Lorem Ipsum / Hossannah Asuncion / 2008
I borrowed this book from my friend and am now pretty sure she’s never getting it back. I asked her if I could borrow it while helping her move during a particularly dark and troubling time in her life. Packing her books in a room full of cigarette smoke and the noisy clatter of a rock song clashing against different South Asian song, the cover stood out for its minimalistic design and clearly underground aesthetic. It’s a small chapbook, held together with a tiny binder clip. The chapbook looked like the sort of thing you would never find in a bookstore, but instead tucked in the corner of some bibliophile’s bookshelf. Its origin story checks out: my friend was gifted the book by legendary poet Jeffrey McDaniel, who selected it specifically for her based on her undergrad aesthetic.
The book is full of images drawn from a Google search using “the terms ‘patent’ with ‘pen,’ ‘typewriter,’ or ‘keyboard.’ As random as the images are, they feel essential to the book. There is a nitpickiness about the images that matches the sort of obsessive attention, sometimes frivolous, but undeniably beautiful that seems to stalk quirky artist types. Think Ikea instructional guide with plenty of numbers and arrows.
The title “Lorem Ipsum” refers to the latin phrase for dummy text, literally filler, used in design models. Not the highbrow title we would expect from a published literary collection, but rather something that gives the collection the feel of something like a mixtape. Don’t let it deceive you about the quality of the poems though. There is something lyrically haunting, utterly mundane, and needle-sharp about these poems. Check out these small throwaway lines for example:
1) “A person, / steps onto the elevator. You / smile. It’s an accident.”
2) “You are forgetting the taste / of smog, you hope it is not forgetting you.”
3) “you don’t / realize the strain of your thoughts: / they are so matte you squint / to understand them.”
Magical, right? So inside of its own head, eyes sore with weariness, throat parched with longing. I sit with this collection and feel my humanity stuck in my throat. By humanity, I mean either love or sorrow.
I recommend this collection for poets and weirdos especially. Everyone else should read it too, but honestly, I don’t think it’s for you.
PS - Doesn’t this author have the coolest name? Doomed to be a poet with that glorious, haunted name.