Now that I’ve been able to reenter the world of reading for fun and writing for a purpose other than final projects, my high school diploma has given me the time to fully read and analyze my personally most-anticipated book of this year: the third poetry collection of Nico Demers, Belly. Split into three sections of present, past, and that which lingers, Demers’ newest book is (in my opinion) his best and most well-developed collection yet with endless content to analyze and excessively mine for projected personalized meaning. Hilariously and without coincidence, that is all I do with any piece of media ever.
Section 1 entitled “Mirror” features language similar to that of his previous collections in the sense that it heavily features short, bulleted statements of joy that are exclamatory but controlled. Unique to this new collection, Demers describes a shared reverence for love and life that has evolved beyond being animalistic or mammalian; instead, the love that Demers describes is expressed as serenely natural and part of the earthly order of things. Now submitted to the natural cycle of the world around him, he is in sync with the exact higher order of things that he previously longed to melt into in his previous collections of poetry. As a returning reader of Demers’, I perceive this shift in content (whether it was conscious or not) as a sign of restraint that comes with maturing as a writer and as a person with more and more experiences under his belt.
Demers conversely explores the other side of maturing as a writer by intentionally implementing extended verse throughout the second section, titled “Tree.” As a reader and fellow annoying poet, I’m a massive fan of his shift into a lack of syntactic restraint as he moves abruptly into talking about his personal experiences throughout the second part because it demonstrates less reverence toward the subject, which is his childhood in this case. It creates a clear contrast between the previous topic and the theme of the second section as he is less perfunctory when describing his own past rather than his experiences with a person that exists separately from his childhood and is therefore untouched by what he considers to be commonplace because of its familiar foundations. The length of the prose surrounding his parents and younger days communicates a lack of awe that persists because it’s nearly impossible as a person to be in consistent and poetic awe of something you feel that you know everything about such as your own past. Longer poems can be a trap for run-on rambles with words that fail to serve a purpose but Demers skillfully escapes this with his endlessly effective and breathtaking diction. With this section being less punctual with its endings and more honest with more room to openly express, it presents the impression that its author thinks and has thought about this subject endlessly and sheds the characteristically excited remarks that seem to burst out of Demers, an encouraging sign that Demers always has a few tricks up his sleeves when it comes to his poetry.
As I read the more miscellaneously curated third section, “Cut,” I couldn’t help but be enraptured by experiencing physical dysmorphia through masculine words that are blunt and stem from separate standards that are somewhat unfamiliar to me. For femininely presenting individuals, bodily shortcomings are often developed as a result of externally defined, rigid standards that change often but somewhat unanimously; however, through Demers’ eyes and in his own personal case, it feels heavily defined by an internal sense of responsibility for masculine individuals to find immediate solutions to their problems that are implied to be self-imposed (whether that is true or not) rather than dictated by an abstract agreement that encourages one body type. In Belly’s finale, Demers succeeds in exposing the universally exhausting experience of young people everywhere that there is a general lack of confidence among modern teens and twenty-somethings as to what exactly we are supposed to look like as young gods in the “prime of our lives.”
Without waste and dripping with individuality, Belly is another promising ‘Bucknife’ foray into poetry that leaves me anticipating his future collections. Trust and believe that the next time he drops a book, there’ll be an article on here somewhere.