Chaotic Good, by Isabelle Baafi
(Faber, ISBN 9780571390953, 104pp)

 

Chaotic Good, winner of the Forward Arts Foundation’s 2025 Jerwood Prize for Best First Collection, is a convincing and moving account of the intersections between girlhood, violence, power, and an ‘escape from a toxic marriage.’ It opens with two epigraphs which act as windows into what a reader can expect in the pages that follow. The first, from Zora Neale Hurston, is ‘There are years that ask questions and years that answer’; the second, a quote from Aretha Franklin’s ‘Ain’t No Way’, is ‘Hard, cold and cruel is a man / Who paid too much for what he got’.  We immediately know from these quotations that these poems will be looking at and challenging our ideas and preconceptions about perpetrators and abusive relationships.

I’ve always loved the Zora Neale Hurston quote and often thought of the years of my own experience of toxic relationships as my year that asked questions.  After reading this collection, though, I have begun to think differently. The book is divided into five sections: ‘Separation’, ‘Childhood’, Adolescence’, ‘Marriage’ and ‘Rebirth’.  Starting at the beginning of the end and going back in time made me think about how childhood and adolescence is actually the ground where the questions are formed, and perhaps the answers are then found in the adult years of toxic relationships, but also in the rebirth that follows.

 

The first poem ‘The Mpemba Effect’ is a specular, detailing the breakdown of a marriage. It’s a bold decision to put this at the start of a collection, but it absolutely pays off.  Look at the way these lines work forwards:

 

I never hated anything so much. Not

you, the meal. I couldn’t stand

anyone but you. Waking up each day to

the soft press of your lips on mine as you left….

And in reverse we get:

 

the soft press of your lips on mine as you left; seeking

anyone but you. Waking up each day to

you, the meal I couldn’t stand.

I never hated anything so much.

 

Working in similar territory, ‘To the woman sobbing into her phone on a park bench’ is moving in its depiction of the complexities of an abusive relationship. It avoids the easy answer of ‘monstering’ a perpetrator and instead examines the reality that men who are abusive also have charisma and other positive qualities. Baafi writes ‘He had a wisdom deep enough to stand in, and you did – / leaning on his shoulder as you stepped into your tomb.’ The ‘you’ here seems to be both the woman on the park bench and the speaker of the poem, and by extension any reader who has found themselves in this type of relationship and been left questioning their own complicity. The first line of this poem: ‘I write the poem to forget you. To study you’ feels like a nod to one of the sonnets in American Sonnet for My Past and Future Assassin by Terrance Hayes – the one that starts ‘I lock you in an American sonnet that is part prison, /Part panic closet, a little room in a house set aflame.’ Perhaps it’s that address to the ‘you’ and the gesture towards the act of writing as an act of taking back power that made that poetic bell chime in my head.

Each section of the book starts with a description of a scientific phenomenon and then a poem about this. At the beginning of the third section, ‘Adolescence’, we get the poem ‘The Bystander Effect’, which explores a specifically female adolescence, outlining a time when girls contort themselves to fit the only labels available to them:

 

(a) rude gyal
(b) weirdo
(c) class clown
(d) sket

 

There are many poems in the collection that are overtly in conversation with other writers and musicians – a golden shovel that uses a line by Caleb Femi, and another that uses a line from the song ‘Midnight Train to Georgia.’ In ‘The Bystander Effect’, Baafi follows a lineage of female contemporary poets who have experimented with using the plural pronoun to speak in the voice of women or girls. There’s the sublime and terrifying ‘The Girls Are Coming Out of the Woods’ from the collection of the same name by Tishani Doshi. Julia Copus has a brilliant specular, ‘The Great Unburned’, from her collection Girlhood. I have ‘We Are Coming’ at the beginning of my second collection All the Men I Never Married. Doshi gives a voice to murdered girls, Copus gives a voice to the witches, or at least the women that were called witches, or would be called witches, whilst I had the lofty ambition of speaking for women who felt themselves shaped by or scarred by living in and through patriarchy. Baafi is doing something different again, not just because she’s speaking for a group of adolescent girls, but because she acknowledges that difficulty of speaking on behalf of a group, and the difficulty of speaking at all. She writes ‘And in order to speak of us, I must first fill my mouth / with blood’.

 

Playfulness and inventiveness with form is another constant throughout this collection, but any playfulness is deadly serious. In ‘Adolescence’ she has a run of poems with titles all beginning with ‘P’ (‘P__y’, ‘Parry’, ‘Penny’, ‘Pushy’, ‘Putty’ and ‘Piggy’). In this sequence, all of Baafi’s inventiveness with form is on show – there is a ghazal, a pantoum, a golden shovel and a poem (‘Piggy’) that can be read in multiple ways down and across the page.

In ‘Piggy’ we get the voice of the police which starts fairly official ‘do you know / why we stopped you    were you / in the vicinity of the attack’ before descending into abuse. On the left-hand side, we get the voice of the person being harassed by the police who says ‘riot    to survive    you should / stay ready    listen with your feet’.  When you read the poem across it becomes even more powerful. The right-hand state-sanctioned voice of the police/media/society completely subsumes the individual voice on the left-hand side:

 

xxxworst thing about them is the smell    do you know
it    drenches everything   and we know     why we stopped you   were you
xxxxxxxxdeath    we have seen butchers    in the vicinity of the attack
xxxthis is worse    bloodied and burning    did you see it     why did you
xxxxxxxxxriot     to survive   you should    run     remove your humanity please

 

This deadly playfulness continues in ‘Everything is going according to plane’ where the word we expect (plan) becomes something else entirely by losing a letter or having one wrong letter, or in this case one extra letter. In the next section, ‘Marriage’, the poem ‘Your Mother’s Daughter (a GIF)’ repeats the same text twice but changes the meaning by moving the forward slashes around. In ‘I’m Here/Gone (delete as appropriate)’, the poem contains word choices that the reader is invited to delete:

 

We were a (miracle/curse). Like an iceberg breaking off
separating a predator from its prey.

 

The collection finishes with ‘Still Here’, a defiant poem of resistance brimming with imagery:

 

Admit that a falcon diving through the air
reminds you of me. Or a heater turned all the way up.
Or a road that bends but doesn’t break.
I burned all the bridges beneath my feet
and was so fly I didn’t even get wet.

 

The way Baafi examines the complexities in a toxic relationship, without slipping into simple binaries of victim and persecutor, the complexities of girlhood and female desire, and the violence that runs alongside it, and then finishes with this call to arms of survival is a masterclass, and one that I’ll be reading and re-reading again and again.

 

∞

Kim Moore’s first collection The Art of Falling (Seren 2015) won the Geoffrey Faber Memorial Prize. Her second collection All The Men I Never Married (Seren, 2021) won the 2022 Forward Prize for Best Collection.