Unanimal, Counterfeit, Scurrilous

"His is either a well-oiled universe or a chaos huddled together...he's a mannish character, unanimal, counterfeit, scurrilous."

Unanimal, Counterfeit, Scurrilous is a work of wild erudition and rococo elaboration, a collection of poems that loosely channels the dynamic of desire and inhibition in Thomas Mann's novella Death in Venice. The poems follow the trajectory of the ageing Aschenbach's pursuit of youth and beauty, transmuting his yearning and resistance into jittery flirtations with longing, decay, and abandonment against a backdrop of political violence.

The poems have an exuberant candour, formed by polyphonic allusions which enact the intersectionality of the speaker; by turns melodramatic, flirtatious, satirical. Like the tragic protagonist of Death in Venice, Cayanan's collection manifests a longing for extroversion sabotaged by its own will. It is a queer performance of anxiety and abeyance, in which the poems' speakers obsessively rehearse who they are, and what they may be if finally spoken to.

'An effusive yet metaphysical performance of "unfinishable selves"...with deft use of allusion, allegory and mythic structures, Cayanan's prepossessing new book is frequently revelatory: In truth, when life happens, it happens in the fourth person.' - Toby Fitch