Review: Everyone is Everyone Except You
Reviewed by: Sam Finnemore
Author:
Jordan Hamel
Publisher:
Dead Bird Books
ISBN:
9781991150622
Date Published:
May 2022
Format:
Paperback
Pages:
72
RRP:
$30.00
You don’t need to know that Jordan Hamel is a champion slam poet before reading his first collection but it does help to explain how clearly they speak off the page. Some run forward in a controlled fall of paragraph-long stanzas almost beyond the limits of breath, for the non-performer at least. At other times the words come out in twos or threes, as if forcing their way out between gasps or sobs. And sometimes again they’re secular psalms complete with antiphons, or in one case lyrics borrowed from Coldplay to withering effect.
Amongst other things, Everyone is Everyone Except You is an equal-opportunity pop-culture golem, built from all available sources and breathed into motion. Hamel has written elsewhere about the turn-of-the-millennium Kiwi icons that raised him and he continues in these poems with salutes to Tammy the Briscoes lady, reality television and the concept of instant noodles as essential gap-filler for modern masculinity. Even deployed by a self-described ‘irony-poisoned millennial,’ though, these aren’t throwaway punchlines: untangling common Netflix suggestions is both a practical component and an effective metaphor for the pain of a breakup. Tammy might be inaugurating a clearance sale or orchestrating your funeral.
Promo materials for Everyone is Everyone Except You place Hamel alongside Hera Lindsay Bird and Tayi Tibble in a new school of radically personal poetry. In a scene led by extraordinary Māori, female and gender-diverse voices, Hamel’s made the superb choice to address what a millennial Pākehā male might have to say in New Zealand poetry in the 2020s by making our silliness, insecurities and looming cultural irrelevance the point, then climbing upwards from there. Not for nothing does he claim to be “falling in and out of love with my own mediocrity,” or title and structure the collection around a series of creeping insecurities dividing “you” from everyone else – sexual, social, professional, existential.
This is poetry that’s embraced its intrusive thoughts wholeheartedly and given them the time of day, and you never quite know if you’re about to get a punchline or a body-blow. Religion gets several strong, visceral and extremely funny serves – Hamel is insistent that “God isn’t watching anymore” but can’t help imagining if Jesus would like a front-row seat – but if nothing is sacred it certainly doesn’t mean there is nothing at stake. Hamel pays close attention to the emotional barriers that standard Kiwi masculinity puts up, interwoven with religion and sport and undertows of suppressed desire.
For all its complications, second thoughts and layers of irony, this is also frankly sexy writing, humming with desire in all the wrong places as well as straight-out physical enjoyment – a glorious antidote to the ‘everyone is beautiful but nobody is horny’ pop-culture tendency. Many of us, of all orientations, have had complicated thoughts about the infamous Shake Weight but it took Jordan Hamel to turn it into a manifesto complete with nods to Allen Ginsberg.
And equally, only Hamel could have produced what might be the standout poem of the whole collection, a fantasy of running away over the Tararuas, complete with Zoolander petrol pump exuberance and balloon crash ghosts at the Wild Bean Café: what it might mean for two people “to live hidden in the architecture of some local tragedy, to be in love / and alive and on fire and dead and buried in Carterton.” Romantic and deadly and heartfelt and wrong, it’s a trip impossible to refuse and the rest of the collection is not far behind.
Reviewed by Sam Finnemore
