Nadira Clare Wallace Reviews Kat Sinclair

 Very Authentic Person
Kat Sinclair
The 87 Press

Kat Sinclair’s engrossing debut, Very Authentic Person, published by the87press last year, could be subtitled: a portrait of the artist’s mind trying to escape itself. The escapism is not a tragedy, though. It is fascinating. The contemporary traits of our distractedness are sketched by Sinclair with verve and fun is often a predominant flavor in the poems. The book also feels rousingly youthful, and I have Sinclair’s own words to back up my characterization: ‘… so what the fuck, and I’m so young, and where’d you go / poorly cut avocado’ (‘Home for Wayward Spiders’). These lines typify much of the collection, with their canny self-mockery, plus a rowdiness that is conformity-resistant, well-oiled-adult-resistant.

Sometimes the defiant mode means honest (and, again, usually fun) disclosure about the speaker’s lack of a stable personality. To be a Very Authentic Person is a struggle. Maybe that Person is chimerical. In ‘Heirlooms’ this comes to the fore in a comic and deeply relatable way:

Walking down to the train station,

six ay em, sea in the distance,

see in the distance a boat

pretend to feel what I assume it is you’re supposed to feel

when you see a boat in the distance

on the distant sea

trip on the crub,

stumble for a couple of feet and the sea slips

from view and now I’m not sure of which

emotion to adopt, I tend to go with what’s most cinematic––

The ‘I’ here is like a costumer at a sentiment supermarket, choosing from pre-cooked reactions to the world. However, authenticity is present in the self-monitoring. Endearingly, the speaker confesses to copying and this, to a certain degree, authenticates what is taking place.

Other ephebic attributes crop up in Sinclair’s longer poems, including the four-part ‘Really Listening’. Below is an excerpt, with my commentary on each line in square brackets:

my thumb perpetually over the lens and

[‘perpetually’ suggests exaggeration and the tone is a gentle, self-mocking one––of the ‘oh, you know what I’m like’ kind. The enjambment––a technique which is used quite a bit throughout the collection––boosts the sense of fast-past chatter]

I am murky and loving

[this line is a jolt after the preceding one; the speaker jumps from describing how she messes up photos to her character. The link is possibly that she makes her photos murky because she is murky]

I am a request stop the slowing down excites me

[the paratactic grammar keeps the breathy style going. Thoughts run up against each other. Also, the speaker’s being playful]

so I’ll tweet about it later but for now

[this beautifully captures that bustling, planning portion of consciousness, which often crushes the poor, present-ness part]

it will be enough to sit on a bench wrong with you

[another lovely, wry, slightly saddening line, implying that much is wrong and that one must accept the fact by continuing to sit on public furniture with nameless, wrongly-loved others]

draw up plans in old lipstick

[the gist here is: we are making do with a situation which is a little mad and broken, using tools which are a little mad and broken. The protagonist is quixotic and therefore liberated––liberated, that is, from the strictures and curbs of workaday, grown-up society by reason of incompetence and kookiness]

make homogeneity history or

[this happens quite frequently throughout Sinclair’s book: a grand, revolutionary idea flashes for us momentarily, but only momentarily. Now you see a utopian impulse, now you see something superficial take its place]

make a playlist for a day not like this one

[the abolition of homogeneity and the plan to make a playlist––rubbing these two ideas together creates irreverent sparks. A ‘day not like this one’ is also masterly. The present moment is glanced at, but only as problem in need of a solution. In this case, the solution is a nonexistent occasion’s soundtrack]

These then are the principal forces of Very Authentic Person: rapidity, rebelliousness, quixotism, mindful un-mindfulness, a sensitivity to error. At times, however, the collection presents us with emotions which slow things down. For instance, in ‘Time After Time by Cyndi Lauper’, we come across this plaintive computer/gaming metaphor:

I want to drag the corners of my own life

Into the right hand half of the screen

So I can busy myself with the Pacman ghosts on the left

And never have to know you again

Sinclair can also get very political––in fresh, far-reaching ways. The narrator of ‘Home for Wayward Spiders’, imagining themself at a party in 2023, tells us they suppose what is going on around them

                         doesn’t quite matter

            Because I am no patron to linear progression

            or colonial timekeeping,

            heteropatriarchal lineage

            or my own pathologized medical potentiality […]

The area covered by these highfalutin, academic terms is large. And the speaker, branded a ‘Dyke’ earlier in the poem, hints that she/they are ready to junk everything denoted by such terms. This is thrilling. It’s the kind of skepticism that can lead to fabulously dark questions, like: what if everything I think I know is wrong? In Sinclair’s final poem, ‘Ode to Osmosis’, politics is again at the center, negotiated via symbols the virtual realm (as with ‘Time After Time by Cyndi Lauper’):

the Duolingo owl, who is capitalism

perfectly distilled and stupid

counting globules of care into tiny jewellery bags and

pulling the strings tight

to be opened when most needed,

which is always, which is never

so the globules grow stale.’

Our current economic setup depicted as an unwise, digital ‘owl’ trafficking in gemmy trick-promises sticks in the mind. Sinclair isn’t aggressively condemnatory and the lament about ‘globules of care’ growing stale feels real. The last stanza of the collection is climactically melancholic: a loved one may be dying of cancer. The poet handles this in a manner both haunting and uplifting, while the whole ragged celerity of the collection comes to rest with a pause that is insurgent:

            I just never thought you’d be another ghost on the Internet

            like ‘Glioman’[1], pun thief, with one introductory post and

we don’t know if he’s lazy, or tired, or dead

like here it is, collapsing at the end of a trial:

caesura the means of production.

[1] A glioma is a type of brain tumour.