A5, 58 pages, Black and white printing, Perfect bound, 2021

Stepping over the bland terrain of liberal cosmopolitanism and into the estranged interstice of liminality and hybridity, Emma Gomis’s sonic poetry moves the reader into kinship with the X we cannot quite grasp and only do so in its playful, traced emergence. Gomis's poetry brings two languages, Catalan and English, into clandestine simultaneity, a dwelling that is as touching and personal as it is transformative and yearning. X here might fulfil the rhetoric of chiasmus in the same breath that it denies fixity with its openness and experiment. For me, these poems made Catalan, a language I do not speak or hear spoken often, feel strangely familiar in a way that does not require knowing per se but rather a sensory acknowledgement, the gift of lilting cadence that warps the light. — Azad Ashim Sharma

It bears repeating that deftly translingual writing such as this pivots away from monolingual dominance and as such is insistently not just the work of loss but of recalcitrance, linguistically kicking out with the heels. Emma Gomis’s X is letter, is address, is cipher, is repetition, is sonic haunting. It creates a collision of senses, an ‘uncanny score’ that ‘sketch[es] a canopy’ over these poems, over us, making us ‘swerve’, 'fold over', 'care'. X’s inventory, its residue, sneaks itself into our aural or oneiric imaginary, and then slips out, squeezes through the gap created between tongue and palate in various degrees of friction and release. — Sophie Seita

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