Andrea Gibson is perhaps my favourite human being.

On some days I think that I’d like to loudly confess my love and beg Andrea to live with me forever. Friends and colleagues may well balk at such a statement, not only because of my general misanthropic demeanour, but because Andrea Gibson’s affecting, queer, and emotional poetry represents a neat antithesis to my stoic, detached, and cerebral public persona.

But Andrea’s work is so mesmerizing as to be worth memorizing. Occasionally, with a full heart, I will replay the poem Ashes in my mind, walking through the spaces where it lives and falling in love with it and its author all over again. There is so much feel, so much body, so much light and life, so much hurt, so much feel, so much poetry in everything that Andrea writes that for a long time I have felt that it could only ever be cheapened by analysis. I say that as someone who lets nothing slip by unanalyzed; Andrea Gibson’s work is better if you try to open yourself up to feeling it.

In this regard, whenever I encounter reviews of Andrea’s work I often find them to be either merely observational or a poor reflection of something that Andrea does better than poet that I know: affect.

Thinking about affect, perhaps we do not have to let the work pass by unanalyzed but rather we need to invoke the necessity of developing a different kind of sense to analyze it. I’ve always loved this quote from Felicity Coleman on how Deleuze considers affect:

Watch me: affection is the intensity of colour in a sunset on a dry and cold autumn evening. Kiss me: affect is that indescribable moment before the registration of the audible, visual, and tactile transformations produced in reaction to a certain situation, event, or thing. Run away from me: affected are the bodies of spectres when their space is disturbed. In all these situations, affect is an independent thing; sometimes described in terms of the expression of an emotion or physiological effect, but according to Deleuze, the affect is a transitory thought or thing that occurs prior to an idea or perception. Affect is the change, or variation, that occurs when bodies collide, or come into contact.

What changes when bodies collide… I saw Andrea perform in Manchester this month and can certainly say that my heart left with bruises from a quite brutal crash. Thinking in terms of affect,  (as an aside, “to impress the mind or move the feelings of” might number among my favourite definitions), renders thinking available to the dense cacophony of emotion and feeling in each of Andrea’s poems.

As a challenge to any readers I might suggest the following: listen to these three poems:

I Sing the Body Electric, Especially When My Power’s Out  (Text)

Angels of the get through (Text)

Radio (Text)

Pay attention neither to what is said, nor to the captivating array of imagery and partial-objects which constitute these poems, and instead try to feel your way into the affective spaces that the poems are carving out. Those heavy-hearted feelings that come before you can think through what they are about. I picked those three at random but all are entwined with the theme of a pedagogy of love: of self, of a friend, of a partner. This is perhaps too cerebral a version of the analysis. To think in terms of affect is simply to be rendered open by the lightness and weight of what is being said, thus rendering a life vulnerable to the possibility of compassion; of suffering with someone else.

Andrea’s work batters down the well-practiced apathy of everyday life and joyously invites the listener to suffer with them (recall the etymology of compassion), to smile, laugh, hope, dream, and weep with them. This audacious act of compassion is a collision of bodies of a kind, words used as weapons, catapulted against the walls of stoic detachment and disengagement.

But, there are cynical and critical voices who live in my head. As such, I sometimes find myself thinking that even this preoccupation with affect is limited, following from some comments by Claire Colebrook on the subject of affect:

There is nothing radical per se about affect, but the thought of affect–the power of philosophy or true thinking to pass beyond affects and images to the thought of differential imaging, the thought of life in its power to differ–is desire, and is always and necessarily radical. The power of art not just to present this or that affect, but to bring us to an experience of any affect whatever or “affectuality”–or that there is affect–is ethical: not a judgment upon life so much as an affirmation of life.

Art- not as the presentation of liberatory affect- but as an affirmation of life. Even if Andrea’s affect(ing) writing can’t save us, the affirmation of life doesn’t seem like such a bad consolation prize. We all need that sometimes.

Needless to say, I am looking forward to Andrea’s new book being released in November.