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Matríc Rage by Genna Gardini uHlanga, Cape Town, 2015. ISBN: 978-0-620-67692-2. 81 pp.
The name of Genna Gardini is not new to poetry devotees. Although still very young, she is a well-respected poet with a consistent record of publications in journals, websites and anthologies such as New Coin, New Contrast, Carapace, Prufrock, Aerodrome, Feminist SA, Sentinel Literary Quarterly, among others. In addition, as Ann Vickery reminds us in a seminal essay on Gardini's poetry recently published in Wasafiri: "One of Gardini's best known poems, 'Mister', was included in the 2007 anthology of poetry about sexual abuse, Breaking the Silence: Murmurs of the Girl in Me (POWA Women's Writing Project)" (Vickery 2016: 68). However, this Cape Townbased poet became a national sensation after the announcement of the 2016 Ingrid Jonker prize, which gave Matric Rage (her debut collection, published in 2015 by uHlanga) a "special commendation". Agreeably, the judges praised Gardini's "lyrical-experimental imagination", the "edginess" and "sexiness" [...] and the "wonderfully varied scenarios" of her poems.
All these elements (and many more) are indeed present in Matric Rage, a truly innovative and gripping collection. Opening with the poem 'The pot', and divided into four sections ('Junior', 'Senior', 'High', 'Matric') in which the poet revisits step by step her spiked human trajectory, the collection offers 30 poems. Gardini's energetic and vibrant subjectivity gives voice to dense and rugged stories, hard as only the truth can be. The exuberance of her language and the explosive force of her verses are manifested in poems such as 'Shark Board' ("I think of the fish's mouth/ as that of a woman in a portrait,/ Resigned. The man pries at it/ with one unkind, prophylactic digit,/ demonstrating that it can't contract/ or choose, the way art does,/ but must be revealed forcibly,/ against context.") and the disturbing, performance-oriented piece 'Fat', which places its attention on the supposed limitations of an "overweight" female body, and is built upon a long sequence of repetitions...