Week 1: Bloodshot Monochrome
On variety, self-love, and sneaky, sneaky form.
I did not anticipate talking about “The Sonnet” this early
but the collection demands it. Welcome to the world of Bloodshot Monochrome by Patience Agbabi: an absolute firecracker to begin the year. I first read Agbabi at A Level when we studied her poem, ‘Eat Me’. The piece concerns a man who feeds his lover to morbid obesity, before said lover crushes him to death and then, it is inferred, devours his corpse. They’re not all like this, but hang on to your hats; we go to some interesting places with Agbabi at the wheel.
This collection reads like a variety show for poetry. Each part of the book — Shots, Monologues, Problem Pages, Blood Letters, and Vicious Circle — showcases a different kind of poem (or so it would seem, spoilers) and the diversity of Agbabi’s work keeps you hooked throughout.
In ‘Shots’ and ‘Blood Letters’, Agbabi covers topics from hate crimes in foreign languages to newspaper as a menstrual product; these sections are replete with memorable quotes. Whether describing Jerry Dammers as someone ‘whose smile/ was a few keys short of a keyboard’ or how the speaker’s ‘heart was break// dancing on the road to Wigan Casino’, Agbabi makes line breaks work hard for her.
For the ‘Monologues’ section, Agbabi slips effortlessly into other voices. ‘Josephine Baker Finds Herself’ shines out from this segment and not just for its mirror form; listening to one performance, Agbabi’s emphasis on the word ‘herself’ in the title unlocks the piece for me. Though at first the poem reads like an amorous encounter, a second reading shows how empowering self-love and even the autoerotic can be: the energy we need for 2025.
For ‘Problem Pages’, Agbabi writes a series of “Agony Aunt” columns helping everyone from Gwendolyn Brooks to Wordsworth. Frankly, any poem that features Shakespeare complaining about being ‘a poet who writes for the stage and thus typecast a performance poet’ gets my vote. Here, the penny started to drop; each of these prose poems is titled after a sonnet. Indeed, each of the fourteen(!) pieces takes the format of “eight lines question, six lines reply”. The plot thickens.
By the time I got to Vicious Circle (a sonnet corona about infidelity and revenge) I realised Agbabi’s game. By my count, there are over 40 sonnets; perhaps I’m just oblivious, but I choose to believe it’s Agbabi’s ability to thrill and to casually disguise this fact until the eleventh hour that makes Bloodshot Monochrome so moreishly good.
To achieve such range — from the warped and miserable to the downright hilarious — when nearly ¾ of your collection is a single form has all the magic of a circus trick without coming across as a gimmick. There’s even a poem whose title is a sonnet. The piece itself is only one word long, which rather sums up the book: ‘Wow!’
I’m grateful to Patience Agbabi for such an invigorating collection: the perfect start to this challenge. And, if nothing else, I now know for certain that I can count to fourteen..
All love,
Baz 🧡💙