“You ask me why I’m so angry,” Terrence Arjoon states in his debut collection, The Disinherited, “and inflexible and uncombed, / it’s because I’m not from here, / and I’ll never go home.” All poems are modes of estrangement. They parallax our perceptible reality, they fuck with time, distance, form, and ontology in a way that forces us to revolutionize our patience with status quo. Poets, by virtue of their form, disinherit all readymade approaches to reality. Arjoon’s sentiment “I’m not from here, and I’ll never go home,” feels precise to that experience, the impasse of psychic exile, sidling between the fear of charlatanism and the humiliated return to some intellectual suburban cul-de-sac. The poet is angry because their struggle is incommensurable. It cannot ever be rectified. And if it is, then the poems die. “It’s my ancestor’s wars, or my father’s demons…” Arjoon later states, addressing the atavistic inheritance, a dying burden to be molted, the poem always in some state of redress, even if futile. 

The poems in The Disinherited are haunted by the graphic suicide of the French Romanticist Gérard de Nerval (the book’s title is from Nerval’s “El Desdichado”) whose voice moves in and out of Arjoon’s own––a possession of poetic lineage which sometimes arrives with anachronistic language and landscape. These are not trendy, topical poems attempting to forge their own historical purity (a serious crisis right now), but poems determined to cohabit and confer the posthumous nightmares of their subject. Arjoon’s lyric is a conspiracy of translation wherein the question of originary text is obfuscated by the poems’ dense collaboration (say: collusion) which renders provenance obsolete. All writing is functionally a form of reappropriation. Arjoon’s use of Nerval begins to feel pragmatic as you read, like tactical gear worn to disrupt threats of surveillance or opposition. Readers of Nerval will be quick to notice Arjoon’s continuity as well as his clever deviations. However, for readers new to both poets, none of this will matter, which is most imperative. While Arjoon addresses the role of Nerval’s poetic voice in the book’s preface, he also makes a much more instructional comment. “I, like everyone,” he states, “am lost in the wilderness of this century.” We, too, are everyone. We, too, are lost. Arjoon gives us all reason to reach for our robust and reified historical materials to navigate an inconceivable present. 

The Disinherited is full of recurring images and characters. The leopard. The Cinnabar Kid. Eight-Bog Marie. Blue frogs. These recurrences are as stabilizing as they are perplexing. (We are most partial to the leopards). Arjoon’s propensity seems to be towards the shifting signifier. The leopards and frogs, we know, are not leopards or frogs, but qualitative states both affected and disaffected by their relation to the language around them. Here are some “leopards” as they appear in the poem, “Drone Architecture”: 

The parts of their bodies that were
normally covered by clothes were those of leopards. 

That attitude being so ponderous of which parts were those
of leopards and which were not. 

….

Consider the crowded dreams of leopards. 

….

Her clothes are off, but she does
not share the parts of a leopard

….

When I turn leopard 
we are caught in the sand, I inside you, 
by he holding the conch.

When I turn leopard the dream becomes ordinary. 

….

I bring a fig metal brooch, I bring a lyre flower. I bring the 
Leopard’s Song. 

Through his anaphoric use of the same signifier, Arjoon demonstrates how no image is homogenous but a complex symbolic system where transference is reliant upon a relation to context. We know this instinctually but often take these same systems for granted, forgetting that meaning is most often arbitrated post hoc. Since the bulk of our language is banal, since we are taught to “mean what we say” even though language is inherently duplicitous, we often miss the gummy and malleable possibilities of reality through the direct transgression of language. Arjoon’s leopards are materials, modifiers, habitats, musics, and systems of measurement. They open up the action of the word, never allowing for their language to languish.  

The world of The Disinherited is not immediately tangible but this is not to say it is uncanny. It can often feel like accessing a collective memory from a block universe, the temporal structures nothing more than a delimitation of our perception. Arjoon’s speaker may be an aberration of Nerval or may be the writer himself navigating his own relationship to the French poet or could be a neutral neither building a metaphysics of relation before our eyes. This relationship seems to exist or propel itself through the very misinformation of memory, its convincing imagery prevaricated by a consolidated series of symbols rather than a substantiated biographical fact. Arjoon’s poems exist with the logical certainty of déjà vu, however, this is not an invitation to pathologize their possibility, but instead to open ourselves to the cohabitive worlds that are immediately evoked through the act of our reading. “Beware of the blank screen’s gaze;” Arjoon says in “Golden Lines:” 

verbs are attached to things themselves;
be careful how you use them! 

Oftentimes, in the darkness, there’s a hidden god, 
and like an eye covered by its eyelids, 
a pure spirit grows under the skin of stones! 

The connective tissue of what orients the reader in the surreal dislocation of The Disinherited is through, as the poet says, the verbs’ ability to attach to things themselves. This imbues our language with a cross-dimensional material possibility. We can speak directly to a time, a place, and through the effect of logocentric influence, alter its reality; or, as the late Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o phrases it: “Language as culture is the collective memory bank of a people’s experience in history. Culture is almost indistinguishable from the language that makes possible its genesis, growth, banking, articulation and indeed its transmission from one generation to the next.”  While language is absolutely a structure of material power, it can also act as a subversion of power. Arjoon looks to the possibility of what is obfuscated by its shadow, caesura, erasure, and darkness––in his words: its hidden god. Is this not the same metaphysical property that captivated and intoxicated Arjoon’s Nerval, or Rimbaud, or Vallejo, or Pessoa, or Cesaire, each of whom built their worlds in the negative space of the poem’s dark universe? 

The Disinherited acts as a portal to this very negative space wherein we can witness the myriad possibilities of translation, transference, and transportation. To feel around in the book’s darkness is to become familiar with a world where an ineffable spirit potentiates our contact with every object. Arjoon evokes Rimbaud’s “systematic derangement of the senses,” yes, but also constructs his own pylons to support his world. These may be as functional as caryatids supporting a firmament, but at least their burden acts as a gesture, a starting point, and positions of material return. If you get lost, just look for the leopards.