Snapshots
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Jun 5, 2017
June’s snapshots are brought to you by three incredible women writers who have a lot to say about sex, life around us, and life inside us.
Molly Cross-Blanchard is a Winnipeg poet and playwright who will be pursuing graduate studies this fall. Her work has appeared in CV2 and The Malahat Review.
#IndianLovePoems
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Signature Editions
If there were a genre devoted to “Erotic Cultural Criticism,” #IndianLovePoems would take the cake, or the “bannock and butter.” Tenille K. Campbell has written a collection that melds sex and tradition, the erotic and the ritual. The speaker, a Dene woman with a laugh that can be “heard across bingo halls,” is unabashedly promiscuous, sampling men from all walks of life: the “hockey players,” the “John Smith(s),” the “Saulteaux warrior(s),” the “marrying kind,” and the “two-headed sea-snake” men who “belong to the water.” At times, the speaker approaches sex as a means of regaining cultural agency, an erogenous decolonization of sorts. In one poem, she rides a white man and refers to him as “conquered goods,” flipping the colonial narrative on its head, so to speak. The collection is ripe with thick tongues and lips and thighs, sensual body parts that take up space in the best possible way. But there is also love here, love that is rooted somewhere deeper than the short-form text messages and “winky faces” of romance in 2017. It is “sweet and flirty and hot as fuck / indigenous love.”
What the Soul Doesn't Want
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Freehand Books
Lorna Crozier has gifted us with a sixteenth collection of poetry, a striking addition to an already remarkable repertoire. What the Soul Doesn’t Want outlines not necessarily a narrative, but a feeling, a perspective through which to view the natural world. In this collection, an eggplant is a “Martian heart,” a fly is “closer to heaven / than we are,” and a cockroach is a loving mother of thirty-three. Crozier coaxes out of us the thoughts we know to be true, but had never consciously considered, like the notion that the soul doesn’t want “wine wrung from turnips” but might in fact tolerate “a rat mother,” or a “leather collar / that reeks of goat.” These poems relax into themselves and each other, allowing for an easy journey through the language of Crozier’s poetic mind. She doesn’t shy away from the words that unsettle, the ones that make us squirm, like “crap,” and “cunt,” and yes, even “fart,” as the cockroaches so often do. Above all else, these poems are chalk full of vibrant, animate life.
Charm
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BookThug
This collection is tactile, in every sense of the word. In Charm, Christine McNair toys with concepts of creationism: of books, of violins, of thicker skins, and of infants. She teaches us about “the futility of metal objects” and to “believe in stitches” because they’re “quaint.” Alliteration and assonance are the technical superstars of this work; the poems are pleasing to all of the senses, but to the tongue especially. For instance: “fingers tighten in lulls ears / say: mine mine minion / miniature minaret tower.” The themes McNair seems to be working with are those of hand-work, of violence where there should be none (“warlove”), and of being a woman – in the rawest of ways – in a world that is not necessarily built for us. This collection gives readers a healthy handful of delicious new words to add to their own lexicons: “platysma,” “pollinia,” “pleurisy,” and “patina,” to name a few. Charm is carefully crafted, stitched together just-so in a way that is not necessarily simple, but oh so satisfying and utterly engaging.
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May 2, 2017
Pilfer! This month’s Snapshots features poetry collections that are sly and sneaky and steal your wallet. These poets are societal dumpster-divers, and they light up culture’s junkyard like it’s the Fourth of a pretty ironic July. Lock up your secrets and seal your lips. The poets are coming.
Davis Plett makes word-things, sound-things, and sometimes video-things. Catch him doing all three during the 2017 Fringe Festival in Inertia.
Human Misunderstanding
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Fernwood Publishing
Kathy Mac’s Human Misunderstanding is a pastiche of found text, paradox, and quiet rage. The collection is split into three sections. One pairs dreamy word-visions of a modern poet-philosopher wandering a lovelorn city with quotes from David Hume’s “Enquiries Concerning Human Misunderstanding.” Mac has a knack for the poetic juxtaposition of previously unrelated materials, and hum[e]an misunderstanding is everywhere where one turns. Another section of the book examines a series of Canadian court cases involving assault charges and potential deportation of persons to countries where they might face torture and death. Language itself gets hurt in these poems; legalistic lingo gets chewed up and spit out by the tragedies it fails to completely account for. Perhaps the most surprising section of Human Misunderstanding compares Omar Khadr to Harry Potter. The results are a harrowing indictment of media portrayals of Khadr as either a tortured hero or a demonic villain: “Harry Potter’s self-sacrifice shields his friends and allies. He tells Voldemort: ‘They’re protected from you. […] You can’t touch them.’ / Nothing—no legal precedents, no UN Conventions, no International Treaties—protected Omar Khadr.” Human Misunderstanding doesn’t offer easy answers; it dismantles them.
Dazzle Ships
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ECW Press
“The Word Liberation Front prepares / language for safe, sincere appreciation” chimes the speaker of “Do Not Revere Popular Music,” and nothing could be further from the ambitions of Jamie Sharpe’s Dazzle Ships. The collection is an escapade through language where “Words took the long / weekend off” so “We might as well go bowling.” Poems about hockey players cross-check poems about computers which carom into poems about the poet’s previous collections. Poems about writing are left, right, and always way off center: “You think it’s a small poem / fixated on life’s everyday minutia— / trivial, but instantly recognizable / bits of the day. // Then a confusing metaphor is made / using the mutant, Kuato.” Silliness abounds as Sharpe somersaults through language and nabs nuggets from arts award ceremonies, email scammers, and even himself.
Same Diff
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Talonbooks
Undoubtedly the most structurally rigorous collection of this month’s Snapshots, Same Diff takes poetry to the art gallery and then there’s an explosion. The collection compiles stock phrases used to justify racist sentiments (“I only meant it as a joke / Political correctness has taken so much fun out of the world / If you move to a new country, you should absorb its customs and values”) in monotone monologues that become as nauseating as they are exhaustive. It instructs the reader in enormous, all-caps propaganda posters to “LOOK / AWAY”. It welcomes the reader to the collection with a list of greetings in a number of languages whose speakers are under threat. The poem concludes with “welcome” in English and Latin. If Same Diff takes some fun out of the world, it’s because that fun was never there to begin with; the signs and symbols of egalitarianism always circle back to the dialects of imperialism. Perhaps the most extraordinary poem of the collection is “Bottom of the Pot,” a nineteen-page elegy simply comprised of quotes from prisoners-of-war, Holocaust and gulag survivors, and soup-kitchen users. Each quote returns to the same basic observation—that soup from the bottom of the pot is most desirable because it has the most nutrients and substance. Mancini’s lists, with their insistent repetition and procedural tenacity are monumental, glacially shifting edifices that deface empire’s pristine walls with their own babble. Mancini [re]says the same things over and over, collects linguistic violence and travesties under the heading “same diff,” contending that there is no essential difference between them; that taken together they are the testimony to patterns of physical and ideological violence. Same diff? Mancini doesn’t think so. Neutrality is not an option.
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Apr 4, 2017
April’s snapshots are brought to you by Molly Cross-Blanchard, and examine facets of family, art, and war through three different subjects: the mother, the father, and the child.
Molly Cross-Blanchard is a Winnipeg poet and playwright who will be pursuing graduate studies this fall. Her work has appeared in CV2 and The Malahat Review.
A Bedroom of Searchlights
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Inanna Publications
In A Bedroom of Searchlights, Joanna M. Weston has interwoven violent notions of wartime in Britain with vibrant images of nature in order to elegize her mother, a diametrical woman, who “melts Neapolitan / between red lips” while the speaker merely “tongue(s) / plain vanilla.” The way Weston has interspersed the imagery throughout these poems mimics a speckling – or spattering – of paint on canvas, paying homage to the Mother’s hobby of choice. There is a deep admiration here for the type of woman who channels her rage against a disloyal husband and an unstable nation, allowing her anguish to “flower on canvas / as scarlet tulips.”
On Not Losing My Father's Ashes in the Flood
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Wolsak & Wynn
These poems take place after the dinosaur extinction, after World War II, after 9/11, after Saddam’s execution, after the Alberta flood of 2013, after the ashes were found “in a box of books... above the waterline.” They have a history – lived and imagined – a backdrop of tragedy and poetry which Harrison seems to present as one in the same, “as if downstream / was another word for heaven.” Using humour, candid voice, and the quirky unpacking of everyday conventions and concepts, On Not Losing My Father’s Ashes in the Flood explores the relationship between father and son, father and dementia, and father and art. The speaker holds his father’s memory out and up, studying with reverence “the beauty / of a man who found beauty everywhere but in himself.”
Tell Them It Was Mozart
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Brick Books
In Tell Them It Was Mozart,Angeline Schellenberg offers readers an honest delving-into motherhood, into the feelings of guilt, of wanting to run away, wanting to “slap,” wanting to abandon; but also feelings of absolute and all-consuming love, an “ultraviolet awe.” The speaker has coined her two children “The Diminutive Professor” and “The Imaginative Child” after their particular characteristics, which the speaker finds both magnificent and paralyzing in their own rights. She explores ideas of motherly expectation, judgement, and self-preservation in the face of words like “Asperger's,” “genetics,” and “diagnosis.” This whirlwind collection of mistakes and triumphs, of flushing campground toilets with gusto, reminds readers that no two encounters with parenthood are the same; “There is no sin in the stumble to surrender.”
