Sundress Reads: Review of unwordly

In the 90’s, Robert Guzikowski had a bout of encephalitis that caused aphasia, which is the inability to form and/or comprehend written or spoken words, or sometimes both. This is the subject of unwordly (Uncollected Press, 2024). In fact, the vast majority of poems are titled “Aphasia Poem,” followed by a number. Most of them have a structure: four tercets, followed by a (usually) rhyming couplet. The imposition of structure intentionally underscore its arbitrariness, especially in the face of aphasia.

The first section of the book, “Shape o With Asemic Writing,” contains only one poem, “Aphasia Poem o,” which displays a writer who is sharply attuned to their own work. It begins “I can not speak this tale / ever changing yet it’s the only / story I have” (Guzikowski 2). He’s told the book’s personal history in three lines. But this poem also contains hints of what is to come in the following pages. Guzikowski describes himself as

His mastery of the English language (though I’m sure he would insist there is no such thing) is such that he can create words: I take “abcanny” to be a mixture of uncanny and abject. The two words the perfect description for the way you feel about your own body when it has betrayed you, become strange to you; the fusion of the two words hints at the larger theme in the book of the malleability of language, the strangeness of it that can only be grasped by someone who has been estranged from it.

Guzikowski renders his experiences with aphasia offers moments of poetic beauty and wisdom; he does not romanticize. They are, first and foremost, painful. “Aphasia Poem 25” conveys this better than any other, representing aphasia, the struggle to form language, not so much a struggle of the mind, but one of the body:

The lack of punctuation here adds tremendously to the rapid, almost frantic effect of the poem as he tries to make meaning again. And, as is typical of the collection, Guzikowski makes the most effective use possible of the words he chooses. The way the medications drone and pulsate as identity disintegrates create a scene that is truly nightmarish and disorienting. Here, the words “scatting” and “riffing” are divorced from their typically joyful, exploratory connotations (though he does make explicit reference to jazz giant Thelonious Monk later on) and instead become an act of desperation, a panicked attempt to make meaning—which, as the poem poignantly points out, is almost inextricable from a sense of identity.

The best moments of the book were those where Guzikowski draws connections between language, the body, nature, and the cosmos. In “Disabled Poem 4,” Guzikowski suggests that when human beings die they become a beam of light—not so much a transformation as a return to an original, ethereal form. He muses, with psychedelic wisdom: “the mimetic self / the full de-realized fully / depersonalized fully still a self” (Guzikowski 34). The standout poem of the collection, though, is “Aphasia Poem 13.” It is philosophical and paradoxical, concerned with creation and anti-theological, claiming

He seems at the beginning to refute John 1:1: “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and God was the Word.” But then he reckons with the fact that language does the work of creation, in that it does not just generate, but “reveals space”, i.e., gives things boundaries, limits, and thus, form. Maybe it doesn’t do this in a literal sense, at least in terms of the world, but when it comes to the self, language is the only way to make the self known, even to, well, yourself. I don’t remember when I last read anything with such profound metaphysical implications.

Reading the book was satisfying in a way that I find to be paradoxically invigorating, much like good exercise. But unwordly isn’t all chaotic, anti-grammatical grappling with the Big Questions. Moments of simple and often transcendent beauty are placed throughout. “Aphasia Poem 35” offers the former kind: “shifting shape to fairy-size / buddha finds repose / among mosses and twigs” (Guzikowski 18). It’s the simple conveyance of a scene, coming as a moment of rest. In a book bursting with existential insights and interplanetary ponderings, it’s almost healing to have the poet simply enjoy the beauty of what’s before him. And in a way, the ability to do that, to be truly present, is transcendent. “Aphasia Poem 24 (Disabled Poem 1)” a consummate example of Guzikowski’s ability to bed words and grammar to his poetic will, is a critique of people like me, who “aren’t / able enough to theorize silence(ness) / not (only) as metaphor or structure but / as identity” (31). Through silence, Guzikowski posits, we can “find common / home aloneness one humanity” (31).

Indeed, humanity itself, it seems, is just one of the subjects of this book. Others include, as has been alluded to, the infinite, jazz music, animisim. Towards the end of unwordly there are dazzling love poems in which Guzikowski looks at his wife and thinks “light / illuminates and revealed every / face of your face” (58). There is so much in here I didn’t get to tell you about; unwordly is one of those rare gems of a book whose virtues cannot be communicated; it has to be experienced. 

unwordly is available from Uncollected Press, as well as through through Bookshop, Barnes & Noble, Powell Books, or Amazon

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Joseph Norris graduated with a BFA in Creative Writing from Emerson College in May of 2025. He has had short stories and poems published in Gauge magazine, Emerson Green Mag, and won the Humans of the World Summer Poetry Prize. He lives in Berkeley, California with his girlfriend Macie and their cat, Dory, and is learning how to play the guitar and the banjolin.