R E V E R S E
Re-verse I N T R O D U C E D BY C H R I S T S E
About the poet: Jackson Niuewland is a genderqueer writer, editor, and librarian living in Te Whanganui-a-Tara. They co-founded the reading/ zine series Food Court. I Am a Human Being is their first book.
I AM AN EGG I am an egg. There is something growing inside me. It is a tree. Its branches and roots push up against the inside of my shell like bone shards. The tree is not the only thing inside of me. There are jars and fish and clocks and skyscrapers. There are robots and bears and riddles and things I can’t define. It is too much for me to hold inside. I am cracking from the pressure. Soon I will shatter and everything will scatter like ashes. Soon I will be a broken thing
In brief: Each poem in I Am a Human Being
reimagines the speaker as a different person or object. Some are familiar – like a photographer, a wheel and a river, others are more metaphorical or surreal (“I am a cone of blue light positioned over a snowy beach”). Taken as a whole, the book is like a puzzle where the final image is constantly shifting. Why read it: As the opening poem, “I am an egg” sets
up the transformative and questioning nature of I Am a Human Being. However, Jackson subverts the reader’s expectations of the egg being an embryonic object that produces something newborn and whole. Instead, by the end of the poem, what emerges is “a broken thing.” This subversion is a recurring theme in the collection, of both the reader’s understanding of each object and how writing can be used to express identity. For Jackson, it’s figuring out a way to express their gender identity with a label that feels true and comfortable. As they note in another poem, “The human condition can be defined as etcetera.” In many ways it's the “etcetera” of lived experience that forms the foundation of one’s identity.
By Jackson Nieuwland from I Am a Human Being, Compound Press, 2020
Why I like it: There’s a lot of playfulness and humour
in Jackson’s poetry, from the deadpan to the downright silly. Puns are scattered throughout the book, acting as poetic palate cleansers between the more cerebral and exploratory poems. “I am an egg” succinctly describes the internal conflict between the different versions of ourselves. I Am a Human Being reinforces the idea that our understanding of who we are never stops – we continue to learn and evolve as we gather experiences and shapeshift in our own small ways. Leaving out a full-stop at the end of each poem in the book is a small but crucial detail – to me it suggests possibility and an open ending.
63