Banu, Simina: Pop

Pop by Simina Banu (Coach House Books, paperback)

Publication Date: April 14, 2020

Publisher Marketing: "Moving through a variety of poem-structures, including more traditional lyric structures, prose poems, drawings and visual poems, Banu becomes the explorer, fearlessly pushing out into the unknown." --rob mclennan's Blog

Softening concrete poetry with humour and tenderness, POP takes an uncommon perspective on modern poetic traditions, combining deft lyricism with visual poems for a playful romp.

POP rummages through the stale Cheetos after the love poem: what remains? What never existed to begin with? The book invites the reader to journey both forward and backward in time, to retrace steps, solve word searches, hold pages to the light. POP delineates the intensities of a volatile relationship through a variety of lenses. As the speaker tries to anchor her experience, she is met with a clamour of perspectives: it is a junk food fight of poetic styles, each line fried and seasoned using recipes passed down for generations; it is a sad clown's skincare routine; it is a singalong, a cartoonish cacophony of pots and puns. The speaker shakes the love poem for all it's worth, leaving behind a trail of lint, wrappers, fibs, and soap foam, but opening up enough space to move in herself.