Book Review: Almost Any Shit Will Do by Emji Spero

Almost Any Shit Will Do
Poems by Emji Spero
Timeless, Infinite Light, March 2014
ISBN-13: 978-1937421137
$20.00

Emji Spero’s most recent collection, Almost Any Shit Will Do, enacts a physical, visual, and textual mapping of the body’s relation to a series of events through seemingly disparate texts, including Deleuze and Guattari, guides on mushrooms, and Foucault. The source material is worth noting, as the process is the text, where, in the notes “on the process,” the impetus is to “To map what-could-still-be” through “A we that emerges in the movement between the one and the many.” Structurally, the collection, or perhaps more appropriately, the rhizome, oscillates between a visual encircling of words and phrasing through drawn lines and prose blocks with titles “the movement (v.)” and “the individual (n.).” The line dictates how the reader navigates these poems; page numbers become irrelevant and are not included. Rather, the line threads the physical event of trauma, the vibrancy of mycelium, and collective unrest to embody an emergent protest to language’s ability to contain and restrain and yet push forward its ability to resist.

There is an institutionalized brutality and syntactical violence to the individual and collective that reverberates throughout these poems—in one “the individual (n.),” the speaker intones “1 you, bleeding from the ear. you, pressed to the concrete. you, followed home daily. you, and all these yous; 2 you, constrained by sentences. you, bending under the totality of the state” bleeds into and from “the movement (v.),” which is “a swell and spilling out of and it will not be convenient and yes you will be made late” and “a swell and spilling into.” On the opposing pages of these blocks of text, the brief encircled poems that utilize the theoretical and the information language on mushroom care and maintenance. Here, collective action is always present, just under the surface.

Like the rhizome in Deleuze and Guattari’s A Thousand Plateaus, Spero’s collection spreads and provides a mode of resistance. Radical connectivity and spreading networks encourage the reader to move off the page, to the thousands of strands unseen yet ever present and, as Spero notes, only a few inches beneath the surface. Almost Any Shit Will Do invites re-reading and varying navigation, to let the reader reabsorb the possibility inherent within and beyond these pages.

Alyse Bensel is the Book Review Editor at The Los Angeles Review and Co-Editor of Beecher’s. She is the author of the poetry chapbooks Shift (Plan B Press, 2012) and Not of Their Own Making (Dancing Girl Press, forthcoming 2014). Her poetry has recently appeared in Mid-American Review, Heavy Feather Review, and Ruminate, among others. She is a PhD candidate in creative writing at the University of Kansas.