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By Liz Worth Trainwreck Press, 2008 24 pages, www.ditchpoetry.com Don't be fooled by the title. Eleven : Eleven by seminal Toronto artist Liz Worth isn't about numerology, or "the opening of the cosmic gates" or any other blather propagated by Uri Geller. It is about the mirroring of the individual sets of "one" and there is, naturally, a countdown of sorts, in the thread of this stark prose poem, and in the verse: "It's these numbered streets. They're counting down our days: Tenth Ninth Eighth Seventh… All down to the last. … It's these streets where we live like atrocities, learning the cartography of sin. And it's on these streets where Maxine turns to me and says, It's only theatre. It's only theatre." Maxine is the exotic other "Eleven" to Worth's narrator in the chap, and depending on your view of similar writer/nihilist type relationships in the past (think Rimbaud/Verlaine for the 21st Century) an enabler, a guru of the dark secular, a BFF, a leach, a sibling or all of the above: "By the way she looked at me I could tell she was staring at her reflection in my sunglasses. She'd just been caught stealing underwear again. 'Lace,' she said, 'A girl can't have too much of it.' As if she were an expert. I didn't question that she wasn't. She asked if wanted to come over and see it all, her stolen underwear that is. She is a Warholian prophecy paraphrased: Everything about her is beauty sleep to cure her sleeping problems and all the boys say she is a problem beauty. I'd heard of a girl with a kaleidoscope between her thighs and thought, This must be her." Worth follows this set up with a gorgeous rendering of a post-punk season in hell, using a very natural and accessible surrealism that never sounds contrived. The ensuing dance, and finale, between Worth's narrator and Maxine follows in the great tradition of Ahab and the White Whale, or Kerouac and Cassidy: a series of lost and broken drifters substituting for the crew of the Pequod or the Beats, as they drain inexorably toward the same whirlpool: "Maxine brings guests of flesh and blood danger. One is gaunt, the colour of forgetting. Two has Phoenix hair and a sharp face, canine teeth that show when he talks. There's a bottle of something the colour of light gold. It tastes like headaches but we drink it anyway. A length of sun streams through the thinning curtains. It catches our smoke and dust and reminds me I haven't been outside in three days. I tell One that something's inside of me. The more I drink the more I see it, the more I feel it, a heaving parasite below my breasts. He's drunk and leans in. The top of his lip is moist. It holds the same humidity I once found between a girl's thighs." The glory of it is that the epic journey down the path of ill intent and its consequent flam contained in 24 pages instead of 240 or 1000. Worth's talent and vision give lie to the notion of Toronto as some moribund outpost of watered down multi-culturalism. That city now boasts strong indie writers like Worth , Robert Chrysler, Goth goddess Alexis Child, as well as endeavors such as Trainwreck Press, Ditch Poetry, and Darryl Salach's Toronto Quarterly. Perhaps not quite the literary rep of Vancouver or several other pretentious North American cities…yet. But Worth would be an incredible writer anywhere she decided to write from. (She is also the author of Treat Me Like Dirt, a non-fiction account of early Toronto punk, available @ http://www.bongobeat.com/bongoindex.php). The final scene of Eleven : Eleven, while not unexpected, is satisfying and honest as any can be for such a naked plunge into self-abnegation. Pound for Pound, Eleven : Eleven gets my vote for best complete prose poem released in 2008. You have a lot of choices out there, but this is guaranteed GOOD writing folks.
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