ransack, essa may ranapiri, Victoria University, 2019
‘he is like a bumblebee stinger on my tongue when I say it’
from ‘Dear Orlando’
essa may ranapiri begins their debut poetry collection ransack with a quote from Virginia Woolf’s gender-switching Orlando: ‘Ransack the language as he might, words failed him. He wanted another landscape, and another tongue.’
When I was doing my doctoral thesis (Italian) I carried a Virginia Woolf quote from A Room of One’s Own with me and I still do: ‘Mary is tampering with the expected sequence. First she broke the sentence; now she has broken the sequence. Very well, she has every right to do both these things if she does them not for the sake of breaking, but for the sake of creating.’
Sometimes we need to break language, to smash how we do things in order to begin again, in order to find form and fluidity for our voices. Sometime language fails us. Sometimes we have to smash muteness and test our way into a new musicality, a new sequence of connections. We may be fierce and we may be vulnerable.
I dipped in and out of ransack last year, and loved every snatched moment, but a few weekends ago I sat down in the cool shade and read the book slowly, cover to cover, and felt myself upturn, overturn, inturn and sideturn as the poetry pulsed through my being (I am thinking of that as a verb). This is what a book can do.
essa’s book is a glorious sequence of creating – of ransacking what has been, in order to refresh what will be. Letters written to Orlando make an appearance – like a epistle spine for the collection or a poetry pivot for both reader and writer.
The opening poem ‘my tongue as rope’ lays down a thicket image – the kind of image that hooks you, especially when you think of writing, speaking and even self as braid. The braided rope is the anchor, the preserver, the tough knot, ‘the single knot’, the finder.
essa writes: to pull in sound / draw in lists / the endeavour hits the land’. Can the poems be a form of rope? ‘my tongue-rope wraps itself until it is a single knot.’
A single poem breaks apart in my mouth and heart. The break in the flow creates a new current.
fetal
a mothe
r returnin
g to the grown ground like a gow
n of weeds got a stretching motion
n to stil
l body corps
e the wood in the wax in the flowe
r chains a bab
y stil
l bor
n rattling i
n the mutton skie
s chubby in the loa
m to no mor
e
Reading ransack allows me to absorb the nonbinary experience afresh. Unsettling the line on the page unsettles the line of thought, the entrenched dichotomies of either / or / male / female / she / he / soft / hard / weak / strong
A long poem ‘Con-ception’ is dedicated to essa’s mother and is a reading explosion of arrival, pregnancy, forming embryo, forming mother. I have never read a piece that breaks into and out of the maternal that has affected me so much. I am going to give you a quote that is also right-hand margin justified, but not all the book is (the forms are dancing on their toes in an exuberant display of variousness:
in the world and into the world of tubes
ride the machine
incubate in plastic
and drench in yellow light
the air is whole new in-the-world
and out of the old world
recognise voices
am i
an i?
put in
alove?
When she finally has a shower afterwards she is crying.
Reading the ransack sequences and I am feeling poetry. essa tells Orlando ‘You never had to discover yourself in a book. You never questioned your gendered nature – you moved from one perfect set of genitalia to another according to Aristophanes and the great round people of concave and convex, of female and male.’
essa places body and experience at its white hot core – a gift in its sharpness, its broken cutting lines and its sweet fluencies as the writer navigates how to be, how to be body, how to be bodymindheart in the world. Part of the writing of experience, with that backstory sting of ‘he’, is claiming name, celebrating a pronoun:
u said you liked the ‘th’ sound in they and them the softening of it
and how it fitted around my rage
made it/for it
to be okay to touch
i talk you through other constructions
ones that subverted phonetics
me as a slice of not that
when expecting this
the xe sound like zay
from ‘a phone call about the nature of pronouns gendered and otherwise’
ransack is a skin-prickling, heart-blasting, mind-opening glorious feast of a book that in the spirit of Virginia breaks up language in order to create something breathtakingly new.
essa may ranapiri, Ngāti Raukawa, is a poet from Kirikiriroa, Aotearoa. They graduated with an MA in Creative Writing from Victoria University of Wellington (2018) and their work has appeared in many local journals. They are the featured poet in Poetry Yearbook 2020 (Massey University Press). ransack has been longlisted for the Ockham NZ Book Awards 2020.
essa may ranapiri website
Victoria University Press page
The Pantograph Punch Jackson Nieuwland reviews ransack
RNZ interview
Poetry Shelf: essa reads ‘Glass Breaking’
essa on being at IIML with Tayi Tibble
NZ Poetry Shelf 