Review by Jami Macarty
In The Utopians, Grace Nissan provides a tangible exploration of an artist’s fascination with Thomas More (1478–1535) and his fictional work, Utopia, published in 1516. Nissan’s book resonates with and responds to More’s in three distinct ways. Nissan’s text is assembled from the language “parts available” in More’s. The Utopians features a series of “Dear More” letters and includes a serial poem entitled “The World,” which underscores the tensions between origins and change. “The first world was a world, the second invention. The first world was a world, the second critique.” To survive, Nissan’s “second world had to cannibalize” More’s “first world.”
While Thomas More’s narrative primarily depicts the religious, social, and political customs of a fictional island, Nissan’s narrative addresses the current socio-political upheaval “in terms of money.” It highlights the devastating consequences of capitalism’s “territorial lust and imperial phantoms,” and the chaos caused by the relentless pursuit of “private property” and the “production of luxury.” These situations reflect the indifference of the wealthy toward the “miracles” achieved by those who contribute their labor to “mend roads / clean out ditches / repair bridges.”
As The Utopians is also a formal exploration of artistic “invention” and “critique,” it emphasizes the need to confront “prison & syntax.” Throughout the collection, the refrain “I must tell you about…” is supplemented by: “the Utopians,” “the towns,” their “debates,” “wars,” “scribes,” “language,” and “death.” This leads to a “Semantic satiation of the world.”
Being “starved of meaning” and “losing meaning through repetition” results in a world “grim & desolate.” The critique appears to have succeeded only in a reshuffling that “rebuilt the things it abolished, in negation.” “History” comes back. Nissan’s lyric elegiac poetry, reflecting social transformation and political upheaval, reads like an “epitaph.” After all, “aren’t all human beings / sort of war damage”?
The Utopians by Grace Nissan. Ugly Duckling Presse, May 2025.
Reviewer bio: Jami Macarty is the author of The Long Now Conditions Permit, winner of the 2023 Test Site Poetry Series Prize (forthcoming University of Nevada Press), and The Minuses (Center for Literary Publishing, 2020), winner of the 2020 New Mexico/Arizona Book Award – Poetry Arizona. Jami’s four chapbooks include The Whole Catastrophe (Vallum Chapbook Series, 2024) and Mind of Spring (Vallum Chapbook Series, 2017), winner of the 2017 Vallum Chapbook Award.
