I Will Get Up Off Of
by Simina Banu
Coach House Books
72 pages
$24
Following her award-winning debut poetry collection POP, Montreal-based poet Simina Banu’s signature blend of pop culture, illustration, and poignant portrayal of life’s struggles continues in I Will Get Up Off Of. In her book, Banu explores the difficulty of getting up off a monobloc stackable plastic chair. In each untitled poem, the speaker searches for something, anything, that can get her off the chair that functions as both a metaphor and metonym for depression. Formatted as block paragraphs, the poems themselves are also literal monoblocs. Though the content oscillates between despair and hope, the fact that these poems can exist at all proves the possibility of getting up off of the monobloc.
Banu’s innovation is in how she tackles depression. The speaker scrolls through memes, listens to self-help podcasts, and turns to Instagram wellness influencers and Zoom therapists for guidance. But, instead of therapists, Banu writes of a coat salesman who refuses to sell her a coat, a gesture toward the inanity of social services and their failure to provide help effectively. “If I’m about to freeze to death [without a coat], I need to / call a hotline,” a temperature coordinator tells her via Zoom.
Art occasionally arrives to save the speaker, if only temporarily. She describes how a poem about grief recited on a podcast “travelled through [her] body like guided medi- / tation”—“I could feel my / hands again.” But, quickly, the experience is ruined by a “word from our sponsors” that rushes “through [her] body like detergent.” Banu is an inventive poet, frequently employing volta, or
tonal/conceptual turns, that overlap the speaker’s emotional experience with the vapid banalities of popular culture, shifting the tone from serious to tragically funny (I often laughed despite myself).
The poems chart the speaker’s mental spiral, weaving in and out of the problem of self-expression, in and out of words and, increasingly, simple line drawings that feel, to the speaker, like failures, even as they seem to bring her closer to art, to hope. Interestingly, there is also a QR code that takes the reader on an online scavenger hunt: while it effectively highlights the speaker’s struggles with isolation and self-expression, the sudden switch in form and language disrupts the book’s rhythm. But perhaps this was Banu’s intent.
Ultimately, I Will Get Up Off Of creates impact with everyday language and twentyfirst-century imagery of mental illness and wellness (#BellLetsTalk gets an ironic shout-out). Through this, Banu makes accessible and communal a form (poetry) and topic (depression) that are frequently inaccessible and isolating. The language and cadence of the poems held me in a particular mood that I couldn’t shake, even hours after I put the book down. For me, that’s the number one sign of a highly successful book and a highly talented writer.
