BOOK REVIEW: I’m Still Growing

I’ve been thinking a lot about change and belonging recently. In my creative practice I find myself coming back again and again to places, spaces, and past selves which I no longer know. At night I find myself walking through houses I haven’t lived in in years, moving through strange quake dreams, and talking to people I haven’t seen in half a decade or more. Perhaps it’s something to do with being almost 25 and finally having finished my Master’s degree. Perhaps it’s the death of my grandfather. Or perhaps it’s just the approach of another earthquake anniversary. Whatever the reason, Josiah Morgan’s (Kāi Tahu, Ngāti Maniapoto) latest collection i’m still growing is exactly the sort of book I’ve been needing to read. i’m still growing finds the poet in conversation with his past selves and older art, exploring queerness, selfhood, and the perpetual experience of change through violence, sexuality, and brilliantly controlled language. Juxtaposing the mundane with the explicit, grief with desire, the best poems of this collection occupy a different stylistic niche to much of the recent output from contemporary New Zealand poets, heralding the arrival of an exciting new voice on the scene. With his first four books published in the United States, i’m still growing is Morgan’s first collection put to print on home soil in Aotearoa – and I for one am thrilled that it’s here to shake things up.

Phrases like ‘exciting new voice’ and ‘one to watch’ get thrown around a lot in the review-space to the point that they often start feeling like filler, but here I think they’re warranted. While I wasn’t sold on all of the poems in i’m still growing, it contains much to get excited about. I was particularly drawn in by the book’s second section, ‘inside the castle’, which functions as one long poem divided into three acts. Originally published in 2019 as a chapbook in the United States, ‘inside the castle’ explores desire, queerness, sex, and loss across forty-six pages of frenetic yet tightly-controlled verse. I’m always a sucker for a long-form poem which makes me work for its meanings – my first encounter with T. S. Eliott’s The Waste Land (1922) on a university course in London turned me on to poetry in a big way after a long period of ambivalence. They’re hard to get right, but Morgan hits the mark here. Reading ‘inside the castle’ I found myself thinking frequently of Eliott; Morgan’s language has some of that same driving intensity, the rhythmic tumbles toward meaning, and sharp jumps through place and time which are so characteristic of The Waste Land. This is no accident. Margin notes on the text are a feature of ‘inside the castle’, and I was excited to find a note at the end of the third act which lists The Waste Land among supplementary reading and influences. At times the verse begins to disintegrate, becoming fragmentary as pieces of text messages and scraps of language float untethered (p.28-29), but Morgan makes it work. Everything in this section is held together and pulled along by a breathless and frenetic energy, underpinned by the relentless, violent sexuality that defines much of the collection. There seems to be something of a tendency among the newer generation of poets coming out of Aotearoa to use viscera and sexual imagery for shock value, relying upon them to hold up the rest of the poem. Open many of our poetry journals and you will find poetic objects (drug use, substance abuse, lipstick stains, cigarettes, sex, religion, the dead – especially other poets – and the living: a non-exhaustive list) deployed seemingly because they are What You Put In Poems. Devoid of pathos yet creating the appearance of Poetry, these are expected items used to construct facades that contain little depth or truly interesting craft upon closer inspection. Not so here. These are poems which reward rereading, unfolding new meanings and layers of intention the longer you sit with them. The explicit – at times uncomfortable – sexuality is there for a reason, and each vignette, image, and experience (real or imagined) is deployed with intentionality and control. Morgan achieves a discomforting sense of proximity while simultaneously holding the reader at arms-length, never allowing us easy access to meaning despite sharing his and others’ bodies in explicit detail.

Another element of ‘inside the castle’ which interested me was the author’s decision to redact parts of the poem he no longer agrees with, some four years after its original publication. These redactions are rendered as blacked-out boxes which cover part or all of the line, creating a look reminiscent of black-out poetry, or classified military documents. In the margin notes on page twenty six beside the first of these edits, Morgan writes “A mistake .... I have redacted problematic language that I have since reflected on”. No further information is given, leaving us guessing as to what the original line may have been. There aren’t many redactions, but the decision to visualise them rather than rewrite the line or present ‘inside the castle’ with the offending parts removed altogether is a significant artistic choice. By presenting them this way the lines are both there and not – their visible absence draws attention to the changes, and tempts us to guess what they might have originally said. In this way the act of editing and changing one’s mind becomes part of the poem. The blacked-out lines are hard evidence of the poet growing and creating in discussion with his past selves, emphasising the overarching idea of growth and transformation. This sense of the present-self in conversation with the stranger-past-self is compounded by the ways the poems in the third and fourth sections (‘change apparatus’ and ‘overhaul’ respectively) frequently talk back to ‘inside the castle’. This is most obvious in the collection’s final poem, ‘reflections on inside the castle’. Here, the poem’s final lines mirror and respond to the first line of ‘inside the castle’. Where in his teen years Morgan wrote “I watch you fry a lamb” (p.21), now in his twenties he writes that he is

“no longer a teenager i am
a motherfucking vegan
i will never watch a lamb get fried
again.” (‘reflections on inside the castle’, ll.17-20)

This proclamation reads as a total rejection of the things his teen-self was or wanted – veganism and lamb-frying diametrically opposed acts which stand for something larger (and for themselves – sometimes we should take what the poet says at face-value). This sort of conversation between poems is part of what makes i’m still growing such a rewarding read.

I realise I’ve been talking a lot about ‘inside the castle’ and the second half of the book, neglecting the first section (which shares the collection’s title, ‘i’m still growing’). Perhaps this is because, in some ways, the first section feels more like a preface to the collection than a part of the collection proper. The shared first line of ‘inside the castle’ and the final line of the collection creates a sort of book-ending effect, giving the sense that ‘inside the castle’, ‘change apparatus’, and ‘overhaul’ should be read together as one distinct whole. There are also more obvious interrelationships between the poems of these three sections than there are between them and the first. While they share themes with the rest of the collection, the poems in the first section lack some of the drive and unexpected turns that characterise the other poems in i’m still growing – they feel more expected, more in keeping with current trends in Aotearoa poetry, and as a result I found myself less interested. Indeed, the strongest pieces in the collection are the ones which embrace the poet’s unique voice rather than closely following current popular styles. I have reached a point of exhaustion at the current oversaturation of poems built on ironic pop-culture references – I find it hard to read new poems in this style with fresh eyes, as I feel like I’ve already read them many times before. Thus I found it difficult to enjoy pieces like ‘mahi i te kino’ (p.98-99), which builds itself on the foundation of Tom Cruise, everyone’s favourite Scientologist. The language is fun, and it maintains the energy that I enjoy elsewhere in the collection, but the heavy-handed irony undermining any pathos left a bad taste in my mouth. 

 
Beneath the intentionally confronting sex and violence this is a beautifully crafted collection. Morgan is one of those rare poets who understands the power of letting an image sit, and knows when not to attach adjectives to every object. As a result, i’m still growing contains some stunning lines which are arresting in their simplicity. One of my favourites is the final couplet of ‘divide’ (p.93), where Morgan writes “the room across the way/lights up sometimes.” Within the poem this mundane observation is juxtaposed with the perpetual wars of the 21st century, creating (for me at least) a melancholic longing, and an intense sense of place and smallness. This is the sort of construction that makes me want to be a poet all over again, and which makes me sit up and pay attention. i’m still growing is a good, if at times challenging read, which rewards close examination. Josiah Morgan is still growing, and I know I’m excited to see what he does next. Buy it for your friends, your sister, brother, lover – but maybe not your mum.*

*I’m sure she knows what sex is, I just don’t want to talk to her about it.

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Josiah Morgan’s “i’m still growing” is available for pre-order at Dead Bird Books!