ਬੁਣਤਰ | Works as Network
Readers occasionally ask whether a particular idea belongs to one work or another. This is a reasonable question, but the works themselves do not seem especially interested in answering it.
A cat that wanders through Asking Out Ms. Leanne Beaton has A distant relatives in another wip, Estella. A question first asked in a poem (ਜਾ ਪਰ੍ਹਾਂ ਕਵਿਤਾ ਜਿਹੀ: ਵਜ਼ਨ | ਕਿਸ ਦਾ ਵਜ਼ਨ ਏ, ਭਾਰ ਨਹੀਂ) may return years later (what.has.weight.) disguised as an expand work, a joke, a memory, or a conversation in a kitchen. Sometimes an image disappears from one book only to reappear somewhere else, carrying additional luggage. For example:
ਮੁੱਖ ਵਾਕ / ਜਾ ਪਰ੍ਹਾਂ ਕਵਿਤਾ ਜਿਹੀ — 2014
ਰੋਜ਼ ਧੁੱਪ
ਪੌਲੇ ਪੈਰ
ਮੇਰੇ ਘਰ ਵੜਦੀ ਹੈ
ਰੋਜ਼ ਚੰਨ
ਕੁਝ ਪਲ
ਮੇਰੀ ਬਾਰੀ ਚ ਅਟਕਦਾ ਹੈ
ਰੋਜ਼
ਮੁੱਖ ਵਾਕ
ਮੇਰੇ ਘਰ ਚਲ ਕੇ ਆਊਂਦਾ ਹੈ।
ਰੱਬ ਕਯਾ ਕਰਸੀ / Passages in weariness — 2026~
ਰੱਬ ਦੇ ਘਰ ਸੰਨ ਲੱਗੀ ਏ
ਰੱਬ ਦਾ ਘਰ ਰੁੜ੍ਹਨੋ ਹੜ੍ਹਨੋ ਨਹੀਂ ਰੁਕਦਾ
ਮੇਰਾ ਘਰ ਭਰਨੋ ਨਹੀਂ ਹਟਦਾ
"ਦੂਰ-ਕਿਤਾ" ਮੇਰੇ ਘਰ ਵੜਿਆ।
The works were written at different times, in different forms, and for different reasons, but they repeatedly find themselves circling the same territory: language, memory, labour, animals, desire, migration, bodies, stories, and the peculiar ways people become entangled with one another and with the worlds they inhabit.
For this reason, the archive is arranged less like a shelf and more like a landscape.
Asking Out Ms. Leanne Beaton follows memory as it drifts between Punjab and Toronto, between foodbanks, villages, photographs, animals, and conversations that refuse to stay where they happened. SourDog approaches many of the same questions through transformation, unstable bodies, and fractured realities. What Has Weight strips the machinery down even further, lingering over words themselves: their texture, their failures, their tendency to become something other than what they were asked to mean.
Across these works, ideas rarely remain where they are first introduced. They travel. They change shape. They acquire new companions. A philosophical problem may return as a punchline. A memory may become a landscape. An animal may become a neighbour. A metaphor may stop behaving like a metaphor altogether.
It is therefore possible to begin almost anywhere. The books do not form a sequence so much as a conversation. Each work speaks in its own voice, but they are often talking about the same things.