Merel Nijhuis

Merel Nijhuis (born 2002) is a cripqueer writer of critical poetry and poetic criticism. She creates peculiar clay sculptures, prefers to draw with pen, and speculates on ways to write new futures beyond the current hegemony. She strives for contradictory multiplicity, curled spirals as a form of resistance, a world full of blue herons and beds in public spaces. Above all, she searches for a space without definitive answers.

Furry and Curled into Spirals

"Furry and Curled into Spirals" is a poetic acceleration, a phantom masquerading as reality. It is a sequence of visions of hyper-capitalism, ableist violence, and inevitable destruction, ruptured by bodies stringing beads and dreaming rhythmically, by a proliferation of internal pressure, and by a language that is falling apart. The tumbling language prompts questions, even when you can no longer hear your own thoughts amidst all the commotion, and invites the reader to do the same.

The result is a collection of untitled poems, divided into two parts: compression and interference. As the collection progresses, poetic acceleration takes place: the stanzas become longer, the page fills up, the language begins to take over from the paper, and finally, the poetry disintegrates into individual letters, deprived of even the most banal meaning. It mimics the hyper-capitalist acceleration of daily life, where you are also drawn into bureaucratic processes and language that violates. In "Bont en als spiralen opkruld" (Furry and Curled into Spirals), the system of acceleration and fragmentation breaks, and fantasises aloud: what comes after the break?

Below you will find a small excerpt from the collection, the transition where the previously logical structure of poems transforms into an accumulation of language, or: a sequence of visions; a process that is set in motion; a warning.