Two Tongues

Slip-ups, skirmishes, and the sidelong glance characterise Claudine Toutoungi's Two Tongues, a surreal and startling second collection that takes on the dislocations and double takes of modern life and weaves from them poems of wit, grit, and delicious abandon. In a landscape populated by levitating snailfish, sotto voce therapists, melancholic kittiwakes, and collapsing stage sets, boundaries blur, languages merge, vision is partial, and identity nothing but fluid. Misdirected medical reminders, discarded letters, crossed wires, and linguistic mash-ups proliferate as the urban and natural worlds collide in an exuberant exploration of confusion—spatial, verbal, and psychological. A gallery is overrun with mushrooms, a scientist takes home a fox-cub to nurse, a wild swimmer grapples with sharks, and all the while these questing, querulous poems shape-shift from searing to soulful to droll to defiant, as they confess, cajole, sometimes ponder, occasionally pout, and perpetually wrestle with our fractured world.