Autism poems brutally honest

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This article was published 24/12/2016 (3549 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Angeline Schellenberg’s Tell Them It Was Mozart (Brick, 124 pages, $20) concerns raising two children on the autism spectrum. Winnipeg’s Schellenberg takes a brutal, honest, unsentimental approach (no Hallmark moments here) but still finds joy and humour in unlikely places.

One poem lists medication side effects, each line a new medication meant to treat the side effect of the previous medication. The absurdity of such a cycle is darkly humorous while remaining a stark reminder of the anxiety (how the mind runs in its own cycles) that requires its own treatment, never possible to fully complete.

“I’m sorry — / when you jumped / onto the sofa and knocked the empty / picture frame / onto your sleeping / sister’s fragile skull — / that just for one second, / I loved her better.”

You don’t need an autistic child to comprehend the terrifying banality of this sort of everyday despair.

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Barking & Biting: The Poetry of Sina Queyras, edited by Erin Wunker (Wilfrid Laurier, 68 pages, $19), argues for Queyras as a central figure in Canadian poetic culture owing to her outspokenness, editorship of the online journal Lemon Hound, and exceptional writing.

Wunker positions Queyras as a figure crossing between lyric and conceptual poetry, who structures her poems using both emotional expression and detached philosophizing.

Ultimately, arguments about Queyras will rise and fall, as they will with all poets, while the work remains. Wunker’s selection misses a few favourites but presents a strong, diverse grouping of poems that showcases Queyras’s visceral and intellectual force.

From pure, brutal imagery (“Dead babies / line the cellar / stairs”) to less straightforward juxtapositions (“If you are still here, present and peel, dandelion and lemon hound”), Queyras’s work displays fierce intelligence and boundless curiosity in startling, spinning lines.

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Kate Sutherland’s How to Draw a Rhinoceros (BookThug, 84 pages, $18) meditates on western encounters with the rhinoceros, to think through and sigh over the sad history of how it has been romanticized and exploited.

Often, Sutherland pulls lines from source texts (earlier scientific and literary investigations of the rhinoceros) and lays them side by side to display the absurd ways that they conflict: “It will kill with licking / and by the roughness of its tongue / lay bare the bones / No animal near its size has so soft a tongue / it feels like passing the hand over velvet.”

The collection testifies ultimately to the absolute incomprehensibility of the rhinoceros — like everything in nature, it exceeds human concepts and is endangered through the projection of human desires.

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Nicole Markotic’s whelmed (Coach House Books, 104 pages, $19) offers an irregular dictionary of new terms the poet has created by chopping off the prefixes of words. These strange yet familiar “words” are defined in odd and often fun ways: we’re told that “handed” is “reptilian baseball” and “ghast” is “antique ghosts, for sure!”

At the heart of these poems is sheer joy in language: run your tongue over “low-church viations and viancies. quibbling for England, for the back alley, for the misled moose.”

Taking hold of words as if they were physical things, breaking them down and reconstructing them, Markotic has fashioned beautiful trinkets for your mental china cabinet.

Winnipeg English professor Jonathan Ball (@jonathanballcom) lives onlineat www.JonathanBall.com, where he writes about writing the wrong way.