Invisibility Exhibit [Paperback]

The Invisibility Exhibit by Sachiko Murakami is a deft drama, a sort of CSI: Poetics, that uses an investigation of the missing women of Vancouver's downtown East Side as an entrance to deeper, more personal conflicts. Ms. Murakami presents her case beginning with a poem titled "Missing", then proceeds with evidence and missing posters, and concludes with a poem of a crime scene titled "We've Seen Little of Her Life and Less of Her Death".

The poet incorporates a mother into the metaphor of the missing to draw all readers into mystery rather than rely on whatever ambiguous sentiment they can gin up, for we all have emotional disjoints, absences, we all have love taken hostage by some unsavory type.

Drunks and beggars abound, schmoozers and drifters, but we aren't driven to disgust or sentimentality:

the story waltzes in like an alcoholic
you love, hiccupping faux pas.
Can't not love her. Can't look at her.

Ms. Murakami understands the burden she's undertaken, too forceful, too soft, too Dickensesque and the reader feels pressured, preached at, or faked out by easy emotions. So she puts herself in the path of on-coming pain, timidly she searches for a way to live sacrificially, as in "The Exchange":


I'd take your three-day migraines, the leg that snapped
in a corkscrew path, eczema, bruises
you got in a blackout, the exotic
hepatitis, along with all the conditions
you insist exist, but no doctor can find,
if I could live from there, as the crouching tenant
in your body, carrying the weight of each starving,
luminous cell, if it meant a place
we could start from.

The book demands to be read as a whole, for poems stretch their fingers across the pages, or perhaps it is better to say: the poems stalk each other down the dark alleys of the book. Voyeurism, a theme with rich cinematic history, is utilized fruitfully. Often the narration of poems is ambiguous, is it the criminal or crime photographer? Who looks at the throat and finds "a hollow big enough for two thumbs"? Who watches her when "she thinks she is alone"? The only firm answer we have is us, the readers. Subtly implicated, our passive response to trouble, turmoil, and trial is exposed. One poem gives a list of excuses ("It's None of My Business"), a series of ifs amounting to inaction, to handwashing.

There is an ominous male presence within the book. In "Portrait of Sonnet as Missing Women" there is one male name. In the poems "Meat" and "News" a husband picking up meat from the butcher's twice swears "it has nothing to do with him". One poem objectifies a hooker (Portrait of It as Missing Woman), neuters her:

Its body emptied of expected contents,
purse spilled on the road before it.
It did this for money to feed itself.
Look at it. Like it's about to cry
or crack. Don't concern yourself.
It can't look up to find your gaze.

She knows our tricks, our methods of obfuscation, using language like a shield to avoid "social issues", using numbers instead of names, using "urban renewal" to mean "driving out unwanteds" and even takes up well-heeled efforts and charity functions that serve to assuage guilt rather than lend deep help. The Invisibility Exhibit is an art opening of the things we do not see, a sort of tribute to our own sensibilities, we are thanked for our "pronouns and other ploys" knowing full well, as she says in another poem, that "a theory of//language will not kill you outright, but this is art not survival".

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