Truth OMG
Imane Boukaila
Unrestricted Interest, 2021
Review by Catherine Harris
Brimming with tumbling language, tactile sound, and vivid emotion, Imane Boukaila’s chapbook Truth OMG is a blend of sound and motion—a reading experience you can both hear and feel.
Boukaila dives into isolation, both physical and emotional, in “Home Holds Isolation.” “I mostly hear sporadic / thoughts,” says the speaker of this poem; “I mostly feel trapped / thinking hours lose / their moments posting / only hollow tones.” The poem engages with the repetitive, claustrophobic nature of being isolated, and the unfulfillment of online connection. The speaker longs for their own creativity to activate—for the opportunity to self-express—under the heavy atmosphere of being at home.
At other times, home holds a different significance. “Dreaming Nomad” explores stability and wandering. Freedom of thought forms a home in itself, a nomadic space wherein the thinker builds a home inside themselves:
I’m a moving nomad
thinker thoroughly fracking
fossilized ideas extracting
the essence of truth
This poem ends in an exquisite outpouring of repeated sounds, building to a climactic break with a dramatic change in structure—an ecstatic celebration of the racing, overspilling nature of thought:
damping retressing distressed
dressed choruses
moving theses trapping facets
shorted truth dares
Boukaila calls for revolutions of thought and action. In “Tearing Down the Pleading Wall,” the speaker vocalizes an overthrow of “tyrannical ideologies” and “standardized / thinking” through the image of towers tumbling down. Preconceptions are made visceral through scent: “foolish / rubbish accumulating stench / of rotten reasons / vegetating.” The sensory nature of this poem encourages us to digest the need for change in a physical way. In “Hampered Truths,” Boukaila’s language is equally powerful: the speaker of this poem is “striving / to rip habits freaking taboos / mad proliferating tucked rabid.” Elsewhere, Boukaila’s language flourishes in different ways, from unique tactile creations to stunning stand-alone images.
“Neurodivergent Revolution” meshes tenderness and action in its opening lines:
Treasuring peaceful thinking
tasting reshaping the moment
mostly to drive thinking toward
troops marching for autistic
rights
The following poem, “Manmade Traps,” expands on the continuous theme of motion and taking back pathways, rerouting: “our neurodivergent minds / ease freedom trappers / innately hindering strides.”
Nature glimmers from inside these poems, from trout in the streams to tree roots pushing through the trails. In “Mind Flows,” thoughts move like natural forces, “massive tornadoes / of treasures,” to be organized with care; “unveiling a structure / of strange strobes.”
Boukaila punctures repetition with glittering images and unexpected moments to create a textured collection. Equally unexpected are moments of language-play, manifestations of tornado thought:
tracking autistic trends timing destructive hostile theories implying thinking is portrayed mostly thorrrrr…
Missed opportunities feeding theses trashing tilted thinking mostly intention piles in neurotypicality truth is my dislocated tornadoed motions imimsse freak tressed mocking imsatres
(“Healing Mind Bridges”)
This chapbook unfurls, moving and stretching from the stiffness of isolation and institutional structures, through rivers of thoughts and trout, to a visceral expression of energy and selfhood. Reworking language and reshaping ideas in a continuous tumble, Truth OMG embodies the powerful motion it describes.
Catherine Harris holds a BA in English from the University of Bristol. She lives in Vancouver with her dog, who likes to keep her company while she’s writing.