Shazia Hafiz Ramji Reviews Dominik Parisien’s Side Effects May Include Strangers

Dominik Parisien. Side Effects May Include Strangers. McGill-Queen’s University Press. 84 pp., ISBN: 9780228003571

“I like to fuck in protest of this body,” claims the speaker in “After Convulsing in Public,” a poem from Dominik Parisien’s debut collection of poetry, Side Effects May Include Strangers. If that line feels confrontational, it’s because Parisien’s poetry undoes the language of pain. 

Side Effects May Include Strangers grapples with the incomprehensibility of pain in its representations, challenging us to sit with the complicated experiences of medicalized and disabled bodies. In the opening poem, Parisien closes with a question: “Ask, Can we for a moment make of beauty / the measure of our pain? and I will answer.” 

Parisien does indeed take measure: “Ask, How many roses does the hammer weigh / when it bears down your skull?” The contrast of soft and hard sensory impressions is paradoxical and disarming: how can a hammer be measured in roses? How much will it weigh when it bears down on your skull? But it’s in this tangle of metaphors where Parisien’s poetry translates the experience of pain.

And the translation of pain itself is questioned. In a poem that closes the first section, “It Is This,” Parisien writes:

Maybe pain is
a poem
a prayer 
a delusion

Maybe pain is
–––––––––––
–––––––––––
–––––––––––

Maybe pain is.

Definitions for pain are struck through and cancelled. Then the strikethrough itself stands in for pain, suggesting erasure, cancellation, absence. Then nothing stands for pain except the verb tense, is, offering profound insight about pain and being and as being. 

Parisien, a Francophone, engages translation literally as well. In “An English-speaking Doctor Translates the Concerns of His Patient with Google,” French and English are placed side by side for comparison. Interrupted syntax and breathy short lines convey untranslatability: “listening / doctor / you who know / suffering / tell / simply / this evil of today / I / me / would shoot / with help / or / is it a / trouble / death.” 

Though the first part of the book confronts definitions, translation, and representations of pain, Parisien also challenges the reconstitutive narrative of recovery, which imposes linear progress on a body in pain and on disabled bodies, complete with expectations of wellness and wholeness as aspiration. In “Post-Convulsive Recovery,” Parisien writes: “today beauty moves / small / … breathing / breathing / in / applause.” This poem guides the breath to appreciate itself, conveying an acceptance and appreciation of being, not as a goal or an end in itself, but as celebration. 

Like the speaker who says, “I like to fuck in protest of this body,” Parisien’s poems are paeans of fiercely tender queer love that write with – not through – disability, depression, and illness, without false narratives of progress. Side Effects May Include Strangers is a necessary and life-affirming book of poems.

Shazia Hafiz Ramji’s writing has appeared in Best Canadian Poetry 2019, THIS magazine, Best Canadian Poetry 2018, and is forthcoming in EVENT, and Maisonneuve, and Gutter: the magazine of new Scottish and international writing. Her poetry and prose have been nominated for the 2020 Pushcart Prizes by Poetry Northwest and carte blanche, respectively. Shazia was named as a “writer to watch” by the CBC. She is the author of Port of Being, a finalist for the 2019 Vancouver Book Award, BC Book Prizes (Dorothy Livesay Poetry Prize), Gerald Lampert Memorial Award, and winner of the Robert Kroetsch Award for Innovative Poetry. She is a columnist for Open Book and is at work on a novel.