Les pénitences par Alex Viens

     Before I even start this review, I need to give a shout out to the bookstore where I got it from. Un Livre à Soi is a francophone bookstore in Montreal that I had the luck of wandering into. While I was there, a woman asked if I needed any help and I asked for recommendations for Montrealian authors. She then handed me book after book, giving me summaries in French that I felt very proud of myself for understanding. After she handed me probably six books, she asked for another employee’s recommendations for novels by Montreal writers and that employee gave me several more. While she was giving me recommendations, yet another employee gave me some suggestions. In the end, I ended up with a stack of probably twelve books to sort through. When I made some decisions, I took them to the counter and the first woman said, “Oh, but these aren’t for you right?” and I replied (all of this in French), “Oh, no, they are. I’m trying to practice.” The man behind the counter then said, “Oh, well, since you’re practicing, I’ll give you 10% off.” It was a really beautiful experience so good on Un Livre à Soi for being so welcoming. Such was the genesis of me reading Les pénitences by Alex Viens. Again, I just have to say that I really enjoyed the experience of reading a novel in French and actually getting most of it. It was a refreshing change of pace. 

Alex Viens’ novel focuses on Jules, a young woman visiting her father, Denis, after over a decade of being no contact. A mystery opens the book: after much debate and delay, Jules has brought a box to Denis and we are not told what is in the box. We only know it is something that Jules’ mother, estranged from Denis, was reluctant to give over.

The early part of the book depicts its fair share of qualified tenderness. Denis’ estrangement from his ex and children is apparent and it’s clear that he’s not the healthiest father figure, living in a run-down apartment, alcoholic and foul-mouthed, listening to The Cure records on repeat and complaining about the world. He’s a miserable grump that insists on Jules staying for longer than she really has to. That said, there are some moments where the two connect in fraught gentleness.

At Denis’ insistence, they go to the store to buy booze, where Denis makes a racist comment to the cashier that the cashier passes off as ‘just how Denis is.’ When they get back to the apartment, they share a joint and get high in the washroom. Denis also prepares a meal for Jules—a kind of elevated poverty-pasta dish with lots of sauce. Between all the drinking, though, Jules doesn’t feel hungry and Denis becomes furious that his daughter won’t eat the meal he has so lovingly prepared. He starts to yell, demanding that she finish, making her eat until she vomits in her lap and he gets to swoop in and say how much he always loved taking care of his sick children.

Denis’ aggression comes across as a little bit too much, a cartoonish kind of evil, but it seems more plausible as the book goes on. With increasing frequency, the book flashes back and forth through time. We see how Denis interacted with his two children, Jules and Charlie. In short, it’s a long stream of abusive moments and pitting the family against itself. He is overprotective, refusing to let them out of the house, and demanding that one of them take fault when they misbehave. If they snuck out, Jules and Charlie knew that one of them had to fess up to being the ringleader and take the punishment for them both. It was a breeding ground for resentment, which got even worse when the parents split up and Jules ran away to live with her mom while Charlie remained behind to ‘take care of’ their dad, being subjected to, in Jules’ mind, his continual abuse.

Viens’ storytelling makes for some rich ethical debate. There are wrongs done in every direction. Charlie tries to escape to her mom’s, and Jules invites her to stay, but she goes home to Denis and is forced into a position of having to say that she was gathering information for what she could say in court. Denis is trying to get full custody and so Charlie furnishes him with info only for it to be spun in the other direction where Denis says that if she were to share any of that with the court it would only mean he’d have to increase his alimony payments. The family is continually in a no-win situation.

In the present of the book, Jules’ conflict with her father continues to escalate throughout their night together. As if it were a scene in a horror movie, Denis locks Jules into the apartment after his looming shadow follows her down the hall. He then takes the mysterious box and locks himself in the bathroom. In an attempt to get him out, Jules starts acting out by pouring out his beers, throwing a brick through the television set, and screaming to make him come out and give her the key.

It’s hard to talk about the book in a way that won’t ruin the surprise. Throughout the book, I had an idea of what might be in the box and Viens continues to turn the screw to make you feel the tension of what might happen to it. When, at the end of the book, it’s revealed what’s in the box and then what’s really in the box, it adds an engaging dynamic. It’s the kind of ‘twist’ that makes you rethink the entire family dynamic, which becomes even more violent in the closing pages of the text. It’s a family drama that could easily be transformed into a moody, brooding, complex horror. I am having a hard time resisting revealing the answer to Brad Pitt’s demand to know what’s in the box?

Viens’ depiction of poverty and its impacts is also really compelling. The initial depiction of Denis’ apartment is evocatively developed. Viens describes how everyone watches television really loudly. The passage elaborates on how the thin walls allow you to hear what everybody else is up to. There’s students climaxing together, a sad old man who cries and hits his head against the wall, an upstairs neighbour screaming at her boyfriend to stop. There’s a comment about how the walls offer such little intimacy but how everyone turns a blind eye to one another because police are worse than noise: <<Les murs offrent si peu d’intimité qu’ils font de ces logements les lieux les plus secrets au monde, dans l’indifférence du vivre et laisser vivre, où les gens se mêlent de leurs affaires pour obtenir pareille clémence de la part des autres. Ici, on n’appelle pas la police. On aime encore moins la police que le bruit>> (20). The image of squalor is finely established and sets the tone for the book pretty early on. In another early passage, Viens describes the contents of Denis’ fridge and freezer. Delissio pizzas, ice cream sandwiches, and so on. The passage describes how he takes out his Ziploc bag of pot and how it’s not just the regular Ziplocs, but the ones with the special slider: <<Le sac de Denis en est un avec une glissière en plastique. Ceux qui valent cher, ceux qui rendent jaloux les camarades de classe à l’heure du sandwich au baloney, ceux qu’on a envie de transmettre à ses descendants>> (26). It’s such a telling moment that this little detail on a Ziploc bag becomes a class marker. It reminds me of the opening passage of Breasts and Eggs by Mieko Kawakami, in which she talks about how you can tell who grew up poor by asking how many windows there were in their home. I appreciate the way the passage takes this little detail and elevates it to the status of an heirloom. 

I would say that the book has a generally accessible style and has these nice flourishes of description to elevate it. The flashbacks pace the book nicely and add tension to the ‘present’ moment of the text. While the main characters’ evils towards one another are sometimes over the top, there’s enough tenderness to avoid easy answers on the characters, and the final moments of the story offer a compelling reason to re-read the hundred and twenty preceding pages. Memory is hazy. Experiences are subject to revision—though none of the characters, Viens reminds us, have quite the capacity for self-reflection they would need to change their ways. It’s a downer ending, though not in the way you’d anticipate.

Happy reading!

Flowers for Algernon by Daniel Keyes

        Is there any point in summarizing Daniel Keyes’ Flowers for Algernon? I feel like it has so much pop-culture cache that everyone knows the story. If not, here’s the idea: Charlie Gordon has an IQ of 68. Disowned by his family for almost twenty years, his teacher at his special school pushes for him to be part of an experimental surgery that improves his IQ. He works at a bakery and after the surgery he comes to realize that his coworkers are pretty awful towards him, he has memories of an abusive childhood, and then he becomes a genius that outpaces the doctors that conducted the experiment. He gets frustrated being under their care and frees himself and the mouse that was the precursor to his experience. He sets up an apartment in New York and continues his studies, has a dating life, and visits members of his estranged family before losing his intelligence and returning to his former life.

The novel has a central flaw that I’ll explain with reference to theory. In History and the Novel, Irving Howe presents the thesis that the foundation on which novels stand—history—erodes as we increase our distance from it. As such, our ability to access and interpret older novels similarly fades. I would make the case that Flowers for Algernon shows its flaws in the light of the modern day. The most glaring issue is that the core of the novel relies on the idea of IQ, a much-discredited measure of intelligence. The history of science imprints itself on the book, but takes it further away from us at a foundational level, beyond the teeth-grinding repetition of the R word. The premise is compelling, but the historically problematic nature of the book breaks the immersion somewhat.

What Keyes does well, in his way, is to present the story with moral conscience and emotional core. Charlie is treated with a great deal of sympathy, with a common refrain being that he is a human being and was even before his surgery. Keyes does a lot to show the torments Charlie Gordon goes through—more on this momentarily—and to expose the evil lurking in the supposedly moral hearts of the “smart” and “normal” people in his life. Everyone treats Charlie as a child and exploits him; his mother shows him no compassion for being different and no one extends any care of him. Keyes does a wonderful job at what is arguably the novel’s climax of juxtaposing Charlie’s treatment with his own mother, who by the end of the book has clearly developed Alzheimer’s—yet people refuse to put her away into a care facility. Keyes shows the limits of peoples’ sympathy and the different treatment of people who have “proven” themselves to the rest of society.

Keyes inserts a diatribe in the middle of the novel, noting that people would never “take advantage of a man born without arms or legs or eyes—how such people think nothing of abusing a man born with low intelligence” (139). It’s a surprisingly progressive stance for the 1960s to target ableism in this way, and I can’t fault Keyes for extending sympathy, even if it is misguided by modern standards. Charlie notes that even when he had low intelligence how he knew he was inferior: “Other people had something I lacked—something denied me. In my mental blindness, I had believed it was somehow connected with the ability to read and write, and I was sure that if I could get those skills I would have intelligence too” (139). He notes that “even a feeble-minded man wants to be like other men” (139). At his best, he shows the moral core that treats people well. At his worst, he succumbs to some of the same infantilization that the people in the book subject Charlie to; he draws the parallel to children directly: “A child may not know how to feed itself, or what to eat, yet it knows hunger” (139). He then speculates on what could happen if all people could receive the same treatment: “If I could be made into a genius, what about the more than five million mentally ******* in the United States? What about the countless millions all over the world, and those yet unborn destined to be *******? What fantastic levels might be achieved by using this technique on normal people. On geniuses?” (139). We see Charlie replicating the same standardization and borderline-eugenicist philosophy that led to his treatment in the first place, not extending sympathy to people for how they are, but instead creating a plan to make others “normal” too.

Now, I can somewhat forgive this seeming flub in Keyes’ philosophy because the novel specifically makes a distinction between intelligence and compassion. After Charlie’s intelligence takes off, he becomes patronizing, unkind, unsympathetic, and so on. People regret that Charlie’s free and easy kindness and warmth disappears as his intelligence emerges. Eventually Charlie learns that lesson, too, and says that there is no direct connection between being smart and being a good person. Consequently, some of Charlie’s views might be discounted as part of his evolution towards having a heart again.

Weirdly, though, Keyes’ narrative seems to place a lot of blame on women. A number of them are vilified or have inappropriate relationships with Charlie. His mother is the worst, alternating between insistence that he is normal and abusing him for being what she perceives as a pervert. His sister is equally malicious. The traumatic and abusive things they do to him could have been plucked from A Child Called It. Meanwhile, his teacher Miss Kinnian is largely compassionate, but I can never accept relationships between teachers and students. There’s also some strange character development in her towards the end of the book that feels inconsistent—the love story doesn’t quite earn its payoff. The other woman Charlie gets involved with, Fay, is seen as a messy free spirit artist who is regularly nude and feels like she’s paraded around as an unintellectual piece of eye-candy for the male gaze. Sidenote: it’s weird that Charlie’s low intelligence is paired with a kind of hypersexualization that he then has to recover once he becomes smart. Even women at the science conference are presented mostly as incompetent and scared of a mouse. Given how much sympathy Keyes extends to people with intellectual disabilities, it’s odd that he does not seem to offer much sympathy to the inner lives of women.

There are some wonderful elements to the book. The way it reads as a kind of Frankenstein story, even referencing Paradise Lost as a shared intertext, is a great way of exploring the premise. It deals with similar questions of responsibility towards one’s creation. Flowers for Algernon adds a spin, though, that the creation does not accept the creator’s role. To explain a little further, in Frankenstein, the creature accepts Frankenstein as his creator and wants to place demands on him. In this case, Charlie refuses to accept that the doctors ‘created’ him—he insists that he was a full person before they ever intervened, which is a great subversion of the trope.

It’s also a nice touch to see the evolving style Charlie uses to express his ideas. The book starts with a number of chapters with poor vocabulary, incorrect spelling, lack of punctuation, and so on. These emulate his inability to express himself properly and then as he learns and grows more intelligent, the style becomes sophisticated. It’s a little hackneyed but still an appropriate choice that helps to emulate the experience.

I do think, too, that the cruelty of the characters is emotional and heart wrenching. It’s most painful that Charlie doesn’t understand. His narration of his coworkers’ behaviours is clear to anyone that they are ridiculing him, but he feels like he is part of the team. It’s also hard to listen to his mother’s tirades against him and his sister’s abuses. When he goes to visit his father and his father doesn’t recognize him, it’s a sad scene and when he goes to visit his mother it’s even worse—she doesn’t recognize him at first, then does, and is so proud of his intelligence and finally accepts him—yet that hits hard. For one, we know that he is going to lose his intelligence and that these benefits are temporary. His need for acceptance is never quite fulfilled, since he has realized that he deserves acceptance and compassion regardless of contingencies. Then, because her own understanding is so fleeting, and her desperation for a normal son that she can show off so great, it’s a painful moment that brings not catharsis but shadowed saccharinity. Like his relationship with Miss Kinnian, his reconciliation with his sister feels a little unearned.

Flowers for Algernon began as a short story that was then expanded into a novel. I have to say, the book likely could have been about 50 pages shorter. There’s some extensive repetition in the middle of the book—flashbacks to a younger Charlie looking through windows (symbolism that is a little on the nose, if you ask me). I feel like a lot of the romance storylines could be cut down or omitted to focus on the central concerns of the book—not that emotional connection isn’t one of the central concerns, but it’s one that does not land as well.

As I mentioned at the start, Flowers for Algernon is a product of its time. Its didactic message is necessary, albeit marred by some historically-rooted flaws. It’s funny: I imagine that the book will have a similar parabolic structure as Charlie. Charlie begins from nothing, has a meteoric rise, and then faces an inevitable decline. Flowers for Algernon, I imagine, will follow a similar path—it began from nothing, became an icon in popular culture, but will face a swift decline as we become more knowledgeable about the science of intelligence and become more progressive in our treatment of people alienated from society.

For now, it’s a nice little book. Happy reading!

Alone in the Classroom by Elizabeth Hay

    We’re going to take the circuitous route to the 1920s Saskatchewan schoolhouse in Elizabeth Hay’s novel Alone in the Classroom. We’re going to start instead with Alice Munro’s short story “Open Secrets” from the 1994 collection of the same name. Of Munro’s work, I find “Open Secrets” the most compelling for its imagistic quality and ambiguous conclusions. The premise of story is that a girl scout goes missing (is murdered?) while on a hike in the woods. While it’s been a while since I’ve read it, I still remember all these little moments that suggest some level of knowledge or culpability in the event: a man pumping water from the house to wash away evidence? A woman lowering her fingers onto the burner of a stove—to burn away her fingerprints? At the end of the story, it seems everyone is aware of what has happened, but Munro never gives the audience the satisfaction of knowing, but instead feeling like they maybe know.

This is largely the feeling imbued by Alone in the Classroom. The premise here, at least initially, revolves around some seeming impropriety at a rural schoolhouse. Connie is a new teacher working under principal Parley, who also happens to lead the drama club. Feeling consistently uneasy by Parley’s presence on her walks home, Connie (narrated through Anne—disregard for now) instils mistrust for Parley with the audience. The school starts staging a production of Tess of the D’Urbervilles [first of all: in elementary? really?], and a bright young girl acts in the titular role. One day, leaving the classroom after being alone with Parley, little Susan, seems upset, changed. The rumours start, Susan stops attending school, and it seems pretty clear that something inappropriate happened. Decades later, Parley admits that he was hard on her, but not much else.

The creepiness is pervasive. It’s an unsettling book from the very start, and it becomes more explicitly terrible when Susan dies in a house fire. While she is at home off school, her house goes up in smoke with her locked in her room, the key apparently in her father’s pocket. The moment is loaded with the same ambiguity as Munro’s story: a lamp in Susan’s room hints that perhaps the fire was self-inflicted, though there are later suggestions that her brother Michael set the fire by accident—more on that later.

Incidentally, the central character, Connie, goes to great lengths to help Michael Graves learn to read. He’s dyslexic (remember: the b is the headboard, the d its footboard). He improves, but it doesn’t really take. The main impression it left on me, though, as an educator, is how creepy the whole thing feels. Connie judges Parley’s relationship to Susan, but her relationship to Michael seems hypocritically perverse, as well. Her special interest feels inappropriate, which made it hard for me to really connect with any of the characters as likeable, and it doesn’t help that a few years later, Connie pursues a romantic relationship with Michael, which goes on for a number of years.

I’ve alluded a few times to time passing. Hay’s novel does, in fact, jump around between the decades. I mentioned Anne as the narrator, and she forms a kind of frame narrative around the rest of the text. In fact, in the ‘present’ at the start of the novel, there’s another young girl who has been raped and murdered with inconclusive results. Parley hovers around the periphery, and comes to the defense of the man accused, Johnny Coyle. There’s an engaging ambiguity here, as well: the accused man, requiring a cane, does not seem to have been capable of the motion required for chasing the girl in the woods; the hair in her hand only somewhat matched his sample, and so on. All things considered, I am inclined towards his innocence, but he is sentenced to death by hanging—later to be acquitted. The way this case plays out, and given its Canadian context, the parallels to the Steven Truscott case seem hard to ignore and an engaging intertext.

All of these mysteries proliferate throughout the first half of the book and the tragic, poetic tone draws nicely from Tess, which Hay’s narrator describes as more effective as a poem than a novel. That poetry works its way through Hay’s novel, as well. Alone in the Classroom is beautifully written, both in terms of descriptive detail and the dynamics of the sentence structures. There’s a quality to the work, if not rhythmic then lyrical. The way Hay establishes the imagery and the way she develops character is consistently powerful.

That being said, around the mid-point of the novel I started to lose interest. The book does not deliver on its promises: there is no resolution to the storylines of murdered little girls and no conclusive findings about guilt and innocence. I can handle all of that. I love ambiguity, but it ceases to gain in layers partway through for a prolonged period of time. Instead, the book reads like a series of character sketches: a trope of early Canadiana suitable to the milieu, but lacking the linchpin that makes it all click. Connie’s relationship with Michael takes a predominant focus which, as I’ve said, makes me so uncomfortable that I couldn’t bring myself to romanticize it. The same is true when Anne, a woman far too young for him, takes an interest and ‘steals’ her from Connie. Again: too inappropriate for me to feel invested in.

Substituting personal histories for the intrigue offered a number of opportunities to weave some central themes together, but the book requires more cerebral attention than heart. At many times, I was not up to the challenge.

Where the book really restores my attention is towards its final act. Hay reveals that Parley was a playwright and his play runs largely parallel to actual events. This is where, a hundred pages after the fact, a bit of doubt is cast onto Michael. It’s implied that Michael, feeling slighted by his teacher Connie, attempted to set fire to the schoolhouse, but wind carried the flames to his house across the street, killing his sister. The possibilities here remain ambiguous but allow us to reevaluate other moments in the text: Michael giving fire safety advice to children, for one. Or, perhaps it’s a more metaphorical moment through which Parley found he could displace his own feelings of guilt. Does his fictionalized play offer a projection? A contradiction? The truth?

Similarly, Anne finds connection between her mother and Parley. When she discovers Parley’s grave, covered in particular vegetation, it brings her back to a memory of her mother’s painting, which had the same vegetation. Ending the book with a moment like that offers a whole new realm of heretofore unconsidered possibilities. Is there, for instance, some kind of impropriety that her mother was victim to? Or, did she have a special love for Parley that had to be unexpressed due to all the mystery that surrounds him?

When I consider the book as a whole, there are parts of it that I find simply masterful. Yet, I didn’t feel the same personal connection that I did when reading Hay’s book Late Nights on Air. In that book—the only other of Hay’s novels I’ve read so far—the human connections were what held the book together. Alone in the Classroom is a book where its questions are the driving force—that’s where I felt invested. The human connections are once again foregrounded here, but they seemed more of a distraction than an enrichment of the text. 

Unlike some other writers, Hay at least has the defence that when the plot gets slow, or when the focus drifts, the writing is at least beautiful enough to make the novel worth reading. I just can’t help but feel that I needed some more layers to peel back, to have a bit more of a foothold on the core mysteries of the text. One of Parley’s plays was about a nice young man visiting an elderly one in the hospital. At the end of the play it’s revealed that the young man is culpable for something truly horrific. The implications of the premise are intriguing: what did Parley know? About whom? Again, is his guilt being displaced? Is he projecting it onto someone else rather than facing his own culpability? These mysteries need just that little bit of extra. 

Overall, in Alone in the Classroom, the meandering path, while often beautiful, just needed some more landmarks along the way.

Happy reading!

Brute: poems by Emily Skaja

    Emily Skaja’s poem “Dear Katie” begins with the following line: “Understand I need these fragments. To tell it once is not enough” (25). 

    The line reads as emblematic of Skaja’s book Brute: poems. Examining Skaja’s biographical entries reveals an academic background in women’s, gender, and sexuality studies, and that influence is clear in the telling of these poems. The poems orbit a number of related issues—domestic abuse, eating disorders, misogyny, sexual assault—and it is clear that “To tell it once” is not enough.

    The poems in the collection, in my view, were proficient and often had well-wrought motifs (at their best when speaking to one another), but the collection as a whole didn’t particularly excite my enthusiasm.

    That said, I want to focus on a few of the pieces I found most compelling. What is interesting to me in Skaja’s work is the way in which images and narrative are paired, giving the audience a taste of both. One can gather hints of connected stories between poems, most notably those involving relationships; several of the poems refer to an interchangeable ‘he’ that lets them read as a sustained exploration of the bond. These glimmers of narrative provide the audience a useful foothold for poems that can sometimes read more abstractly.

    My favourite example of a balanced poem are the opening stanzas of “Figure of Woman Coming Out of a Wall”:

& so it is, having slain the dragon Winter, I come to walk

the herringbone floorboards & the wet stairs of a nursing home

        out of the hall. Every day for a month I’ve said the words He left me.

At a wedding where I was happy for the couple, I declined to give the toast.

        I took his namecard from the table & told myself it wasn’t stealing—

That this name I loved belonged to me. At least.

         Through the window of the nursing home, I can see the gutter dripping.

I stand taller than the wingspan of a heron to suggest I’m an arrow. Which I point. (71)

I love these opening lines for their specificity of narrative. We’re provided a clear situation—or rather two—to help orient us for the more emotional exploration. The idea of stealing a name card from a table at a wedding is that precise kind of moment that is anchored in symbolism and so oddly resonant. It’s the kind of memory that lingers and is the perfect material for poetry. I also appreciate the imagery of its mirror image in the nursing home: “herringbone floorboards,” the “gutter dripping,” and the speaker standing “taller than the wingspan of a heron to suggest I’m an arrow.” Beginning the poem with such an interesting juxtaposition of scenes creates a resonant framework for the later two thirds of the poem. 

    “Figure of Woman Coming Out of a Wall” continues with the speaker visiting her senile grandmother, who “doesn’t always remember our name” (71) (I love how the ‘our’ unites them despite their clear disconnect). The grandmother’s reminiscences are replete with similarly specific moments that seem too real to be fiction, like “watching their father burn down the garage for the insurance money.” The mix-ups are gutting: “She thinks it’s my aunt’s birthday, that we have eaten golumpki / & set out the cake knife & we’re waiting for my grandpa, dead in 1987, // to rummage through the cabinets for the good floral plates.” Like other poems in the collection, this poem has some clever turns of phrase and imagery that capture the tone of the collection. In this case, she refers to how “March / has melted five blizzards down to floods” and how “There’s a parquet star on the floor. The moon is losing blood.” She continues, “When I cradle the skull of a vulture to my cheek, I remember / How once I was near-bride at the not-altar, how she sewed me a blue marriage quilt” (72).

    Individually, these images build a heart-wrenching scene and, taken on their own, are striking. Where the collection fails to land, for me, is that a lot of the poems seem to have a mix of metaphors that don’t evenly mesh with one another. The result is that the poems’ indistinct foci make them more difficult to latch onto. Rather than using metaphors to leverage one another, they are set up to battle for dominance.

    Of course, the broader sociological issues in Skaja’s poems are important and demand action. Skaja isn’t as abrasively polemical as some of her contemporaries, but the ethical impulse of the work is certainly clear. The poem “Girl Saints” stands out as a notable example in that respect. The poem almost certainly responds to the misogynistic undertones of religious discourse and the madonna / whore construction that so frequently traps women. “Girl Saints,” however, does not spend the majority of its time on brash deconstruction. Instead, there’s a surprising amount of rich metaphor and wordplay: “we were already stained in glass. // A circle of black flies biting / our arrival. Scales scraped off a fish. // Starved girls folded at a line from Leviticus” (23). A few lines later, Skaja writes, “Bring us the coat-check ticket for our eyes” (23) which I found such a mysterious and delightful phrase, anachronistic and decontextualized. The most explicit identification of the dilemma comes in just a few lines: “If ghost, if whore, if virgin – same origin story: // because X was a face too lovely, Y was a corpse in the lake” (23). I suspect the X and Y double as a wink to chromosomes, with the Y chromosome being the one that gets killed off in this framework.

    Let’s return to the poem which lent its opening lines to the start of this review since “To tell it once is not enough”. In “Dear Katie”, we see an elucidation of central key themes: there’s the religious “I have a hundred holy objects, everything looked upon, to break”, the temporal meditation “Time will pass, time will pass me, attaching mile-marker threats // to every causeway”, issues with mental health and eating disorders like “You are the only one who ever asks me Are you eating?” and the challenges of gendered expectations like in the line “when did I begin to choose this type of man who loves to ‘protect’ me // from himself?”. The fact that so many of these different motifs are placed into the same poem is perhaps representative of the internal competitions within poems—or, more generously, representative of the intersectional approach in Skaja’s work. The tangible lines of “Dear Katie” are then supplemented with the more oblique lines that are more evocative, but perhaps draw the focus somewhat: “Remember the dead dog as we found on the bridge road. A coyote, I said. / Raised as I was near a cemetery, I always assume some authority // over the departed. Stray magic. Lies about the natural world // comfort me, I admit. Like if a tree feels something / when another tree is fucking up her life. I believe in patterns. Shapes” (25). Personally, I prefer the more obscure lines, especially when taken from their context. The idea of “stray magic” in such close proximity to a reference to a dog is a clever layering, for instance.

    Cleanth Brooks, an unlikely critic to reference here, has a book called The Well Wrought Urn in which he talks about how poems are like well-wrought urns where everything cohesively fits together and that no piece of a poem can be changed without changing the whole. To me, Skaja’s poems may be well-wrought, but not in the same sense. In many cases, I think the base of each poem is well-constructed on a foundation of sociological critique and is then painted with its more lavish, if obscure, flourishes. It’s almost as if the stylized flourish could be lifted and the core of the poem would remain, for better or for worse.

    If you’re a fan of societal critique and social justice poetry, Skaja’s work nicely elevates the mode, even if it sometimes doesn’t quite hit the spot for me. Skaja cites her influences in the form of epigraphs before the different sections of the book, and the one that seems most clear to me is the reference to Sylvia Plath. Plath and Skaja are joined in a project of exploring deep issues, particularly as they pertain to feminine experiences of the world. This is an overly verbose way of saying: if you like Plath, read Skaja, too. 

    Thus concludes my first review in quite some time. Hope it was worth it!

    Happy reading!

My Art Is Killing Me by Amber Dawn

    In the foreword to Amber Dawn’s collection of poetry, My Art Is Killing Me, ______________ writes, “As I read the poem ‘Dear IncorrectName,’ I began to wonder why we expect artists to do our emotional labour for us. Is the violence of consumption inherent to experiencing art in our late-stage capitalist societies?” (13). I love these questions for their broad reach, and asking them set up a framework for reading Dawn’s poetry.

    Before I go into the questions My Art Is Killing Me inspires, I want to offer a brief comment on why I found ________________’s questions so thoughtful. The first question—about why we expect artists to do our emotional labour—is an incisive one. Typically, I think we have an expectation that reading books is in itself an act of healing, as if healing words will, by osmosis, make things better. That perception seems to undercut the challenging personal work necessary for actual emotional labour; the same goes for quoting e. e. cummings to your beloved. I appreciate the way the question simultaneously elevates the status of artists while undercutting the falsity of their supposed purpose (i.e. in this framing, as opiate of the masses). As for the second question, the idea of consumption and art is a meaningful one—a problem that even (and especially) I succumb to: observing art without being generative or allowing it to truly force me to reshape myself and the world.

    These questions prompted others in my reading of Amber Dawn’s poems. One question that sprung to mind for me is what it means to have an oeuvre. In a collection like My Art Is Killing Me, the poems deal directly with sexism, homophobia, sex work, rape, abuse, and so on. It first struck me how many of the poems deal with the same topic; I then considered how many famous poets built their careers on writing about the same topic and whether I am any different. If I can read and write poems about time and find some new nuance to the topic each time, why not for issues of social justice?

    Dawn’s approach threads the needle for social justice poems. We should consider the question: what is poetry for? Dawn seems to agitate, never veering so far into the didactic that her work ceases to read like poetry, never so esoteric that it loses sight of the real issues. In fact, the focus of the poems is what gives them their force. One poem is an extended examination of the relationship between Hollywood and sex work. It has the background research to read like an academic paper, but the stylistic arrangement worthy of poetry. Dawn documents how many actresses have won Oscars for portraying sex workers while simultaneously advocating against the decriminalization of sex work (Meryl Streep! A flaw?!). The hypocrisy runs throughout the collection and integrates passages of speeches from film and to the UN. She includes a passage from Mira Sovino’s role in Mighty Aphrodite that just gains profoundly terrible force for its being embedded in the footnotes of the poem: “And so there I am on the first day, on the set, and there’s this guy fucking me from behind, right, and there’s these two huge guys dressed like cops in my mout at the same time and I remember thinking to myself, ‘I like acting’” (40).

    Dawn has a special talent for giving those thoughtful, brutal gut-punches. Again, in critiquing the film industry and its role in society from an oft-unconsidered angle, Dawn writes, “I grew up with motives that taught me the meek / shall inherit the prom. Or the Geek shall inherit / access to a blackout drunk cheerleader.” The line break and the internal rhyme just make the line ring that much more powerfully, that much more critically of our social mores.

    Some of the lines echo between poems. It’s particularly powerful when there are recurring motifs that build up the characters in the poems. For instance, there are a series of lines that reference a lecherous professor guiding younger female students. The vignettes construct a ‘type’ of person—a stock character common in real life. Within the poem, Dawn acknowledges that he’s a composite and yet he feels so true to life in his toxic horror, both as a systemic and particular figure.

    Social justice poems are best when incorporating the personal. Dawn allows her poems to balance both in a way that is emotionally resonant and linguistically sound. There’s a narrative poem about a queer woman taking care of her homophobic relative and tracing the history of abuse and silence in the family. She writes about a letter she received that reads:

e   m   o  o   r   a    l

in context: “your emooral life”

a small tear between “o”s where his pen

heavily retracted the vowels

like an infinity symbol (42)

I like the way Dawn breaks down the misspelling in its particularity and then the descriptive simile of the ‘o’s as infinity symbols, as though she is forever emooral because of her identity as a queer person. I don’t know how true-to-life the account is, but the misspelling is telling. There’s an intimation of being ’unmoored’ in this spelling at the moment of her expulsion from the family. In a line shortly after she recounts how “All my abusers are survivors after all. / Nonno           no different”, referring to a family member. I love the repetition of the ‘no’s and how it bridges the disapproval and the family member as though the two are one. The moment is then punctuated with one of Dawn’s particularly poetic images: “My ma told me he died in a trailer so / poverty gnawed she could see the sky // through the aluminium walls.” It’s an evocative image that encapsulates the decrepitude and bleakness of the moment. I have a minor complaint about there not being a hyphen between “poverty” and “gnawed” but I’ll let it slide (along with a few other spelling and punctuation errors in the collection).

    In My Art Is Killing Me, Dawn writes that “an anagram for ‘creative writing’ is ‘tragic interview’” (22). The linguistic cleverness may be a bit much, but I can’t help but enjoy it. It also feels appropriate for the confessional tone of the collection (indeed, one poem is a compilation of DMs that people have sent in response to Dawn’s work, often of a triggering or re-traumatizing nature). The headline here is that the collection offers a fine balance of the personal and political.

    The collection has an authenticity that is sometimes lacking from similar collections. While I sometimes find myself troubled by the propensity of poets to repeat similar subject matter, I have to give credit to Dawn’s force for her particular set of concerns. Overall, I gotta say: it’s a pretty good book.

    Happy reading!