Mysteria by B.W. Powe
Reviewed by Elana Wolff
Coming to Mysteria
B.W. Powe, student and interpreter of Marshall McLuhan, has long been crossing genres in his writing—blending poetry, pensées, fragmented narratives, meditations and mini-essays on love, life, spirit, and the turbulent wired-world we live in. I first read Powe in his Guernica Editions releases: the neo-romantic poems of The Unsaid Passing (2005); the fabular prose in These Shadows Remain (2011); and the 2015 hybrid collection Where Seas and Fables Meet: Parables, Aphorisms, Fragments, Thought—that rose from his previous work (to quote myself in an earlier piece) “like a third-eye on fire.” Reading Powe’s texts on ‘just about everything’ felt synaesthetic, electric, impelling, wondrous. Almost oracular.
Late in 2019, when news of the mysterious coronavirus broke, I was deep into reading Powe’s newly launched, big, beautifully produced NeoPoiesis Press book, The Charge in the Global Membrane. ‘The Charge’ follows the author’s career-long fascination with the media—and fleshes out a subject noted (in passing) in ‘Seas and Fables’: “the natural ESP of the global communicating membrane.” In ‘The Charge’, Powe charts the transformational leap to a digital world culture, and indicts the mind-bending, soul-hollowing, eco-altering fallout of digital-based life on global overdrive; the virus adumbrated in the Membrane’s verso pages. In 2023, as the pandemic wound down, Powe released Ladders Made of Water, the first project published by Stream Elsewhere Press (“Manufactured by Amazon.ca.”). The slim volume offered a sampling of his in-progress work on current eco-spiritual crises and signalled a “trembling of consciousness in deepest thrall.”
With the publication late in 2024 (also with Stream Elsewhere Press) of his large, free-format “cuarentena” work, Mysteria, Powe reveals himself ‘unpeeled’—in his most personal and earnest collection yet. Mysteria “time-wobbles” between two land-and-thought-scapes—his Canadian home “in a town outside Toronto” and his wife’s family farmhouse in a valley of the Sierra Morena Mountains in southern Spain, bringing together writings from moments of the “confinement,” when “what we are and could become is still on the line.”
Mysteria contains a familiar Poweian mix: poems, aphorisms, anecdotes, dialogues, and snippets of stories old and new—of eco-loss, the Holocaust, a troubled son, a toddler daughter, marital love and faithfulness, family illness, death and grief, “brooding on the dead—too many”; “Bitter breaking Earth,” “Lost Scripts,” the trauma of “Miscarried twins in Spain.” Beauty too, amid the strains of living with the virus. Feeling ratcheted up.
Mysteria follows the distinctive breakaway design of ‘The Charge’—no sections, no pagination, no footnotes, no index—and takes it to the next level. Out of the “isolate room,” an even more highly charged global membrane book. Pages seemingly cobbled together. Assorted typefaces, different fonts. Facsimiles of the author’s handwritten pages displaying his scribbles, scratches, cross-outs and blots, his flowery, hyper-kinetic ‘calligraphy’: ‘f’s that look like shepherds’ crooks, ‘h’s and ‘g’s with hanging ‘legs’, ‘d’s—the ascenders, bent like antennas; a script unevenly slanted, letters in places heavily pressed. A visual, textual mash-up.
Powe is led in the work by “unlettering”—a word he found pre-quarantine in a library book in Cordoba. A concept coined by the Sufi mystic, Ibn ‘Arabi (1165-1240), to stimulate thinking beyond the literal, beyond the symbolic: into the intuitive. A favoured mode. Yet “unlettering,” for Powe, also includes “Accepting slips. Cliches. The maudlin. Sentiment ... and muddle.” Mistranslating, misreading, blurring, making mistakes. Doing “what turns [one] on to find the new.” Mysteria embraces “Occult Uprising … Future Phantoms,” “Appropriating always.” “Reconceiving the real when realties crack”—as they did with Covid.
Reading Powe is an exercise in powering up intuitive thinking and thought. Yet he’s wary in Mysteria of claiming second sight. It’s “too soon for vision,” he writes from the cuarentena, tilting instead to “vertigo—giddiness—and shuddering.”
A decade ago, in ‘Seas and Fables’, Powe called himself a “transcendentalist … in pursuit of the generous liberal vision.” A visionary? The epithet fits. He’s sensitive, inventive, imaginative, persistent. Attentive to “tremours and shimmers and pulses”—vibrations in the ethers, signs on the horizon: what they may say. He’s anticipated change and named it, sought and found potentialities, written to raise awareness and perception. Reading Powe is an exercise in powering up intuitive thinking and thought. Yet he’s wary in Mysteria of claiming second sight. It’s “too soon for vision,” he writes from the cuarentena, tilting instead to “vertigo—giddiness—and shuddering.”
Near the end of the book, there’s a telling “Two-Second [freaky] Accident” poem: The author fumbles up the staircase at his Stouffville home. Topples, cracks an ankle, severs a tendon. After which there’s surgery and “unremitting pain.” Stumbling upwards is “supposed to be good luck,” says his Romanian grandma. The closing line reads, “Still waiting for that.” Depending on the way it’s said, the line can be bright, or wry. It’s a matter of tone, and seeing/reading.
Visionaries don’t always see what’s coming amid the “mists, mirages, ashclouds, blur, and dust.” The “fathoms” may be shadowed too, unscrutable. This, the Mysteria. We wonder, with the author, what comes next …
About the Author
B.W. Powe is an author, a poet, storyteller, a musician, and a teacher. He has written sixteen books, including the award-winning The Charge in the Global Membrane (2020) which had artwork by Marshall Soules and design-work by Dale Winslow. He shared a Media Ecology-Marshall McLuhan Prize for Book of the Year with Marshall Soules, and he won a York University Research and Innovations’ Award and The Medium and the Light Award for Lifetime Achievement in Writing and Teaching. His notable books include Ladders Made of Water (2023), Where Seas and Fables Meet (2015), Marshall McLuhan & Northrop Frye: Apocalypse & Alchemy (2014), These Shadows Remain (2010), Towards a Canada of Light (2008) and Outage (1995). He’s an Associate Professor in the English and Humanities’ Departments at York University in Toronto, with an affiliation with the Music Department.
About the Reviewer
Elana Wolff's cross-genre Kafka-quest work, Faithfully Seeking Franz (Guernica Editions, 2023), received the 2024 Canadian Jewish Literary Award in the category of Jewish Thought and Culture. Her eighth book of poems, Everybody Knows a Ghost, is forthcoming in 2026.
Book Details
Publisher : Steam Elsewhere Press (Nov. 23 2024)
Language : English
Paperback : 290 pages
ISBN-10 : 1069068608
ISBN-13 : 978-1069068606