Review of Kaisa Saarinen’s ‘Voideuse’.

By Aisling Ní Choibheanaigh Nic Eoin

‘Voideuse’, page 15

This collection of poetry, prose and photography by Kaisa Saarinen comes into being at a time when the importance of mixed-media art is becoming increasingly clear. Published by Feral Dove Books, ‘Voideuse’ ties its poetry and prose works together with an interesting set of images produced by the author herself. As the opening content warning delicately states, ‘these pages contain stage knives and safety needles’, and the sharp objects that seem to tear at the outer surfaces of bodies and spaces in this text certainly fulfil this statement. However, nestled between descriptions of discomfort, pain and suffering are unexpected moments of softness, which are often more powerful for their situation within a harsh landscape.

Moving through the collection, the reader will notice the intentionality that governs the placement of each piece. Linking sections together, Saarinen’s photographs are composed of meditative shapes and inverted colours that recall the emotional experiences laid out in the textual body of this hybrid collection. The unfocused images provide a contrast to the cutting use of language employed by the author, but they are no less forceful. Page 15 of the collection beautifully exemplifies this, with a black and white photograph that highlights its foreground shapes through a use of negative space. The white-out sections of some images, and the fuzzy boundaries of objects within them, mirror a form of static which is encountered in a number of textual passages. Saarinen writes of the static buzzing ‘at the edge of (her) consciousness’, and a body that is ‘too full of static’, connecting the text’s bodies to immaterial space. This space, crushingly real in spite of its invisibility, interferes with emotional and interactional segments of poetry and prose. In one section, the static prevents the narrator from crying, and in another, it is used to name the unintelligible language surrounding life and death: ‘a static of incoherence/in words i am not alive and neither are you’. The static of the text, and its accompanying images, is the intangible link between the different pieces. It lurks at the corners of the poems, between the words in the prose, and in the gaps between objects and background in Saarinen’s photographs. It breaks down the borders of space in each piece, until, as she writes, ‘the edges of every room are fraying/softer, softer’.

Importantly, the static also ties bodies to one another in her descriptions of human interaction, and complements Saarinen’s distinctive style, which manages to capture a form of world-body relation that is rarely discussed with such poise, and that underlines some of the difficulties of contemporary living. Her material use of bodies within textual sections allows her to articulate a very particular sense of disconnect, as she offers us forceful, and often necessarily discomforting representations of womanhood. In the story ‘Divide et Impera’, she writes ‘Even when I am fully in myself, present tense, I am always observing the world through a screen, transparent but slightly clouded’, recalling the hazy images that punctuate the collection. Notably, this section concludes: ‘Pain experienced through the veil is subdivided by it - I only get the aftershock’, and it is these aftershocks that much of her textual work considers. The body, and particularly the female body, is constantly confronted with these aftershocks. They come in the form of sexual encounters with men and fleeting interactions with other individuals, but in between these aftershocks, seen through this ‘veil’, come moments of almost-divine clarity. These moments are most often encountered with, or as a result of, other women. The womb-like void that Saarinen describes as ‘birthing (her) over and over again’ creates moments of transparency, living vacuums in which her narrator is ‘closest to God’.

Notably, both womb lining and blood offer brief but significant segments of material focus in a collection predominantly concerned with the edges of lived existence. Used for artistic practice, the blood of women in ‘Voideuse’ is given willingly to other women, and safeguarded through forms of creation, so that the flesh transforms into ‘a vessel for something (she) cannot quite pronounce’. Similarly, in ‘Inner Light’, Lucy offers her body to the narrator so that a form of creation might be possible, becoming both the material and subject at once. Within and beyond sexual encounters, the bodies of women in the collection are joined to one another through this form of artistic sharing. Saarinen beautifully details the bodily trust that exists between her female characters, evident in ‘My Love is of My Body (An Unholy Sleep)’, when Marlene reflects that ‘she could use me up, consume me like this, for whatever purpose she deems fit’. It is these moments of trust that seem to tear down the ‘veil’ through which much of the collection examines the world, embracing passing moments of tenderness, often between women.

The true mastery of Saarinen’s work lies in her ability to articulate the complexity of organic, lived emotional states, and the often inexpressible patterns that colour a human life. She communicates both suffering and tenderness with a controlled voice, and this collection is a wonderful example of her ability to produce stylistically-diverse, but consistently skilled, pieces of work.

Kaisa Saarinen grew up in the Finnish countryside and ended up in London via Glasgow, Tokyo and Oxford. Her debut collection of poetry and fiction, 'Voideuse', was published by Feral Dove in 2022. Her first novel, 'Weather Underwater', is forthcoming from Bellows Press in 2023. ‘Voideuse’ is available to purchase from the Feral Dove website.