Georgie Jesson – soft spot for a junkie (Toothgrinder Press)
i’m so lucky
all the junkies
so soft around me
These are the opening lines to the final poem, thank you, in Georgie Jesson’s debut poetry book, ‘soft spot for a junkie’ (Toothgrinder Press). These words encapsulate the tenderness with which Jesson dissects and intervenes into their own history and memory as they deal with grief, loss, bereavement and love. A subjectivity that was crafted and moulded through family relations, between a Bosnian mother and a British father; ‘a communist turned neurotic capitalist’ and ‘a private school cast-off turned heroin addict’ respectively. As many people have, myself included, Jesson found love a love for poetry through music, initially in the work of PJ Harvey and Bob Dylan and later on in more esoteric and obscure lyricists such as Karen Dalton, Jock Scott and Ben Wallers. It is the hope that in writing about this beautiful, violent and raw work of poetry in what is predominately a ‘music’ publication that others will be able to find refuge and companionship in this literary form, if that they have not already, and participate in its possibilities as a mode of self-actualisation and a constituent of collective liberation.
C. S Lewis wrote in A Grief Observed, “I thought I could describe a state; make a map of sorrow. Sorrow, however, turns out to be not a state but a process. It needs not a map but a history…”. Such a sentiment resonates within the tonalities of ‘soft spot for a junkie’ – as a piece of writing it does not attempt to create a totality for reconciliation but rather we are taken on a journey through a history of living and loving an addict, one that is filled with a myriad of emotional registers which are constantly in antagonistic relations. In the end, the capabilities of Jesson as a poet are to be found in the fact that in the reading process, we are able to momentarily enter into their experiences, but perhaps most importantly we are left to endure this experience long after we close the cover. We are left without resolution but instead with a profound lesson that we cannot be castrated from our memory, never fully repress our pain – that no amount of writing, of speaking, of silence will restore us to a mythological place of peace – but in being brave and open enough to experience it, attempt to understand it that we can keep on living. As Jesson writes in, time is not a line:
and where do i meet you in your past?
and how fast can i imagine ‘to be’
now that time is not a line
but a faint, spreading circle
Paintings by Maro Michalakakos
Similarly, as can be seen in the words above, the distinguishing structure between poetry and prose – at least according to Giorgio Agamben in his work, The End of the Poem – is enjambment. If that is to be the case, a ‘soft spot for a junkie’ is an exceptional work of poetry. Jesson’s meticulous use of enjambment functions to create tension and release, it gives the breath of life to the poems so that they come to live off of the page; each pause and each invitation to proceed entrances the reader allowing them feel the magnitude of emotions and feelings that are the content of the poems. The understanding of poetic language and structures feels natural, not contrived as if in preparation for a review such as this, but nonetheless in its brilliance it is sure in the knowledge of what is being accomplished. Such as in the poem, following sunlight:
i’m practicing the language of loss
And the less you say,
the more i understand you
The run-on from loss in this instance feels more fulfilled and intense, in a book of poems that rarely capitalises the beginning of its sentences let alone anywhere else, which allows it flow, shocks the reader and forces them to confront and recognise the following statement and all that it captures.
The word ‘junkie’ became popularised in the 1920s in the United States of America. Its etymology is contested, between notions of adding the suffix -ie, which is commonly used to form nicknames and other such diminutives, to the word junk. Historically a nautical term for “an old and inferior cable or rope” however the meaning of junk morphed and changed – as language oft does – to mean “Old or discarded items or materials that may be reused or recycled such as used clothing, bottled scrap metal, worn-out machinery”. Junkie in the context of the book refers to “A person who is addicted to drugs, especially heroin; a habitual user of drugs” – an expression which was first used by Nels Anderson is his 1923 work, The hobo: the sociology of the homeless man. Joe Schwarcz writes that in the 20th century as addiction to heroin became a widespread problem, and that the drug was not cheap which meant as a result people experiencing addiction “resorted to supporting their habit by rifling through junkyards for scrap metal that they could sell”. At the heart of Jesson’s book, that similar logic is present, that of rifling, here though the poet is trawling not through materials but their history and memory – finding value in time, finding value in places – and in doing so is able to open up the possibility for re-understanding and re-contextualising our relationship with our own junkyards and our collective histories.
In words, as in society, we find the stigmatisation of the addict and addiction – of the junkie. Language and the terminology we use to designate certain conditions hold within them, or are inundated with forms of control and social power, to the extent that language can adversely affect the suffering of individuals who deserve more care and attention, through labelling of an individual as junkie, some may naturally or unconsciously confine such a person to the realm of social outcast, filled with depravity and not deserving of humanity. ‘soft spot for a junkie’ questions this categorization, it forces us to confront our prejudices and the pathology of addiction. With drug use in the UK rising over the last decade and addiction and dependency on the rise, with more than 300,000 people seeking help for substances in the England in the past year, alongside a collapsing system of health and emotional-care – a book such as this may never have been more important to provide humanity to the issue of habitual drug use and addiction. In this way, it is appropriate to see this collection of poems as a work of re-humanization and reforming our understanding of words and labels and power that they hold. For if language is to be an important form of communication then it is of the utmost importance that these signs that the affective economies they create between speaker and subject do not harm unnecessarily or blindly but create a circuity of empathy and respect. To remember as Jesson shows, that the junkie is also: ‘father’, ‘earth’ ‘shapeshifter’, ‘mountains’ and more.
‘soft spot for a junkie’ is not solely about the poet’s relation to the father, but also to the mother and Bosnia. The works sits suitably disjointed in-between the duopoly of drugs and diaspora, as the unification of experiencing these combined circumstances is no easy matter for a heart and mind to comprehend. They can leave a being caught in the middle, stuck and split, as Jesson writes in the poem, balcony:
i see my life like two halves of a severed worm
both alive and struggling
These lines although not directly related to, harmonise with the reflections on the experience as belonging to part of a diaspora, in this case with Bosnia, such as in the poetic prose piece, ‘the return’ which divides the book. A divide which can be seen to function symbolically in regard to the content of the particular piece, as it represents an in-betweenness or fracture that can occur on returning to a place left or temporarily lost. Writing on grief and identity in the aftermath of migration from the Balkans, Jelena Markovic notes that “cultural bereavement seems to be a type of ambiguous loss – one in which the boundaries about what was lost, where it was lost, or when are unclear, partial or indefinite”. This claim corroborates with the words present in ‘the return’, “In the car to Stanari is bliss, rolling through the Balkan greenery. being around distant family feels like constantly having your headphones in, it’s the greatest comfort because it’s vaguely familiar yet I don’t understand everything enough to totally tune.” It’s partial not complete and not a permanent feeling, as is shown only a few lines later, “I hide in the kids bedroom because I’ve lost the language”. One moment of connection can be replaced with a sense of disconnection. However, there does arise the feeling of a sense of belonging, or relating the history and family which comes from being situated with the place, being a part of that society. As Halbwachs theorises in on Collective Memory, human memory can only function within a collective context, “it is in society that people normally acquire their memories”, and therefore their subjectivity. Through the time spent in Bosnia, as shown at the end of, ‘the return’ – “This place is such a big part of me. It’s way more than half of me, it’s more of me than I think I’ve ever realised.”
If you’re wanting more reasons to read this brilliant book of poems, from voices with more respectability and understanding then have a look at the reviews – for on that list there are illustrious writers and artists with a profound knowledge of the heart who see that same ability in ‘soft spot for a junkie’. Jesson shows us that with compassion and heart we can re-write our memories, re-establish our relationship to loss, seek to comprehend perplexing and traumatic experiences, as Portelli states, “Memory is not a passive depository of facts, but an active process of creation of meanings.” In the process of memory, lies the process of remembering, this work moves beyond the borders of the book and into-the-world, as an interjection against the status-quo, as an intervention into subjectivity-formation and history. As an insight which functions in chorus with the Palestinian writer, academic and activist Edward Said, into how we can begin to reimagine and reclaim narratives. Ending as Jesson concluded with the final lines of the opening poem, elegy in the sun:
yet i was still young enough to be
a completely new person at the end of each summer
Words by Teddy Maloney
Paintings Maro Michalakakos
Photos by Jeanie Jean
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