An Infinite Emergence
Review of Jessie Jones, The Fool
by Natalie Co
In her 2020 debut collection, The Fool, Jessie Jones inhabits a world where “Allow yourself / to make you is cross-stitched / at the bough of every ingress.” To navigate through Jones’s striking sequence of poems is to embark on a journey of becoming. In tarot, her eponymous fool is assigned the number zero and represents beginnings. Just as the perfectly round zero cannot be traced back to a single point of origin on the page, the fool has no specific place within the tarot deck. Rather, it represents unlimited potential and can therefore be placed either at the beginning or end of the deck, rendering the tarot sequence cyclical. Similarly, Jones’s collection is segregated into numbered sections of 0, I, II, III, and 0 once more. As suggested by its title and circular structure, The Fool invites its readers into a world of constant evolution and dizzying self-discovery.
Jones begins The Fool with a quote from Lisa Robertson: “If pleasure emancipates, why aren’t you somewhere.” This demand accompanies “Itinerants,” the sole poem in section 0. In this poem, Jones boils the mysteries of the human condition down to a neat arrangement of questions, each comprising a single end-stopped line. She asks, “How much pleasure can we permit in ourselves? / Will its fervour signal lightning, act a kind of metal? / Why did it take so long to find a weapon in weather?” Here, and in Lisa Robertson’s words, Jones illuminates an overlap between our internal and external worlds. We struggle to harness the ephemeral strikes of external pleasure into the enduring “metal” of a personal “weapon” with which we can navigate the turbulent storm of life. Although Jones expresses these existential struggles in a precisely organized list of questions, the realities of such issues cannot be so easily encapsulated. Life is a constant negotiation between the self and the external world; we revisit these questions again and again in a perpetual cycle; we grow and evolve with each iteration of these negotiations. “Itinerants,” therefore, not only introduces self-actualization as an interaction between our internal and external worlds, but also suggests through its title that this process recursively leads us to a state of constant emergence.
“The moment before” further reflects the recursive nature of becoming. This poem begins with “a flash, a fresh egg sails back toward the pan” and unfolds with a similar structure, flitting across commas from phrase to phrase. Over the course of the single asyndetic sentence that constitutes this poem, we encounter seemingly unfathomable phenomena, such as “a cathedral of music assembling spires.” Jones’s use of asyndeton stretches the bounds of English grammar, while her convoluted imagery explores the limits of our imagination and the words we use to express ourselves. Through both form and language, she defies conventionality, crafting a poem that reflects the unique experience of becoming: no two individuals follow the exact same path of growth, nor does there exist a simple formula to self-actualization. Like Jones’s self-assembling cathedral of music, the self creates its own song, building upon its previous echoes. Through our unique recursivity, we begin over and over again; with the infinite potential of a “fresh egg,” we “[sail] back” to yet another start.
Whereas “The moment before” broadly conceptualizes the nature of becoming, “The fool” explores the specific mechanisms behind this process. In this poem, Jones “move[s] through the city like a bundle of kindling,” waiting “for a bit of friction to transform [her].” Just as a fire requires both kindling and friction, we only begin to evolve when our inner potential is sparked by external forces. In “The fool,” the most prominent of these forces is external validation: Jones “want[s] to be seen” and fantasizes about a world “where / everyone is doubled over in love / with [her].” This desire “wants to begin, original / and sinful, in jest.” In referencing the original sin, Jones suggests that our hedonic need for outside recognition is innate. Furthermore, she uses personification to highlight how powerful this desire is: in “want[ing] to begin,” she suggests that our need for validation has its own desires and thus some level of autonomy. This innate need exerts its influence over us, driving us toward the recognition we need in order to fully realize our latent potential.
In “Year of the rabbit,” Jones shapes the themes of recursivity and external recognition into a personal narrative. Using the second-person point of view, she tells her former self how she “will emerge a lucid / stream from thin, trivial pools” in the prairies but “dispose of every ounce / of backstory” and “flee further into the rush” of the city. In contrast to “the famine of the flat prairies,” the whirling excitement of the city is an ever-changing landscape that, with “fennel-seed sausage / and post-modernity,” nourishes Jones’s desire to be seen. Beneath the gaze of countless pairs of eyes, she exults in the chaos of the city: she has finally realized her fantasy of being seen. However, “when the night / finally drives [her] awake” from the pleasure of validation, Jones “will navigate / to the water marrowed and frozen by moonlight.” The city, which has left her “frozen,” comes to represent numbness and a sense of disconnection from the core self. We require recognition from others, but only in moderation, or else we may lose ourselves and let this validation pull us into a hedonic oblivion. Having returned to the water, Jones will “witness pit of sky and sea knit into an impenetrable solid.” She sees that the depths of her self have “[kept] swelling” from a stream into a sea that is now one with the vast world around her. This lucid, contemplative version of Jones may be construed as the speaker in this poem: her newfound self-awareness allows her to reflect on her past and offer guidance to her younger self. Thus, “Year of the rabbit” can be interpreted as a cyclical journey of becoming, in which Jones moves to the city, loses herself, then returns to herself with a sense of awareness that allows her to narrate this experience.
Jones ends The Fool in much the same way she begins it: with a section 0, a quotation, and a single poem. Having wandered through a multitude of works on identity and becoming, we, the readers, have arrived back at zero – the simultaneous end and beginning of the journey. In contrast with the neatly end-stopped lines of “Itinerants” in the first section 0, however, Jones’s final poem, “Infinity mirror,” has no stops. To this end, she quotes Clarice Lispector: “has it ever occurred to you that a dot, a single dot without dimensions, is the utmost solitude?” Instead of organizing her words with the literal dot of a period, Jones scatters the word “dot” throughout the poem: for example, “No dot limits exist / Infinity of the three-way / mirror is a coffin”. By removing what Lispector suggests is a symbol of dimensionlessness, Jones creates a boundless infinity. This symbolic and grammatical disorder is reflected at the structural level, as the poem itself is split across several half-filled pages. By nesting one form of disorder in another, Jones creates a fractal chaos that conveys a loss of her sense of self – she has shattered into infinite pieces. The “three-way / mirror,” which refers to the three self-referential syllables of Jones’s name, is both a space of kaleidoscopic “infinity” and “a coffin.” However, Jones finds a “chain of women holding [her] / to the world”. She calls upon these “sisters” to “resurrect all of [her],” so that her name becomes “a three-syllable prism” that will someday “be pronounced just right light refracted through its middle” so “[she]’ll multiply.” The “chain of women” that acts as Jones’s lifeline suggests the sequence of a lineage. This sense of succession has permeated The Fool through the theme of becoming, an act that iteratively builds upon previous versions of the self. In knowing that her current self is built of her past selves, Jones is able to crystallize her identity and become whole again. With this return to zero, we – alongside Jessie Jones – have reached the end of this iteration of poems and await the next beginning.
Works Cited
Jones, Jessie. The Fool. Fredericton, NB: icehouse poetry / Goose Lane Editions, 2020.
Natalie Co grew up in Vancouver and currently attends McGill University, where she is studying psychology with a minor in English literature.
27 June 2023