Oana Avasilichioaei’s practice is concerned with textuality, polylingual poetics, the social and political forces/voices of the polis, and the intermediary spaces between word, sound and image, exploring the transgressions of these terrains through poetry, translation, performance, and sound work. Her five poetry collections include We, Beasts (Wolsak & Wynn, 2012, winner of the A. M. Klein Prize for Poetry) and Limbinal (Talonbooks, 2015), a hybrid, multi-genre poetic work on notions of borders, and her current book/beyond-the-book project is Eight Track (upcoming 2019), a poetic, sonic investigation of the multifold meanings of track and tracking. Also a translator, her most recent translation of Bertrand Laverdure’s Readopolis (BookThug, 2017) won the 2017 Governor General Literary Award. (<www.oanalab.com>)
What is the terror forming on the street corner?
The glass eye watches, vigilant.
Not to spy, but to monitor.
***
411 Rue Duluth Est
***
What do we passage through these face pages?
It was the era of self-surveillance.
It is the era of self-image worship.
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521 Rue Duluth Est
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When curiously slipping into voyeurism, do even our most impartial kindnesses become performances?
Tell me, are you sovereign, are you willing in a time of wakeful living?
On the streets, under the unseen eye, we walk with eyes averted, sunken into screens, focused on the ground, on an elsewhere, on anytime but now.
***
Where is the slippage? Where, the booming mechanical voice concealed behind the picture frame?
It was the great era of seeing.
It was forgetting where to look. Or how.
A layer, then another layer, then another.
It was the era of a new form of oligarchy.
It is the era of a new form of oligarchy.
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152 Rue Rachel Est
***
What do we passage with our refusal to be implicated?
What is the trauma of this relentless echo?
A layer, then another, then the eye, present and overall ignored.
It is a moment, it is a choice, then it is gone.
Onwards and onwards.
Or rather, backwards and backwards.
Or rather, simply standing still.
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6 Rue Vallières
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What reflects back to us in this two-way mirror?
The distinction between the watcher and the watched growing ever thinner.
The imitating and the imitated facing each other in one unvarying stance.
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What is the tenor of a small act, a sight, a slight shift in the voice’s horizon?
We meddle and we meddle.
We hollow and we hollow.
We ricochet off our will to comfort, to distraction.
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4429 Boulevard Saint-Laurent
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Tell me, are you vassal, do you fear in the wake of living time?
While we prevaricate, tomorrow knots itself into a tight corner.
While the state may wish to take on the burden of the future, the burden of the present lies resolutely on our shoulders.
While our chroniclers believe they’ve attained a kind of imperial freedom, the era of big data enacts the office of the overseeing eye.
***
Why do we make light of our autonomy, while the impetus fritters away?
Why do we give up responsibility so readily?
Words hewn by a “big-brother” will.
Not to discipline, but to control.
This is how the subject falters, gradually becomes obsolete.
Pour citer cette page
Oana Avasilichioaei, « Q & A », MuseMedusa, no 6, 2018, <> (Page consultée le ).
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