Ogress Oblige

by Dorothy Trujillo Lusk

Dorothy Trujillo Lusk is a savagely funny writer whose poetry mangles the clichés of modern life to reach a new kind of negotiated peace. She "lacks breeding and gravitas and degrees," but she's a titanic force in the new Canadian poetry, and Ogress Oblige is a jeremiad of heroic and epic proportions. Lusk writes in a variety of avant-garde forms, then shreds them up into mulch, the better to express the frustrations and rage of the poor single mother--or thinking human being--in a society which cares little for her or us. As one train of invective leaves the station, another pulls in. Wrapped crates pile up on the stationmaster's steps, crates marked "The Monstrous," "The Sacred," "The Female." Words are left gasping all over the page. Her remarkable verbal dexterity is itself a kind of banner of hope, a way out. With grace and mercy, Ogress Oblige surveys a battered landscape in which "art is expensive," for a course in "legendary victim improvement."

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1928650112
• ISBN13: 9781928650119
• Release Date: January 2001
• Publisher: Krupskaya
• Length: 64 Pages
• Weight: 0.25 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.2" x 5.6" x 8.0"

Customer Reviews

more sniping from a hostile city-state

Only a page into the volume, Ogress Oblige quickly 'thought to 'shut me the fawk up' and has kept me in this holding pattern for a couple of months. The numbness is wearing off a little. Yet I still don't have my bearings and hopefully won't, (but a few bearings are nice now and then as they spin in their private caves). It's still so heady, however, and has kept me out of any argumentative state with the book.) What else can you do when you realize, among the myriad of beauteous shards and halting tales, the one who penned the letter had been "bullied by American spellcheck," (who has the ability to think THAT!?) reduced, not to a Dorothy T. Lusk or some known or fictional character, but simply and"apparent whom," an anonymous pronoun slated to its indirect case. But the subject-I, the "goof" that wishes she "was rich" and that moves through the Ogress, regardless of its would-be and actual fissures of identity ("I am convinced I have no father// I am reduced to a generic being sniping at a hostile city-state," "Indemnity, or who I seem" "As if I matter, as if"), is not headed for suicidal erasure but a more buoyant and fluid over identification. I'm thinking, at the moment, of the line: "I'm deleted to pluck your aper-ature." Although the speaker is "deleted", she is also delighted, and in that delight of deletion, she plucks an aperture, a gap opening in the word itself by way of the dash to become the "Velour enrobed matriarch of my imaginary present." Lusk has that uncanny ability to draw from the unwanted periphery of culture details to create a hybrid verse of the low and high. Such a prestigious position of the matriarch, worthy of being "enrobed" (not just simply wearing clothes), wears velour?! Elsewhere she remarks, "In my absence, I perceive the drift-by shootings." The deletion and absence of self, leads not simply to a realist perception of facts of the underside of society, in this case, the tactics of urban gang wars, but is able to take this element and transform it, (drift by instead of drive by). Poetry here doesn't simply present the self in some lyrical cocoon but is out there, part of the world, on the one hand, subject to its abject elements while also possessing enough courage to take on the not-so-pretty, the vertiginous, and make something new and exciting out of them . Ah there is so much to say about this great book, so much indeed, but it's time to oblige to the ogress, return to silence, and simply say read it for yourself.

Excerpt from Publishers Weekly Forcasts

"An ahistorical avant-garde verges on apoplexy at the approach of an active mother - RRRRRR -" Juxtaposing high latinate lexemes, frequent internal rhymes and self-consciously stilted neologisms, Lusk evokes the history of England and its poesy as a colonial specter of post-co writhings: "Errant friction fall-out/ to repudiate a lineage/ of hammered patricians."....Subjected to a poltergeist bent on "aural thumpage," rarefied aesthetic language trips on itself, swerves thematically ("Beer Girl, Art Thou Troubled?"), swears and yields lexical and phrasal hybrids that poke violently through its surface, turning Poetry into a "puritan potty mouth."