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Clara-Læïla Laudette reviews two pamphlets from London-based publisher fourteen poems
Symmetric of Bone, Troy Cabida’s latest pamphlet, is —ostensibly— a polyformal exploration of longtime Tiffany designer Elsa Peretti’s jewellery.
It focuses on light: catching on precious stones, on human skin sheathed in rare metals: “contoured gold gleaming / with light” (‘Bone’). But a pinpoint
irreverence runs through the collection, sharpening its intention.
Its speaker is alert to the political and affective forces at play when we express ourselves, and assess others, through clothing—those gaps through which
prejudice, projection and hope all funnel. Cabida’s work centres the porousness between bodies and objects; in this pamphlet,
he zeroes in on the transformative, subversive potential of adornment. Peretti’s designs offer the poet both curvature and armature. The title poem states:
The act of removing
is to assume a new role
This is jewellery as disguise, as wishbone, as portal across bodies, time, socio-economics—a queer Filipino man, living in London in 2025,
conversing with Peretti, a twentieth-century Italian woman. Here is a sterling cuff whose removal means exposure, vulnerability.
A necklace whose migration from one chest to another radiates intimacy, however temporary: “look at how compassionate [the pendant] already is” (‘Symmetric of Bone’).
A ring whose “citrine cabochon cut” distracts onlookers, protects the speaker and concentrates his aspirations: “in prayer, I stamp my fingerprint /
on the solid halo and imagine” (‘Citrine’).
Cabida’s first pamphlet, War Dove (Bad Betty Press, 2020) similarly sought to chart the self’s unpeelings. His fascination with transitions,
with states of matter—liquid, solid, air—was already apparent. Its titular poem ends “like softening hardened honey, / crystallised and unflinching.”
But where War Dove’s phrasing could, at times, be clunky or convoluted—its conceptual workings laid out with didacticism—Symmetric of Bone’s touch is light, measured.
Cabida has clearly been busy: refining his voice, calibrating when to lead readers and when the barest suggestion will do.
Most excitingly, he has allowed himself to experiment with whichever cross-disciplinary elements take his fancy: haute joaillerie, interior design, pop music, astrology,
fashion photography, Broadway musicals. It’s a delightfully holistic rendering of the stuff orbiting modern aesthetics—orbiting the poet’s mind, too.
The sequence opens and closes with found poems using archival news and magazine clippings as well as film dialogue. It includes ekphrastic poems; poems at once speculative
and epistolary; free verse poems with set stanza lengths; shape poems, and many free-form pieces.
This formal variety mirrors Cabida’s preoccupation with what drives an individual to shapeshift. He interrogates the currents underpinning self-presentation—how
the urban space codifies bodies, and more specifically queer brown bodies. Reclaiming this codifying process allows “endless possibilities” for aesthetic reinvention (‘Citrine’).
But the burden of personhood, of being perceived,
can also entrap or conceal: after all, it’s only “the impossible [which] offers a multitude of interpretations” (‘Pitcher’).
The timeline and spatial layout of ‘Citirine’ sandwich the speaker between two aggressively, judgmentally straight men: his father and
his childhood friend. Both impose their visions of success and manliness onto the speaker. His coping mechanism—selecting jewellery to “[hide] bruises”
from the first interaction—draws mockery and ire in the second interaction, with the friend.
Cabida is sensitive to this inescapable duality which means one thing can be its opposite: the mirror a friend and enemy; a gemstone fluid and stable;
a father consoling and berating; a lover’s knowledge affirming and incomplete, even limiting. In ‘The Teardrop and the Fighting Fish’, the speaker recognises
lovers might know your shape but not “your name /
outside of [their] bed”—“believe there is value here, too” he urges. “Choose the alternative.”
Cabida repeatedly emphasises agency and autonomy. In ‘Elegant’, the opening erasure poem, he elides the entire article but for twelve words.
The first words he keeps? “Of course / she chooses.”
Something of this push-and-pull, what we gain and lose in representation, echoes Richard Siken’s ‘Portrait of Fryderyk in the Shifting Light’.
Siken’s poem could be in conversation with several of Cabida’s, not least ‘Cor Cordium’, whose speaker vows to no longer be “somebody else’s commodity”.
He approaches existential liberation through—and beyond—his chameleonic abilities: “I am the open heart pendant / flush against a woman’s neck. […] I will be / pure ornament,
the gap nothing but / a gap, the monstrous that makes me.”
The poems probing gender and legacy do so casually. In ‘On Normativity’, the speaker’s “straight friend” bombards him with questions about his relational choices,
what his singledom will mean at his death. It’s a kind of scene which will be familiar to many queer folk, particularly those from non-Western backgrounds. In response,
Cabida invokes something of Frank O’Hara, Essex Hemphill and something, too, of the assured mondaine—presents us with “the flat by the bridge” purchased “with the virtues of my face”,
where lovers-turned-friends come to administer the
speaker’s finely-curated possessions. Then comes reincarnation—a teasing, sprite-like distillation of the poet, who will
Have my ashes forged into a diamond
set on a chain or a gold band,
a setting so clean
I’ll spend this next chapter of my life
flicking light at the still-living.
(‘On Normativity’)
**
With the premonitory lines, “I decided / the view from our would-be bedroom / was worth the flood risk”, Hetty Cliss’s debut pamphlet *(In)Habit ushers us into a homespace that
courts disaster. Danger pulses from ordinary details: a locked-in housecat, reusable shopping bags, a figure asleep on the sofa. The opening poem, ‘Swing & Miss’, continuously defers
its own violent object by ending all but two lines with “the”. This delaying mimics the denial common to abusive dynamics, while repetitions and internal rhymes echo the speaker’s
stuttering shock. The tone is set for what’s to come: a book taut as a fist; a speaker both muted and brilliantly, resiliently obstinate.
(In)Habit’s tonal variation captures the confusing mixedness of toxic relationships. Between emotional or physical aggression, Cliss conjures vignettes of wholesome coupledom: out cycling by a river; meal prepping; family Sundays. ‘In Sickness and in Habit’ subverts idioms with the word “habit”, renewing language so well-worn we had almost ceased to see it. This mirrors the pamphlet’s overall mechanics: Cliss wedges in distance,
inch by inch, until we realise what lexical and psychological territory we’re in.
(In)Habit invites us to consider how moralising compulsions intersect with gender constructs. The speaker in ‘Redeemer’, for example, dwells on moral “complexity” which
“[muddies] / whose impulses are right, whose wrong.” The poem complicates our understanding of the internalised misogyny which usually allows villains to garner sympathy—staging a
final, intimate image of femicide. Had her partner put a gun to her head, the speaker admits
I’d have likely joined
the chorus, the imagined audience
as they whisper: let the bitch have it.
Here, the speaker supplies alternative phrasing—“chorus” and “audience” are, arguably, doing the same job. But this overcompensation also highlights a consequence of being
gaslit: no longer believing your word is enough. The repetition helps to build that sense of constantly being scrutinised—and judged—by multitudes. By the pamphlet’s end, the
speaker is “disappearing //
but at least I’m no longer being / watched.” (‘Wedding Season’)
Cliss is sensitive to interpersonal intricacies—her speaker ”always carrying […] / the bludgeoned berries/of someone’s else’s feelings” (‘Inhibition’).
This conscientiousness weighs heavy, often manifesting as emotional labour performed on her partner’s behalf: “I carry messages / from your eyes / to this pigeon-toed
heart of mine”; “I’ll take / whatever message floats up behind // those eyes” (‘Ask Again Later’). There’s a knee-jerk attentiveness towards family, friends — even neighbours — which
hints at an individuality decentred, destabilised by hyper-alertness. ‘What the Neighbours Saw’ transposes poetic POV to the couple’s neighbours, so that Cliss’s speaker effectively
vanishes into the reflex of seeing herself, her life’s moments,
from outside; reduced to “woman / stilted in the passenger seat.”
(In)Habit moves through the implications of this extreme empathy for, and inhabiting of, other people’s perspectives. ‘Re-Telling’, for instance, is set vertically across two pages and can be read either in columns or rows. The form reflects the malleability of lived experience—with compassion as a driving factor.
Though the poem’s addressee appears erratic, explosive and controlling, the speaker still concludes with a detail bound to trigger empathy
towards him: “Your father stays with you / for just fifty minutes after / the crisis call.”
(In)Habit picks at the politics of truth-making. ‘For the Taking’ declares “the body / owns the mind”. I’m tempted to think it’s more frequently the opposite: poems like ‘Substitute Host’ explore the mind’s enormous power to reconfigure what the body perceives, “like that scene from The Mummy // when the scarab inserts itself […] to find the brain.” ‘Letting Things Lie’ focuses on the distressing image of the speaker’s “topless skull agape, your lies bedding in”—a trepanation she sees and is powerless to stop.
The pantoum’s looping form rewrites her first instincts so that by the fourth and final quatrain, roles and responsibilities feel desperately muddled.
It’s not solely men rewriting women’s experience. The speaker acknowledges her part in co-establishing narratives: “I laughed / when he lied because his stories / were so plausibly delicious.” (‘Wedding Season’) There’s an undeniable activeness: in ‘Arrhythmic’, the speaker’s insistence her partner is “doing the best / you can”
recurs like a mantra, a stubborn optimism:
you’ve been bad again so let
my goodness flit in so healing so ready to tuck you in so ready
to pin you to your actions hammer hands caressing
The poem, an uneven square, pockmarks the page, miming the arrhythmia of its title. Its form, imagery and voice—the speaker forever “riding rings of denial”—embodies codependency’s blind, driving entropy. Whose hands are hammers, and whose caresses? The poem taps its irregular beat, speaker and beloved swapping places in a lepidopterist cycle:
“so ready to tuck you in so ready / to pin you to your actions.”
Cliss pairs the odds and ends of domesticity with metaphysical possibilities to create her own sort of bathetic existentialism: “an anorak, a gate, / a phone call, a pair of trainers, / a portal. A knock, a knocking, / an answer.” (‘In the End’) Since these could read as instructions for fleeing home, the syntactical bittiness conveys a pressured mental
state—that “one foot in front of the other” mentality triggered by survival mode.
Cliss’s strength lies in her noticing and how she harnesses this attention to show rather than tell. Frequently excellent lineation deepens and complicates meaning. Take the penultimate poem, which weaves a thing with its negation—the speaker claiming not to notice something she describes. ‘Wedding Season’ slips
from couplets to a final single line, mimicking the pamphlet’s real-life arc (partnered-to-single):
Trouble is I never stop
to notice how hotel beds are often
two single mattresses pushed close
and held together by a pressed sheet.
The pamphlet’s final poem ‘Song for Leaving’, an unrhymed Italian-style sonnet, is the counterpart to the opening ‘Song for the Love We Learned’. Structural symmetry aside, its appeal is obvious: punchy imperatives (“make me / wilful.”); a forward-looking directness (“I’ll bask”); poppy references to Hot Girl Summer (“comfort series on repeat”, “bodysuits and brunch”, “hot gossip”, “fluorescent dresses”). Energetic, determined, fun,
it’s a manifesto for the speaker’s future—conscious of what she’s been through, but newly unfettered.
Still, I would almost have preferred (In)Habit to end on ‘Scab’, which works in subtler, harder-won ways.
Its numinous last lines—suffused with an understated, contemplative resolve—speak for themselves:
you glance a slow finger
over Scab’s grave feel
the skin a little taut
there a little less eager
to break again.
(In)Habit, Hetty Cliss (fourteen poems) - £8
Symmetric of Bone, Troy Cabida (fourteen poems) - £8