’s Orlando, a story of a time-travelling poet who entertains multiple romantic partners through multiple centuries. As in Orlando, the speaker toggles between their desires for formality and frippery, and the decision to reveal or conceal these desires. The collection opens: “there are women wearing / ruffled underpants just behind my eyes.” 

Though exploratory and wide-ranging, the work is best when it’s rooted, as in the poems from the final section, which deal with a rural childhood on Prince Edward Island. Here, rhyming couplets and references to “child-mad women” conjure a downhome Macbeth:

You show me

The dirt drove. The woman-child mad

The damp poof. Radish halves

Greens soaked in vinegar. Profound sound

Strong between 

Could the Bard himself have come up with the amazing sonic description “snapping dirt-streaked asparagus”? Underpinning the collection is the sense that there is something both thrilling and deviant about putting these sounds and feelings into words: “Words / —sex, garments, death—turn to ash in the mouth. / But we thrill in the deceit!”mRb