from the editor's desk
Review of ‘Hello Keanu! A poetry anthology’ edited by Emily Sun and Sarah Yeung
Sun, Emily and Sarah Yeung, editors. Hello Keanu! A poetry anthology. Momolo Books, 2024. RRP $20.00, 62pp, ISBN 9780646888132.
Jenny Hedley
Web Editor’s Note
For any readers who aren’t aware: one of the editors of Hello Keanu!, Sarah Yeung, is Westerly Magazine’s Administrative Editor. In the interest of transparency, I want to assure readers that Sarah did not commission this review. When Jenny approached me with the idea of reviewing this collection, which she already owned, I could not resist saying yes.
Melissa Kruger
Our tight-knit literary community is increasingly polarised as atrocities cascade down social feeds: so much feels futile in the face of infinite scroll. And yet, where else but in art can we permit ourselves utopian imaginings—for example, a world of extreme kindness ruled by a secular host who inspires us to ask always: What would Keanu do?
Keanu Reeves fans are apparently everyone, his virtue incontestable. The 368,000-follower strong subreddit r/KeanuBeingAwesome is threaded with stories of his bodaciousness. On Quora, the post ‘Why do so many people like Keanu Reeves?’ has 1.5 million views, 64,000 upvotes and a virtual congregation testifying to his saintliness. Sebastian Götze led a team of researchers who named a type of fungus-killing bacterial compounds keanumycins A–C after Reeves, and in tribute to the ‘many iconic killers in his cinematic career’. And where other LGBTQIA+ cultural icons have maligned their fanbases (Hello, JKR!), Keanu voiced solidarity when the Wachowski sisters revealed The Matrix franchise to be an allegory for transness (Damshenas).
Emily Sun and Sarah Yeung’s cheerful poetry anthology Hello Keanu! provides space for twenty-four poets and two artists to pay homage to Keanu Reeves as cultural touchstone. While the project began as a joke—an off-the-cuff answer to the ubiquitous writers festival question, ‘What’s next?’—support was overwhelming. I recall chatter around the Hello Keanu! call for submissions: many writers I knew either riffed out Keanu-themed stanzas or else lamented missing the deadline. Although submissions were anonymised, the contributor’s list reads like a who’s who of Australian poetry au courant. In the book’s introduction, Sun describes the agony of sending ‘so many quality Keanu poems’ to the slush pile (v).
Lauded author Scott-Patrick Mitchell opens the book of worship with this invocation: ‘Humble yourself before The Book of Keanu. Let these words be the cool breeze over the mountains that still you’ (1). And like relief from a maelstrom, the poems provide temporary shelter, transporting us from a cruel matrix of systemic injustice to a queered, multicultural Hollyweird imaginary. In Cruel Optimism, Lauren Berlant speaks of optimism as an orientation towards pleasure, ‘a scene of negotiated sustenance’ that makes our world of ‘crisis ordinariness’ more bearable. In positioning Keanu as thirst trap, Sun and Yeung’s anthology is a cinematic candy bar menu that actually hits the sweet spot. Keanu is our communal nourishment, the one who ‘will break this code explode / this blockchain system’, according to contributor Miriam Wei Wei Lo,
because somewhere in the space-time continuum
there was a wormhole a tunnel a connection
flick flick flickering
something in your face maybe tumbling towards us
like possibility like a head-over-heels kungfu flip to
a michelle yeoh future (10–11)
Similarly wading through the mire of cultural imperialism, RMIT Vice Chancellor’s Indigenous Postdoctoral Fellow Eugenia Flynn writes ‘the North America of my teenaged dreams // Little Black me’ where she ‘Sees a white passing Keanu / everywhere, all over the street’ and finds ‘I am seen differently here, not catcalled on the street / but appreciated / for me’ (18–19).
While Flynn revels in the safe haven of anonymity, other poets ache for the catcall, provided Keanu is doing the whistling. (He’ll never be on the wrong end of #MeToo, people argue online: notice how in photos his gentleman’s hand hovers, rather than grasps at people’s waists.) A lustful magenta heart pulsates from Hello Keanu!’s otherwise stark white-with-black-text cover, ode to
[…] Keanu’s incandescent masculinity
dissolving by limitless spectra
into suspended desire—racial solidarity,
queer joy, the kindness of strangers (Yeung, 28)
In a dispatch from the lust zone titled ‘The First Week We Kissed @RealKeanuReeves110 Followed Me on Instagram’, Madison Godfrey writes that they would ‘let Keanu suck the past from all my crevices, which is to say, I’d let Keanu teach me how to inhabit multiple timelines without ever dating a man from a bro band’ (24). Jacquelyn Leigh’s cat Snugglepot slinks onto a fan-girl poster of Keanu’s nude backside and ‘claims / your glossy bottom kneading new creases’ (25). Luoyang Chen writes:
I never watched The Matrix
Now I have and
All I want to do is have sex with Neo. (22)
Less debauched but just as playful is Sam Morley’s vision of Keanu ‘in his white / coat and faint Jesus beard / smelling like echinacea’ (33), an image of celestial grace echoed by Natalie de Rozario’s charcoal portrait (What Would Keanu Do? (51)), wherein Keanu gazes upon the reader with divine serenity. Meanwhile, Lin Blythe’s ‘Enough Money for Centuries’ plays devil’s advocate to Keanu’s notorious generosity:
If money is the last thing you think about—
But you have given away so much for good—
Taping the ethical label over your net worth—then
Did you give enough for it to matter?
Did you only give enough for us not to notice? (30)
Our saviour Keanu emerges unscathed at the end of Blythe’s poetic inquisition because ‘unlike most bloodsuckers, / You’ve blunted your fangs and gone vego’ (31). Which is not to say that Keanu’s characters lack killer instincts. No ordinary assassin, Keanu as John Wick is ‘our knight, our Puppy King’ (Mitchell (37)). ‘Sing, O Muse, of the wrath of John Wick’, laments Rachael Mead (44). Thumbsucker and hacker alike gather around a lone, unimpeachable figure in Hello Keanu!—an echoing chorus which meditates upon deeper issues of justice and equality, with a measure of hot sex.
Works Cited
Berlant, Lauren. Cruel Optimism. Duke University Press, 2011.
Damshenas, Sam. ‘Keanu Reeves was unaware of the “profound” trans allegory behind The Matrix’. Gay Times, 19 Aug 2020. https://www.gaytimes.com/culture/keanu-reeves-was-unaware-of-the-profound-trans-allegory-behind-the-matrix/.
Götze, Sebastian et al. ‘Ecological Niche-Inspired Genome Mining Leads to the Discovery of Crop-Protecting Nonribosomal Lipopeptides Featuring a Transient Amino Acid Building Block’. Journal of the American Chemical Society, 20 Jan 2023, vol. 145, no. 4, pp 2342–2353. https://doi.org/10.1021/jacs.2c11107.
Jenny Hedley’s writing appears in Overland, Archer Magazine, Cordite Poetry Review, Diagram, Mascara Literary Review, Verity La, Admissions: voices within mental health and elsewhere. She lives on unceded Boon Wurrung land with her son. Website: jennyhedley.github.io/
