Genni Gunn

In Faceless, Genni Gunn explores "the impulse for the edge," a magnetic field between the gloss of the topside world and the grit of the world beneath. Both these landscapes are fascinating and treacherous, haunted by faces that are obsessively worn and shed, torn off and replaced, where identity itself is arbitrary. Impersonation, even of oneself, is the rule. In a piano bar, the musician is a chameleon adapting to the faceless men who sit around her piano. The faceless cadavers in the notorious BodyWorlds exhibits stalk the rooms while, in Gunn's title poem, an ordinary French woman finds redemption in the world's first face transplant after being mauled in a strange accident by her pet dog. To be anonymous in today's urban places is to be free yet isolated, to be in a constant flux of longing for and fear of "the dead and beating heart," both in one's own breast and those faltering in the chests of others. The countless faces that Gunn confronts on the streets of the city or behind closed doors make her important new book such a compelling read–as does the "delicious anxiety" she sees hanging in ecstatic, sometimes terrifying suspense in the liminal spaces between.



 

Review Quotes

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"As a central metaphor, “faces” are an interesting one to explore, ripe with echoes of surface and depth, geography and biology, semantics and connotations. Faceless explores these themes with vigor and scope, collecting almost every poetic angle on the subject of the face into a group of image driven, largely narrative pieces. . . This is a book about conjoining memories to landscapes, spaces to letters, fusing poetic techniques to linear and lyric storytelling."                                                      - The Dansforth Review, November 2007

 

“The lines of Genni Gunn's Faceless move with a nervy, angular rhythm; the book's title functions as a literal description of a French woman horribly mauled by her own dog (the subject of one sequence of poems) and as a metaphor for the contemporary experience of mass-produced urban anonymity. Gunn's lines eschew any 'conventional' sort of phonic beauty, and such a soundscape is in keeping not only with the world these poems explore but with their tough-minded and often ironic stance toward that world. . .” 

                                                                       - University of Toronto Quarterly 2009

 

 "In the poems in Faceless, Genni Gunn explores the many masks worn and peeled away in attempts at formulating identity, influencing opinion and finding a place in vast, nullifying or unforgiving landscapes. Sometimes it is nature masking itself as benign, when in reality it has the "furious will" of a wrecking ball, smashing things in its path on the predictably unpredictable cycle of birth, growth and death… When a vital part of physical identity is taken away—as in the title poem where a French woman's face has been ripped off by her own dog, or in "Hands" where two Mexican women each lose a hand in successive industrial accidents—there is only emptiness left behind, and an even greater yearning for acceptance by the world."—Event, Winter 2008