Jo-Ann Mort, A Precise Chaos (Arrowsmith Press, 2025)

On the cover of Jo-Ann Mort’s A Precise Chaos is Wassily Kandinsky’s 1923 painting ‘Black and Violet’. A quick Google search for the image will bring up versions with its cream background in various gradients moving from an off-white to a garish orange. The book’s reproduction brings out its pink hue, which makes all the angled lines and shapes, in their chaotic precision, appear in a twilight. Whether intentional or not, the reproduction is evocative of Mort’s own poetic licence in her debut collection, in which the whirr of sharp edges is cushioned with narrative continuity and gradual moments of musical profundity.

Often, these poems literally take place between day and night. In ‘Snow Day’ which looks back to the pandemic, the speaker sits ‘in a dark Brooklyn living room waiting for midnight to arrive’ while talking on the phone to another country, where it’s 5am. Over the poem’s course, these speakers will have ‘synchronized our body clocks’ only to see a ‘hole in the sky’ where connection should be. In another poem, the hole reappears when ‘that time in the evening, always  on the knee, friend to friend, snaps apart’, breaking a party with the reality of futile war. In this guise, Mort’s poetry is a landscape on the verge of disaster where even in the vast expanse of the American plains, darkness has ‘no walls, no windows, only the blanket of dew’. A mobius strip makes time always evolving but never changing. Just as ‘Burning Bush’ ...