Tag: Writing

“these hard little dreams”: Nostalgia, Heartbreak, and Resilience in Sarah Ens’s The World is Mostly Sky

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Sarah Ens’s debut poetry book, The World is Mostly Sky (2020) is a stunning collection full of vibrancy and teeming with tenderness. Each poem, like each tooth in the first poem, “By the Skin,” is a “hard little [dream]” given to readers in the “square white envelopes’’ of each page (Ens 3).  The World is Mostly Sky is composed of three sections: “Silos,”“Wuthering: A Comprehensive Guide,” and “Powerful Millennials on The California Freeway.” In these three sections, Ens’s poetry first soars through childhood nostalgia and anguish, dives through thick waters of heartbreak and longing, and finally crashes up through clouds of young adulthood with ice coffees raised like chalices to the sky. 

Sarah Ens’ The World Is Mostly Sky

The first section, “Silos,” orbits around themes of change, loss of innocence, and growing up. In “World We Rise,” three children witness a teen destroying a bird’s nest, resulting in the death of the baby chicks. In this moment, the children witness death and loss simultaneously. The mother bird “frantic / at the hydro / wire… shrieks” (10) at the loss of her babies while the poem’s speaker reflects, “did she / think she / could still / save them / & us” (11). “Silos” moves into a meditation on growing older in “Choreography of Bounding,” wherein the play of two sisters concludes with the elder sister, the poem’s speaker, stating “the choreography / of our bounding / too obvious, / & none of it real” (15). This moment, while saddening to the sister, whose face “slump[s]” (15), is also a moment of growth and maturing as the poem’s last words “before flight” (16) signify reaching for the outer world of adulthood. “Straddled” and “The Sacredness of Sleepovers” portray a darker side to growing older: the imposition of sexuality on young girls. In “Straddled,” the speaker sees girls that “straddled everything” in posters “leaning over bikes” (17) while in “The Sacredness of Sleepovers” the speaker becomes the confidant of a friend who was “touched… when [she was] just a kid” (18). “Silos” concludes with “I Promised No More Poems About the Moon,” a poem of softness and vulnerability and searching for meaning in “footprints in the field… & the faded moon” (28).

The middle section, “Wuthering: A Comprehensive Guide,” deals with love and loss, heartbreak, and longing. In “Early February & He Built Her a Nest,” a gannet falls in love with a stone bird, evoking Ovid’s Pygmalion myth in a fresh way. The bird “shape[s] her beds of seaweed, twigs & dirt” (31) despite her inanimacy. The poem “Wuthering: A Comprehensive Guide” captures falling in and out of love through bodily and disembodied movement and response. This long poem begins with capturing the movements of love: 

The body burns

red in triangles, maps

Circles from your collarbone

to your chest, pokes breath to

your inner ear,

            seeks sun, craves water

& also you.

            The body unfurls. (53)

The breaking apart of the relationship is then embodied by “huge / & heavy silence, the inevitable / sinking” (58) followed by the eventual recovering and resilience of the body in the final stanza:

the body learns to dance whole 

Routines, cook soups & stews,

sleep soundly. (61)

This poem exemplifies the primary message of this section: the coexistence of love, heartbreak, and resiliency. 

In the final section, Ens showcases the beauty and power of millennial friendships. The prose poem, “Communion,” turns the mundane to spiritual, highlighting the sacred in moments of quiet friendship. Here, “ritual” is “dyeing each other’s hair in the bathroom… [searching] the carpet for claws the cat has shed” and “[sitting] around on the kitchen floor” drinking wine (75). In these moments, bonds are formed in the “telling[s]” and “teachings” between friends, and in the ritualistic chanting of “me too, me too” (75). The power in these friendships peaks in the second to last poem of the collection, “Powerful Millennials on The California Freeway,” which evokes the freedom of becoming lost in a moment, screaming to songs on the highway, and “waving iced coffees / to the sun” (89). With details like this, Ens reminds the reader of the title, The World is Mostly Sky, giving a final salute to hope and the serendipity of everyday life. Moving through memory to heartbreak to resilience, this is a debut collection you won’t want to miss. 

Work Cited

Ens, Sarah. The World is Mostly Sky. Turnstone Press, 2020. 

Review by Delane Just. Delane Just (she/her) lives in Saskatoon and is a current graduate student in the MFA in Writing program at the University of Saskatchewan. She has had work appear in In Medias Res and The University of Saskatchewan Undergraduate Research Journal.

Have Courage: A Review of The Long Walk by Jan Zwicky

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Engaging heart, mind, and body, Jan Zwicky’s collection of poems, The Long Walk (2016), invites readers on a journey through a lifetime of memories, intimate moments of personal loss, grief and joy fused with images of environmental and cultural devastation. Throughout, the poet skillfully weaves metaphor with detailed descriptions of nature and difficult subject matter to tell a story of strength and returning home. This is stated with elegant simplicity in “Haydn: The Unpublished Sonatas,” the last poem of the collection: 

A winter night after snow,

the long walk home, faint smudge of moon

…

And climbing the stairs at last, then,

and lighting the fire, 

and slowly, gently, taking off your coat (75)     

The poem “Courage,” offered as a prelude to the four sections that comprise the collection, reminds the reader that there is much yet to be done: “And now you know that it won’t turn out as it should, / that what you did was not enough” (8). The reader is urged to witness a world that enables environmental devastation and social injustice, and to have the courage to take action, however weary they might be: “Come, step closer to the edge then. You must look, heart. You must look” (8). The line foreshadows the need for the reader to brace themselves for the difficult subject matter that follows.

Jan Zwicky’s The Long Walk

The first section of the collection opens with “Into the Gap,” a poem that, along with the last poem in the collection, describes a return home through childhood memories detailed with images of an altered landscape. This poem flows like a song with a rhythm that captures the wind:

            To set out west, into the windbreak’s gap,

            and through the memory of the poplars roaring on the night

            your father died, the memory of the bench, not house, 

            he built high in their branches – you could look out

            to the first rise of the foothills – and the tunnels

            in the caraganas underneath, dog-

            haunted, their dry and scented shade. (15)

The land is explored through memories of ice-clotted mitts, mushrooms, fallen logs, wild strawberries and  events that took place years earlier. The last few lines of this poem incorporate a theme that is woven throughout the collection: “The body / knows before the mind collects itself: what held you / is what held you up, at every step, / to set out then / into the walk that keeps on walking. Coming home / without a roof” (17). The experience of coming home as a sense of completion is embodied through memories of the land despite, or perhaps because of, painful losses along the way. 

The second section uses the language of machinery, nature, and contamination to enable readers to feel in their bodies, in the way physical relationships are felt, the impacts of environmental destruction. The brutality of progress is captured through a powerful use of defamiliarization, exemplified in the poem “Near”: “that put the steel in our forearms… the axle of our will is seized” (30). The individual body is conflated with culture and nature; bodies, machines, even child soldiers are implicated as labour-saving practices that promote progress. At the end of the poem, Zwicky urge the reader to take action, to speak up, “Louder. Louder” (31). 

The third section continues the journey, incorporating sorrow and joy, personal and environmental transition, departure and violation. The poem that strikes me most in the collection is “No,” in memoriam to Aisha Ibrahim Duhulow, a young Somalian girl who had been raped and subsequently stoned to death to pay for the sin of being raped and reporting it. This poem again calls on the reader to witness the politicization of women’s bodies through the repetition of the words, “Because she was a woman”:

            Because she was a woman

            she’d been raped.

            Because she was a woman

            there was no excuse. (50)

As in the first three sections, the fourth has moments of beauty and joy that intersect with science, geographical distance, and environmental destruction. The world expands and contracts simultaneously and seamlessly, rendering inherent contradictions visible. 

This collection of beautifully written, pragmatic yet theoretical poems invites readers of diverse backgrounds and interests into a world of pain and joy, despair and hope. It invites them to open their hearts and join the writer on a journey home along life’s streams, gullies, and roadways. 

Work Cited

Zwicky, Jan. The Long Walk. University of Regina Press, 2016.

Review by Karen Wood. With roots in New Brunswick and Saskatchewan, Karen’s writing is fueled by a deeply held commitment to addressing gendered violence, informed by years of working in the community and conducting research in social work, education and health. New to the world of creative writing, she continues to be delighted by the extraordinary capacity of artistic activities to create space for social and political engagement, activism and change.

How Form Informs Content: Barbara Langhorst’s “Climate Change” from Restless White Fields

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The phrase “climate change” refers most obviously to global warming, the melting of polar ice caps, the erosion of the ozone layer, the impact of human industry on the environment. It makes sense to title a poem about catastrophe “Climate Change,” and Barbara Langhorst does not disappoint, though the environment is the family, and the catastrophe is the problem of motherhood.

book cover of Barbara Langhorst's Restless White Fields: Poems. A white image of grass with translucent writing of the title in large words in the center.
Barbara Langhorst’s Restless White Fields

“Climate Change” opens with the speaker addressing her daughter, then parallels her self-perceived failings as a mother to her own “radiant” mother (27). The parallel is quite literal—the past and present exist simultaneously on the page, with the speaker’s present on the left and her memory on the right, curving outwards and foreshadowing the later shapes and melding of present and memory into grief. 

On the following page, these two parallels are brought together through an italicised stanza that describes and enacts what the speaker is doing: reading. The italics indicate quotations from other written works (citations located at the back of Langhorst’s book), so that the poem shows us what the speaker reads even as she writes the poem. The tension between memory and the speaker distracting herself through reading is realized with the mention of “at her funeral,” when the reader sees that the memory of summer lake visits is overwhelmed by the presence of mosquitos at the mother’s funeral (28). The reluctance to face this other memory—or the desire to hold onto the happier memories—is indicated through word-spacing. A small stanza on the left could read “the last day / the inevitable / soggy three-day / holiday week / end—” and be talking about the speaker’s desire to remain at the lake as a child, or the desire to remain inside that memory (28). However, the lines “[the mosquitos overwhelming / at her funeral]” interrupt this stanza, claim space beside the end lines, so that the end of the holiday weekend becomes the funeral weekend (28). The square brackets around those lines further indicate the intrusion of thoughts the speaker would rather keep at bay. The poem then focuses on describing the mother as she was, but this is overrun by the mention of the speaker’s father, and the poem abruptly reverts to quoted lines; the speaker turns off her thoughts by returning to reading.

However, the thoughts return and the speaker soon tells us—hesitantly, haltingly, with many interruptions from other texts—that her mother was murdered, and that “three days the bodies lay,” with no other hint of her father (29). The following page retreats into quotes and memory, with the speaker berating herself and her family for forgetting their mother’s birthday, and the accompanying quotes relaying a mother-daughter experience that could have been shared by the speaker and her own mother (30). The layout of this page positions the speaker’s memory inside a cocoon of borrowed memories (quotes) that insulate the speaker’s regret. This regret is tied to how her mother died, and that it took so long to discover her death, but ensconced inside the mundane quotation-memories, this specific instance of disappointment speaks to the larger regret without facing it head-on.

Conversely, the next page is displayed in a circle, with quotes and the speaker’s thoughts interspersed together and a void left in the middle of the page (31). On this page, the poem can be read as italics, then non-italics, across the lines, or down either side and then the next, or even jumping between stanzas, so that the eye crosses over at each extra space between lines. The lack of direction in how to read this embodies the lack of direction experienced by the speaker, regarding both processing her grief and reconciling her ‘failures’ as a mother with her ‘failures’ as a daughter. The circle implies the cyclical nature of grief and trauma, while existing as a gaping hole, but the poem leads out of this in a descending line that continues straight down the page, offering a path out of grief and depression, while still allowing for that grief to be revisited and explored from other angles upon (re)readings.

While the end of the poem tells the reader that the speaker’s father is responsible for her mother’s murder, and that afterwards he killed himself too, the poem refuses to be defeated. The end circles back to the beginning, and returns to food and notions of nutrition, allowing room for her family climate to change again, for the better, while recognizing that that change has not occurred by the end of the poem.


Work Cited

Langhorst, Barbara. Restless White Fields. NeWest Press, 2012.

Essay by Allie McFarland, a bi, white settler originally from Calgary, AB on Treaty 7 territory. She holds an MFA in Writing from the University of Saskatchewan’s Department of English, where her thesis, a manuscript on eating disorders currently under consideration with multiple presses, was nominated for the College of Arts & Sciences Thesis Award. She is a co-founding editor of The Anti-Languorous Project, which publishes antilang. magazine, soundbite, Good Short Reviews, and the On Editing blog series. Her poetic suite “Lullaby” won the 2015 Dr. MacEwan Literary Arts Scholarship. She is also the author of the chapbook Marianne’s Daughters (Loft on EIGHTH, 2018). Allie currently runs a not-for-profit used bookstore on the unceded territories of the Lekwungen people of Vancouver Island. Disappearing in Reverse is her full-length debut.

Reconstructed Homeland: A Review of Bittersweet by Natasha Ramoutar

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* Please note: Quotes are formatted as closely as possible to the original text. There may be some discrepancies. 

Natasha Ramoutar’s debut poetry collection, Bittersweet (2020), reflects on a “reconstructed homeland” of the Indo-Guyanese diaspora and Scarborough, Ontario (Cover copy). Playful, inventive, and poignant, the artfully titled Bittersweet asserts poetic creation as a tool to explore the persistent aftertaste of racism, colonialism, and the self, while asking: “How do you unravel a history of trauma, that which is woven / within you?” (Ramoutar 72). 

Natasha Ramoutar’s Bittersweet

In answering this question, Ramoutar is like a cartographer, drawing maps from “home to home, from Toronto to Guyana to South Asia” (Cover copy). Meanwhile, Scarborough remains omnipresent as a “city of travellers” (32) within which Ramoutar weighs her life against history, like tea leaves, shifting “back and forth, / reading for the past instead of the future” (5):

Ask me where I come from and I will tell you: from the remnants of melted sugar cubes, from the rough grains ripped from stalks, from spices and saccharine scents, from a sweetness that mixes with cardamom hanging in the air. I come from a line of bittersweet women, women shrewd enough to empty pockets, to upturn kingdoms, to launch ships to war. On a journey long ago, I witnessed the origin point: fields of cane standing tall like soldiers on patrol. But cane is raw, just long stalks, unbridled and wild and free. (2)

What is striking in this poem, “Cartography I,” is the associative imagery between “remnants of melted sugar” and women. Both are “rough grains ripped from stalks,” reduced from “fields of cane standing tall like soldiers” to something bittersweet (2); pleasure tinged with suffering. This layering effect underscores Bittersweet as Ramoutar returns to different “origin points” to collect pieces of her homeland and explore her third-culture identity (2).

The back cover states that when writing Bittersweet, Ramoutar meditated on “memory—[personal and collective]—prompted by photographs, maps, language, and folklore.” The collection draws from these sources to evoke metaphor and renovate form. For instance, “All Inclusive” mimics an advertisement for an all-inclusive vacation package (34). The poem parallels “white-sand beaches, / places we can dub nirvana” with colonialism: “six days of escaping, / six days of imposing” (34). Ramoutar’s inventiveness with form, such as creating an all-inclusive vacation, a fire-starting guide (9), and recipe (67), subverts the positive multi-cultural identity of Scarborough, revealing it as problematic. She does this by taking familiar markers in western culture and defamiliarizing them to show their harmful nature. Most importantly, Ramoutar confronts readers from outside the Indo-Guyanese community with challenging subject matter, asking them to reflect inward and create something positive in the process. 

Whether it raises awareness of systemic racism or begins unravelling readers’ relationship with trauma, Bittersweet has something for everyone. While the audience for some poems is primarily those outside the Indo-Guyanese community, others speak directly to “diaspora babies” (13) who “walk on eggshells” (69) and are made to suppress their identities: “never add your own flavours. They’re not a good fit” (67). These poems share stories of resilience in marginalized communities by celebrating the parts of language, dance, cuisine, and history that are retained and reclaimed. These bits of collected memory blend with a constant yearning to know a home that was stolen, as exemplified in “Us Diaspora Babies, We Do Not Sleep”:

This boat, it rocks back and forth like a cradle on the Essequibo 

            River,

us diaspora babies swathed in red life jackets,

the steady shifting trying to lull us to dream.

[…]

This boat tries to comfort,

but us diaspora babies,

we do not sleep —

only dream with eyes wide open, 

grasping at the water of our homelands, 

droplets slipping through our fingers with each midsummer 

            breeze.

Us diaspora daughters, 

listening to our parents’ stories of the golden era 

of a far off youth.

We know of home through photographs and UN reports, 

but what of seeing with our own eyes?

What of divided states of being?

What of us diaspora babies, 

Us diaspora daughters,

exiled before birth? (13)

Bittersweet by Natasha Ramoutar is a “sugary syrup” (61) of sensory details with an aftertaste of racism and colonial violence. The poetics are clever, the form and content engaging, but the real reason to read Bittersweet is that it validates Indo-Guyanese diasporic experiences as being as true and important as any other. As Ramoutar unravels internalized trauma and explores her identity, readers are invited into a space where they can safely do the same. One must read the collection to reach Ramoutar’s conclusions, but rest assured, “it comes together / slowly” (72).

Works Cited

Ramoutar, Natasha. Bittersweet. Mawenzi House Publishers Ltd., 2020. 

Cover copy. Ramoutar, Natasha. Bittersweet. Mawenzi House Publishers Ltd., 2020.

Review by Aliza Prodaniuk. Aliza graduated from McMaster University with an honours BA in English and Cultural Studies. She secretly enjoys sci-fi and fantasy but will tell you she only reads literary fiction. She is currently creating and exploring in Dundas, Ontario, where her work dabbles in murder mystery, eco-fiction, and realistic fiction. Her writing has been published in various business, science and travel magazines/journals, with her most recent work appearing in the Canadian Journal for Medical Laboratory Sciences. She’s currently happy to have time to focus on her work while learning alongside other writers at the U of S. 

Interview with Lenard Monkman

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Özten Shebahkeget Interviews Lenard Monkman

Lenard Monkman, writer and associate producer with CBC Indigenous

Özten Shebahkeget: When did you begin to take writing seriously? And what motivated you to start?

Lenard Monkman: I didn’t take writing seriously until around March of 2015. I set it as one of my goals that year to become a better writer. That month, I started a personal blog just to get used to having a space for my writing, but also just to get into the habit of writing all of the time. Another thing that I started doing was putting out long Facebook statuses. I wanted to get into the habit of writing every day and getting used to having feedback from my online Facebook community. It was a good practice for me, and those long-winded Facebook statuses eventually became newspaper op-eds, which eventually became a job as a journalist. Truth is, I have always been a journalism nerd, I just needed to get used to writing every single day.

ÖS: What obstacles have you encountered as a writer? 

LM: If you take it from 2015, I would say that there haven’t been too many obstacles. At the beginning of that year, I went from barely being able to write a properly formatted email and typing very slowly, to being able to write 500 words in 5 minutes by August. Although now, when I look at the things that I was writing five years ago, it is hard to read because I can see how much I have improved since then. The best advice that I ever got from anyone was: if you want to become a writer then you need to pen to paper every day. I always thought about that and recognized that every single time that I write, it’s an opportunity to improve with each story and each sentence.

ÖS: You are a co-founder of Red Rising Magazine. Why was creating a literary magazine for and by Indigenous people important to you? 

LM: I wanted to get into producing media before we started Red Rising Magazine. It was definitely a collective effort to get it off the ground with a bunch of energetic, intelligent folks from Winnipeg. We went from not having a whole bunch of skills, to having all sorts of publishing related skills in just the first year. I think the main idea behind everything that we did was to give Indigenous writers and artists an unfiltered platform that existed outside of the traditional forms of media. The magazine became a place where many people that I know had their first opportunity to be published and it is something that I am proud of. Although I haven’t been with the collective for a couple of years now, I still believe there is a space for that type of work and would like to see it continue in one form or another.

ÖS: You have been a journalist with CBC since 2016. The Canadian media has always had such a profound impact in framing Indigenous stories, and storytelling is an integral aspect of Indigenous cultures. What do you feel are your responsibilities as an Indigenous journalist, and what have you learned from telling the stories of a vast array of Indigenous peoples in Canada?

LM: I think the biggest responsibility is to make sure that what I am doing is truthful and that people feel like they were accurately represented in the work that I have done. I haven’t done as much “accountability” type of journalism as much as I have done the “here are some Native people doing really cool things” type of journalism. I really want to use the mainstream media platform to try and boost our people’s presence and to highlight their successes. But I also strive to make sure that the reality of what our people go through is being heard in newsrooms like the CBC. What I have learned from talking to so many Indigenous peoples across the country over the years is that we are brilliant and that our cultures are diverse. I’ve also come to realize that so many of our struggles are similar from coast to coast. There are a lot of things that I continue to learn as the years go by, but getting a chance to talk to Indigenous people all over the country is easily the most enjoyable thing about my job.

ÖS: What are some of the books that have influenced you? 

LM: I always give credit to Indians Wear Red. The book spoke to my reality of what it was like growing up in Winnipeg’s inner-city in the 90’s-00’s. It really was a “light bulb moment” for me to understand that what I was seeing in my life was happening not just in my life, but everyone else in my community as well. The last chapter “What Can Be Done?” was also a call to action for me. I think that the more we are able to try and create changes within our communities, the less healing the next generation will have to do. Another book that I really like is Franz Fanon’s Black Skin, White Masks. There are a lot of really good psychological gems inside that book that are applicable to the Indigenous community.

ÖS: What do you write outside of journalism?

LM: I still love Facebook more than the other apps. It allows me to joke without feeling like I’m being judged. It allows me to write in long-form if I ever need to get a thought out. I also really just practiced everything that I could in terms of writing on that app. I also like to use Twitter, although it’s more of a professional space. Twitter has made me a better writer because I put a little bit of thought into trying to make those sentences a bit stronger.

ÖS: Where would you like your writing to go next?

LM: I feel like I have been thinking about this question for a couple years now. I try to improve with each story that I write. I also try to improve with each radio script, TV script and everything else that is journalism related. I have thought for a long time about whether or not I would like to write children’s books, graphic novels, fiction or nonfiction. I guess the biggest thing that stops me is feeling like I need to be an incredible writer before I actually start writing. Eventually I will settle on a subject, and hopefully I can dedicate enough time to sit down and hammer out something that is loosely based on some of the things that I have seen in my life.

*

Lenard Monkman is Anishinaabe from Lake Manitoba First Nation, Treaty 2 territory. He has been an associate producer with CBC Indigenous since 2016. In 2021, he received the Manitowapow Award from the Manitoba Book Awards for his contributions to the Indigenous writing community.

Özten Shebahkeget is a member of Northwest Angle 33 First Nation and an MFA candidate at the University of Saskatchewan. She grew up in Winnipeg’s North End and holds a BA in English from the University of Winnipeg. Her poetry has appeared recently in CV2, Prairie Fire and The Winnipeg Free Press.

Capturing the Magic in Honey

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*A note on the text: due to constrictions of WordPress, the excerpts from the text may not be formatted as they appear in the text. We did our best to format excerpts as close to the original as possible.

Honey. That viscous, golden-amber liquid produced by bees has been praised for centuries for its delicious taste as well as its medicinal (and sometimes magical) qualities. Many ancient cultures considered honey and milk acceptable gifts to the gods. It comes as no surprise then, that the poems and short prose in Amal El-Mohtar’s The Honey Month (2010) draw upon the sensuous and mythical qualities associated with the golden nectar.

Amal El-Mohtar’s The Honey Month

The Honey Month had its beginnings in a set of twenty-eight different types of honeys that had been given to El-Mohtar as a gift by a friend.  Inspired by this collection of exotic honeys, she set out writing poems or pieces of prose for each flavour of honey she tasted in the following month, preceded by short sections of sensory notes describing the smell, taste, and colour of each sample. Written in a journal-like format, each day has a new entry of honey-inspired poetry or prose to whet your sweet tooth. The pieces in this collection are dripping with language that excite the senses and expand on the sensory notes given at the beginning of each entry. They also pay homage to the mythical history of honey by telling tales of daring, lonely, and not-altogether-human women and the enchanted worlds they inhabit. El-Mohtar mixes honey with fairy-tale worlds so well that honey itself takes on magical qualities, as seen in “Raspberry Creamed Honey”:

‘Where, if you’ll pardon my asking,’ I cleared my throat slightly, ‘is the dawn?’

‘Being swallowed by the ogress,’ murmured the river. ‘She’s pulled it from me like a tablecloth, and I am bare and cold when I should be warm.’

‘Why now? The dawn has risen for every day of the ogress’ long life; why should she fancy a taste for it now?’

‘Why not?’ shrugged the river. ‘She’s an ogress; you’ll find they’re always hungry. Perhaps she ran out of raspberry creamed honey and thought the dawn an appropriate substitute.’ (31)

The poems and prose are laced with magic, injecting the otherworldly into their lines. The dream-like mood of these pieces transports the reader into new and intriguing worlds, while the sensory language helps ground them in real smells, sights, and tastes. The book itself is a work of art, with beautiful illustrations interspersed among the entries. The images reflect the written poems and prose in bewitching washes of vibrant colour that are as pleasing to the eye as El-Mohtar’s words are to the mind.

With Rhysling Awards for Best Short Poem in 2009, 2011, and 2014 under her belt, El-Mohtar’s skill as a poet is well recognized. In fact, the poem that won the 2011 award, “Peach Creamed Honey,” is in The Honey Month. Anyone who has read El-Mohtar’s other poetry will be familiar with the speculative lens through which she frequently writes, and this collection is no exception. The book oozes with magic, mystery, and intrigue and will leave you guessing at what has truly taken place at the end of each work of prose and poetry.

The tone of El-Mohtar’s magical pieces oscillate between whimsical and coy and something far more oblique and dangerous. The more cheerful poems and short fiction use the motif of honey and sweetness to emphasize pleasure. In “Peach Creamed Honey,” the poem is lighthearted, a tale of playful young lovers under the summer heat:

I’ll see her lick her lips, and I’ll see her bite a frown,

and I’ll see how she’ll hesitate, look from me up to the town

and back, and she’ll swallow, and she’ll say: ‘can I try?’

and I’ll offer like a gentleman, won’t even hold her eye.

Because she’ll have to close them, see. She’ll have to moan a bit.

and it’s when she isn’t looking

when she’s sighing fit to cry,

that I’ll lick the loving from her,

that I’ll taste the peaches on her

that I’ll drink the honey from her

suck the sweet of her surprise. (17)

Other pieces hint at the darker side of these charmed, magical worlds. Often, these depict the destruction of a naïve or lonely young woman who ignores her gut feelings or the advice of others, and ultimately meets their end. In such works, honey is like bait in a trap, luring girls in with surface-level beauty or pleasure before they finally succumb to hidden danger. These are cautionary tales about the magical intoxication these honeys can bring. “Lemon Creamed Honey” is one of these bleaker tales:

The lemon road is long, the lemon road is wide,

The lemon road is pleasant maid-sung song;

The lemon road will have you for its bride.

When first I ventured my feet from the salt-stitched tide,

They told me I was foolish, told me I was wrong.

‘The lemon road is long, the lemon road is wide,

It will sour all your footsteps, sour you inside.

Stay here with the brine, with us, where you belong—

the lemon road will have you for its bride.’

I laughed at their warnings, but I couldn’t—though I tried—

put them from my thoughts while I walked myself along.

The lemon road is wide, the lemon road is wide,

and I felt myself pucker, felt a tightness in my side,

a frown on my lips, with the whisper growing strong:

the lemon road will have you for its bride. (25)

Whether it’s for the magic, delicious language, or beautiful layout, The Honey Month is the perfect book for anyone who likes a bit of magic and honey in their lives. This wide array of honey-inspired stories offers something different with each entry. It’s almost guaranteed that you won’t be bored, as Amal El-Mohtar is a master of sensory language and enchanting poetry and prose reminiscent of fairy tales. Read it like a sampling and enjoy your own honey month.

Work Cited

El-Mohtar, Amal. The Honey Month. Papaveria Press, 2010.

Review by Amanda Dawson. Amanda grew up in rural Alberta, Canada, where she spent her time reading books, stargazing, and searching for a door to the Faerie realm in the forest near her house. She is currently pursuing a MFA in Writing at the University of Saskatchewan.

“The souls are growing under the fields”: Allan Safarik’s Blood of Angels

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*Note on the text: because of constrictions of WordPress, poetry excerpts are formatted as closely as possible to the text, but discrepancies might appear.

Filled with evocative images, stunning beauty and violence, Allan Safarik’s Blood of Angels (2004) is a collection I would recommend to those who typically avoid poetry. With fifty years of experience, Safarik’s work is often surreal and imagistic, probes human complexity yet is accessible to a wide audience. Blood of Angels was written following his time as Writer-in-Residence in Humboldt, Saskatchewan, which included weekly sojourns to St. Peter’s Abbey in Muenster. Inspired by monastic life, there are poems about monks working the field and wracked by age, devotion and changing seasons, but also religious fervour and bloodshed. In one ten-page stretch, Safarik leaps from Napoleon’s invasion of Russia, to a gruesome “portrait of truce” in no-man’s-land, to elegizing a slain El Salvadoran Archbishop. Reading this collection reminded me of the eclectic conversations in Safarik’s creative writing class at St. Peter’s College. It showcases a curious mind, activated by the raw material all around him.

Book Cover of Allan Safarik's Blood of Angels. A photograph of a tree with the sun behind it, illuminating a field. Above is a faded angel wing with the words Blood of Angels in the wing.
Allan Safarik’s Blood of Angels

The first section, “The Harvest of Souls,” offsets austere reflection with surreal, even humorous insights. “The Sowing” asserts that “life turning lonely and small, depends / on a handful of dried seeds planted in time” (10). By contrast, in “New Year’s Resolution: St. Peter’s Abbey,” Safarik pictures himself as the “Mouse Man of Muenster,” chewing cream “and whole grain bread into a thick pap / before I feed the naked baby mice / with an eyedropper from the monk’s infirmary” (32). Safarik does not lack imagination and is clearly indebted to Imagism. “Blood of Angels” demonstrates his penchant for short, concrete lines:

Blood red

underneath white

grey-fringed clouds

evening piling up

in the western sky

sun peering above

the horizon like

a half-cooked egg (12)

One could interpret clashing colours in the sky as symbolic of the clashing expressions of faith this collection portrays. Fittingly, the standout poem of this section is “Harvest of Souls” (27-28). With its neo-Beat repetition of “The souls,” everything from vegetables to flowers, geese, vacationers, transients, and departed ancestors are put on equal spiritual footing.

The second section, “The Holy Road,” counter-balances the peaceful and whimsical reflections that precede it. Warfare, paranoia, and persecutions populate these pages. A man muses on tribal conflict: “This war never really starts or ends / but like all wars simmers forever on the / hearths of storytellers and old scarred men” (“The Holy Road” 46). Safarik explores primeval impulses that consider “the letting of blood… a necessary purging” (“The Traveller At The Beginning and End of Time” 66). That some narratives of extremist violence blur together suggests there may be a few too many. Nevertheless, poems like “The Grave” (38), depicting a man digging his own grave, and “Cargo” (49-51), a chronicle of a colonial sea voyage gone awry, are both shocking and thought-provoking. A non-violent poem, “Things That Might Have Been,” imagines life around the Ganges River: “fragrant oranges in shaded grottoes / severed monkey hands in the bazaar / grey-headed nuns washing bodies” (63). Here, as elsewhere, Safarik layers image upon image, energetic as a child, deliberate as a bricklayer.

The third and final section, “Abbey Meditations,” is indeed meditative, set against a backdrop of seasonal change. In “Under The Apricot Moon,” Safarik slips away from “literary conversation about the poets / who moved out west and became movie stars” (73) into the refuge of a summer evening in Muenster. In “October Song,” he states:

Every tree in the shelter belt

a permanent resident

I represent the temporal

simply a visitor caught

up in a lifetime

reading and writing (80)

In “First Winter Storm,” while monks make “solemn music in ecclesiastic air,” Safarik struggles to write, “cannot empower the voices in my head / to speak to me about God, only poetry” (84). Throughout this section, spanning late-summer through winter, Safarik ponders what it means to be a West Coast writer in Saskatchewan, a “visitor” amongst disciples of God, a human in a holy landscape. But he avoids esoteric musings, worships at the altar of precise images: “dark-limbed spruce trees with hoary beards” (“Witness” 87) and “old monks in black robes” with “discarded onion-skin faces” (“Onion Skins” 88).

Blood of Angels may be inspired by sojourns to St. Peter’s Abbey, but it is no simple record. Flip to any page and one will find a mind transmuting regular experience into singular art. These poems, by an itinerant poet already “gone on / to the next accidental location” (“Epilogue” 95), evoke the universal in the particular, the spiritual in the secular.

Work Cited

Safarik, Allan. Blood of Angels. Thistledown Press, 2004.

Review by Brandon Fick. Born and raised in rural Saskatchewan, Brandon Fick writes realistic fiction (and some poetry) and reads a variety of genres, with particular interest in horror, war, and western novels. Brandon has been published in Polar Expressions, in medias res and The Society. He received a B.A. Honours (English) from the University of Saskatchewan and a Writing Diploma from St. Peter’s College, and was proud to be awarded the Reginald J.G. Bateman Memorial Scholarship in English and St. Thomas More College Creative Writing Scholarship, among others. Currently, he’s very grateful to be connecting with other writers in the MFA program at the U of S. 

Lisa Bird-Wilson and Poesis: Making the Absent Present in The Red Files

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The Red Files, Lisa Bird-Wilson’s 2016 poetry collection, deserves renewed attention for the honesty and grace with which it examines the truth of Indigenous intergenerational trauma and the healing possible in the course of reconciliation. The collection is artistically nuanced and skilful, and emotionally and psychologically complex. It continues to be relevant: socially, inviting our collective, on-going engagement in Canada’s truth and reconciliation process, and artistically, demonstrating poesis, the transformation of absence into presence.

The Red Files by Lisa Bird-Wilson,
Nightwood Editions, 2016

Family snapshots of relatives who attended residential schools sparked the book’s concept, in the context of the cultural genocide residential schools perpetrated. Of individuals lost, the National Centre for Truth and Reconciliation reckons “the number of children identified by name, as well as unnamed in death records, is about 4,200” (Mussa CBC.ca). Black-and-white institutional photos appear on the book’s covers while images Bird-Wilson found in Ottawa’s General Synod Archives of the Anglican Church of Canada provide the collection’s frame.

The literary practice of ekphrasis has come to mean verbal reflections on visual art materials. However, Bird-Wilson’s use of the rhetorical device is also reminiscent of the original Greek. According to Ruth Webb, “To compose an ekphrasis is to tell (phrazo) in full (ek)” (Webb 13). Bird-Wilson does so, with a tonal range the material merits, from the poignant to the pejorative to the possible, while evoking the inherent difficulty caused by cultural erasure.

The title of The Red Files refers to the Canadian Government’s naming system for documents related to residential schools. While the tragedy’s nameless, numbered students are the primary focus of Part One, Parts Two and Three wide-angle the lens to encompass the Canadian Government’s systemic genocide from first contact annihilation and starvation policies as in “Daybird” (“white men / standing like sterile hunters / atop mountains / of bleached buffalo skulls”) to the deliberate undermining of Indigenous cultural continuity through and beyond residential schools, to the Sixties Scoop, to, despite the Apology, “this / thing that is still in the doing” (61, “The Apology” 56). 

The Red Files was nominated for the Saskatchewan Book Awards’ poetry category in 2017. Herself a child of the Sixties Scoop—a government scheme begun in the 60s that removes Indigenous children from their mothers for adoption into non-Indigenous homes—Lisa Bird-Wilson is an award-winning Métis and nêhiyaw writer of prose and poetry widely published in Canadian literary journals and anthologies. Her artistic and leadership contributions, particularly to the Ânskohk Aboriginal Writers’ Circle and the Saskatchewan Aboriginal Literacy Network, garnered her the Saskatchewan Arts Board’s 2018 RBC Emerging Artist Award. Bird-Wilson’s fourth book and debut novel, Probably Ruby, is forthcoming in August 2021 through Doubleday Canada.

The Red Files, her first book of poetry, features a voice that finely modulates and models being “glad for speaking the truth” and variously uses bilingualism—Cree words appear amid English in titles and text—and multiple poetic forms: free verse, prose poem, and, in one notable example of found poem form, erasure (“Hundreds of Boys—A Response” 45).

In “The XXXX’s Situation,” Bird-Wilson exposes the Government’s cover-up of a residential school’s travesty by adding quotes and lineation to an archival letter to the Superintendent of Education, Indian Affairs, effectively co-opting a censored and redacted Government document under the guise of poetic erasure (46).

Regardless of form, her poetics organically serve her subject’s stories and themes, making the absent present and the invisible seen. As in “Girl with the Short Hair,” (“it’s in her bones to lope under the prairie sky … / … / for miles in all directions                now this is more like it    there   she   is,   the breathless one       the one with the wind-knotted hair” 16), the prose poem enacts, in part through assonance and rhythm, the transformation that recognition of identity confers. In poems such as this, Bird-Wilson’s poetry embodies what specialist in Aboriginal literature and creative writing, Warren Cariou, envisions in the spirit of reconciliation: that the verbal quality inherent in the act of poetic creation, regardless of the origin of the term poesis, moves “across the lines of class and race and epistemology toward something more elemental in us all …” (Cariou 32). 

The Red Files is vibrant with metaphor, rhythm, assonance, alliteration, pun, irony, enjambment, and imagery like “against his antler-velvet skin” (“‘Within the Circle of Civilized Conditions’” 29). In Bird-Wilson’s hands, these devices convey the tension between cultural invisibility and visibility, absence and presence, and the dignity of agency, love, spirit, voice. She even applies poetics to punctuation.

When rare punctuation is used, it emphasizes declarative colonial entitlement. For example, the sentence, “Saturday is his day to take / a boy.” opens “The Finest in the Dominion” (26). Enacting absence, many poems have no end-line (except the occasional em-dash) and no final punctuation, perhaps mirroring the continuing ramifications of cultural genocide and intergenerational trauma. In “The Apology,” for example, “the story endures— / a sucking wound” (57).

The collection’s launch occurred just after the Truth and Reconciliation Commission’s final December 2015 report with its ninety-four Calls to Action, including the Canadian Government’s still un-adopted UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples.

One achievement of The Red Files is that it dares to make palpable not only truths of the traumas Indigenous peoples experienced from genocide and attempted genocide, but it conveys the vulnerability of Bird-Wilson’s own questioning around the process of reconciliation. The collection continues to invite readers, both Indigenous and non-Indigenous, to experience parallel journeys. In “Sweep,” one of the final poems, the speaker says, “I have to live with the memory: …/ and the question/ what does it mean to be full of grace/ … and make things out of your hands” (75).

Works Cited:

Bird-Wilson, Lisa. The Red Files. Nightwood Editions, 2016.

Cariou, Warren. “Edgework: Indigenous Poetics as Re- Placement.” Indigenous Poetics in Canada, edited by Neal McLeod, Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 2014. 

Mussa, Idil. “Remembering Children Who Died at Residential Schools,” CBC News, 30 Sept. 2019, www.cbc.ca/news/canada/ottawa/remembering-children-who-died-at-residential-school-1.5302955.

Webb, Ruth. “Ekphrasis Ancient and Modern: The Invention of a Genre.” Word & Image, vol. 15, no. 1, Jan. 1999, pp. 7–18. DOI.org (Crossref), doi:10.1080/02666286.1999.10443970.

Susie Hammond is an emerging Seattle-based Canadian poet, and University of Saskatchewan MFA in Writing 2020 graduate. She is the 2019-2020 Edney Masters Scholar for International Understanding Through the Humanities and Fine Arts, with residencies from The Banff Centre, Catalonia’s Faber, and France’s Musée National de Préhistoire. She’s an editor, youth mentor, Community of Writers poetry alum, and Yes!
Poetry’s October 2020 Poet of the Month.

Interview with Allie McFarland

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Erin Hiebert interviews Allie McFarland

Allie McFarland, MFA in Writing alum and author of the novel Disappearing in Reverse

Allie McFarland is a bi, white settler originally from Calgary, AB on Treaty 7 territory. She holds an MFA in Writing from the University of Saskatchewan’s Department of English, and is a co-founding editor of The Anti-Languorous Project. Disappearing in Reverse is her full-length debut.

Erin Hiebert: What does your current literary practice look like? This could be day to day or how you conceive of and carry out larger projects.

Allie McFarland: It depends on the project, but typically I write short scenes to discover my characters, then figure out how those scenes work together, or what different orders of the scenes accomplish and what story(ies) they tell. For example, for my thesis, I knew the basic premise—a young, educated woman (older than a child) had an eating disorder—and I knew that I did not want to either appropriate the experience of an eating disorder or provide instructions on how to have one, but instead convey the severity of eating disorders and the impact they have beyond the afflicted person. For this, I knew I had to first establish the main character and her close relationships (so that readers would actually care). I wrote Part One more or less at the same time, but not chronologically—the first scene I actually wrote appears about half-way into Part One. Once I had a bunch of scenes written, I printed them out, moved them around, and looked for a flow that made sense for the progression of the story. I then had to edit out redundancies and fix references depending on where the scenes would now appear versus when I had written them. I basically followed this method for each subsequent ‘Part’ and then filled in narrative gaps at the end.

EH: What are the ongoing preoccupations that drive your work?

AM: Thematically, I always return to food and family/interpersonal relationships. Artistically, I have a drive toward merging form and content as closely as possible, which for me results in the collapsing of genre distinctions.

EH: While reading about your thesis work, I was particularly interested in this dismantling of genre and the hybrid nature of your novel(la). Can you speak towards this instinct? Is there a larger question or ethics at play, or is this what the project demanded?

As mentioned above, I strive for a merging of form and content, so that each demands the other (almost like a chicken/egg scenario). For me, poetry always feels closer to the character, like the barrier of narrative and the pretenses of sentences have been stripped away, so I find that characters experiencing emotional turmoil express themselves in poetic thought. This idea took form for me with a previous manuscript, an excerpt of which was published as a chapbook titled Marianne’s Daughters by Loft on Eighth. This manuscript follows three daughters as they each individually face personal crises and are brought together. Most is written in first person, but at the times where they are under the most stress, each daughter’s perspective shifts, so one daughter falls into second-person narration while her twin goes into third person and the youngest daughter falls into third-person verse. The changes in narration indicate the differences between the characters, while also pointing to their shared tendency to distance themselves from the established first-person narration. So, yes, my rejection of traditional form is a marker of my work generally, but also something that is required and dictated by the individual pieces I work on.

EH: Who are your literary parents, and how have they guided your work?

AM: Aritha van Herk is a mentor and friend whose work has guided my own. I love her books for their stories and attention to form and content. For example, her novel No Fixed Address begins as a traditional novel, but is then interrupted by “notes” that are written in second person and provide an outside perspective that engages with the thematic elements of the work while remaining inside the story—effectively creating a character for the reader to embody inside the text. She also writes outside of and in-between genres, with much of her work being considered ‘ficto-criticism’ or ‘geofictionaire’ (texts which collapse non-fiction into fiction and theory).

Barbara Langhorst is another mentor who helped in the first drafts of my thesis during the mentorship portion of the USask MFA, but she went above and beyond for me. After our official mentorship ended, Barbara agreed to keep reading drafts and giving me feedback right up to my defence. Not only is she a great editor, but she is also skilled in poetry and prose. It was amazing to work with someone who writes across genres. Her book of poetry, Restless White Fields, is beautiful and tragic, and the way the poems are displayed on the pages reflect the content inside them (i.e. a poem about grief is circular, repeating, progressing, but always looping back). And her fiction is funny! It deals with difficult family and social issues, but uses humour to do so. In Want, Delphine orders a new kitchen—the most beautiful kitchen she’s ever wanted—without telling her husband, and in the middle of agonising over her impulsiveness, her brother comes to town convinced that the world is ending and the only way to survive will be to live off the grid. The story shares a lot of the same themes that I work with, but Barbara Langhorst is funny, and that’s something I’m still working on.

Another literary parent, someone I’ve never met, is Robert Kroetsch. His words circle me—stories and poems ensnaring and teaching me. He was prolific, so he’s written something for every occasion. Want to learn how to incorporate different details to serve plot? Check out A Likely Story. Looking for hilarious magic realism? What the Crow Said. Or do you want something self-aware, somewhere between poetry and prose? The Hornbooks of Rita K. I love his books and essays because they are both enjoyable and informative—every book is a lesson on some aspect(s) of writing, but you don’t need to be a writer to delight in the stories or language.

EH: You are also the co-founder and editor of The Anti-Languorous Project which also has a hybrid nature with the various online, print, and sound editions. Can you talk a little bit about how these elements coalesce under the antilang banner? Are there distinct challenges for each or does it feel in service to the singular project?

AM: The ALP is at its heart a project, and so the hybrid nature makes sense. We want to engage with writing, reading, and publishing in as many diverse forms as we can, and, by using the technology available to us, share the Project with as many people as possible. Of course, each aspect has its own challenges, a main one for soundbite being that recorded works are more difficult to edit. More general challenges include time and financial restraints, but those are not specific to our project, except that our resources are spread across various mediums rather than being focused on a singular publication. However, now that we are more established, we are looking at ways to expand, so that The ALP becomes even more collaborative with different people involved in the different publications, broader types of writing being shared (such as our recent addition of Good. Short. Reviews), and with a reconfiguration of soundbite.

EH: Finally, any new projects you would like to tell us about?

AM: Not a new project, but an old one that I’ve been spending time with, is my novel(la) Disappearing in Reverse. This manuscript was published by the University of Calgary Press’s Brave and Brilliant series, and it is, in a lot of ways, the younger sister to Pretty Delicate—not that the characters or content are continuous, but stylistically. Written in short, first-person scenes, I compiled it in much the same way as I did my thesis: I wrote scenes and then figured out what order they went in and what needed to be added to flesh out the story. This process continued for a while, as I completely rearranged the scenes between drafts with the publisher and was guided in what needed to be added by my fabulous editor, Naomi Lewis. Disappearing in Reverse came out September 2020! [Editors’ note: You can find and buy Disappearing in Reverse here.]

Interview by Erin Hiebert, whose work has appeared online and in print. Her chapbook, Save Our Crowns, was published by Anstruther Press in 2018. She holds a BA in Creative Writing and is currently pursuing her MFA in poetry. She lives in Saskatoon.

Mapping Empty Space in Sarah de Leeuw’s Where It Hurts

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Canada is full of empty places. I was raised in one, a village smackdab in the longitudinal centre of the country and surrounded by dairy farms. My sense was, growing up, that the rest of the country consisted mostly of villages like mine, a feeling supported by the road trips my parents schlepped our family on each summer, east as far as Quebec City, west to visit my grandparents in Saskatoon, or more west and up, up, up to the Yukon. What I remember most about these trips is staring out the car window at hours-long stretches of yellow fields, brown fields, green forest, brown forest, and lots of rocks. I remember highway. And I remember hundreds of “nothing towns” flashing past. 

Sarah de Leeuw’s collection of essays Where It Hurts, 2017.

In Where It Hurts, Sarah de Leeuw stops to take stock of these places. Set in “throw-away spaces” like Belle Island, Ont. and Prince George, B.C., the essays refute suggestions of inconsequence and vacancy (33). Instead, vivid story-snapshots and powerful, pin-pointed detail document colossal loss and violence in a collection centred around the people preyed upon in Canada’s “empty” places.

As harrowing as this documentation may be, Where It Hurts asserts that injustice left unnamed is injustice made invisible, insidious, and unimportant. In “Soft Shouldered,” an essay about the thirty-three missing and murdered Indigenous women of Highway 16, de Leeuw urges that nothing and nowhere areas, like the side of a road outside a remote northern resource town, are exactly the places “worth looking closely at, if only to see what has disappeared, what is missing” (73).

Where It Hurts implicates the reader directly in the text. Whether employing an intimate, second-person point-of-view or addressing a “you” whose subject ranges from ex-husband to Oma, de Leeuw denies the reader the role of bystander. “Take off your undershirt, sweat-stained from almost four hours of snowshoeing along the Skeena River,” begins “Aesop” (91). “Think of any northern city with mills at its heart,” comes the instruction in “Quick-quick. Slow. Slow” (67). “You hurt in places you didn’t know could exist,” aches the collection’s opening, title essay (28).

Each essay is deeply rooted in space and time, from the last row of the shag-carpeted movie theatre during Terrace, B.C.’s biennial film festival, to “the family Y on a Tuesday night, 7:30 p.m. sharp during the high months of winter” in Prince George (63). This positioning works to both map the contents of “empty” locations and use landscape as a visible symbol of unseen turmoil. In “Belle Island Owls,” the end of de Leeuw’s marriage is tied to Belle Park’s landfill which leaks toxins into the surrounding rivers and lakes. “Seven in 1980” connects the eruption of Mount St. Helens to the murders of eleven children by Canadian serial killer Clifford Olson. The asbestos mine in Cassiar, B.C. is the backdrop to the young women whose bodies are “pulled under the currents of northern rivers” in “What Fills Our Lungs” (60). By linking physical geography with de Leeuw’s experiences and observations, Where It Hurts renders abstractions of grief and cruelty grimly tangible.

In the title essay “Where It Hurts,” de Leeuw focusses on “all the strange truths people keep hidden inside them” (8). Flashing through a series of painful anecdotes, the essay exposes some of these truths: “up in the reserves,” boys hang themselves with garden hoses; a young mother nervously allows a stranger named Cowboy to hold her newborn and then, years later, finds Cowboy’s obituary connected to an article on women found murdered along the Highway of Tears; three men in Terrace, B.C., assault, rob, and set on fire an intoxicated homeless man. Uncovering these stories does not bring healing, but it does demand that we stop and take stock of the suffering.

Occasionally, the essays’ disparate images and anecdotes struggle to coalesce into fully realized metaphor, but this collection is more interested in finding and naming what’s been lost in Canada’s forgotten places than interpreting those losses or suggesting solutions. In “Soft Shouldered,” de Leeuw writes, “the sparseness of findings and inquiries has resulted in almost nothing and so nothing has been circulated…So begin with me at the edge. That borderland where pavement ends and soft shoulder begins” (72). 

Where It Hurts is at times brutal in its refusal to look away. However, by studying the toxins seeping from landfills scabbed over, by pulling over to the side of the highway, by noticing the fire and the “smoke hanging in the air containing fragments of a man who has burned to death,” the essays show how in isolated, overlooked spaces, people are similarly ignored and erased (100). With precise and potent essays, Where It Hurts memorializes those who have disappeared too soon from the landscapes they considered home.

Review by Sarah Ens, co-editor of the RVRB. A poet and essayist, her work has appeared in Poetry Is Dead, Sad Mag, Room Magazine, and Arc Poetry Magazine. In 2019, she won The New Quarterly’s Edna Staebler Personal Essay Contest. Her debut collection of poetry, The World Is Mostly Sky, was released with Turnstone Press in Spring 2020.