Divergent classics inspire dark debut

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This article was published 22/09/2018 (2876 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Noah Wareness’s Real Is the Word They Use to Contain Us (Biblioasis, 112 pages, $19) is a singular work — quite simply, there is no comparable Canadian book of poetry.

The poems range widely in style, framed by a bizarre reimagining of the story of The Velveteen Rabbit by Margery Williams, a children’s book from 1922 about a toy that wished to become real.

Wareness’s second, strange, contrasting touchstone from the 1920s is the nightmarish, hopeless horror of H.P. Lovecraft. In a child’s bedroom, a stuffed/taxidermied rabbit and the gun that killed it debate the value of the concept of being “real.”

Poems interspersed between this story amplify its themes through complex, grim imagery: “when wasps get trapped / halfway in the grain of the floorboards / the sound of their wings makes a prism.”

Elsewhere, we read that “the non-human world has never been mute at all, but only silent by custom; and the words of its speech are called by humans monsters.”

One of the strangest, most unique and more brilliant poetry debuts in Canadian history.

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Katherena Vermette’s river woman (Anansi, 100 pages, $20) “celebrates love… as a force of reclamation and repair in times of trauma.”

This trauma is often the trauma of colonial action: “we are not a part of your mosaic / we are the mortar that glues you together / we are the foundation on which you adhere / we are the earth you are hurting.”

Vermette also celebrates the pleasure of learning Anishnaabemowin: “I remember / words as / intangible as / dreams / so real / at night / but I can’t quite / grasp them / in the day.”

Vermette’s new collection is a strong followup to her Governor General’s Award-winning debut, 2012’s North End Love Songs.

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Paul Vermeersch’s Self-Defence for the Brave and Happy (ECW/Misfit, 76 pages, $19) considers the strange, dark future we might make for ourselves.

“You must carry only plastic laser guns to battle. / Point your plastic laser gun and make the sound / with your lips. The most dangerous weapon there is / is the one that’s fun to use.”

The book’s image system, rooted in pop-culture imaginings of the far future, produces an engaging and odd blend of silly campiness and stark sadness: “Every day, there are new ways / of being wrong.”

The poems circle this idea of futility in progress to suggest that, as spectacular as our future might be, in the end we have no future: “Dystopias are scary because you see / people struggling, but Utopias are scarier / because you see that they stopped.”

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Jason Freure’s Everyone Rides the Bus in a City of Losers (ECW/Misfit, 100 pages, $19) attempts, at once, a celebration and damnation of Montreal, and the poems obsess over these sorts of twinned, contrasting impulses: “Every evening at eight I turn my eyes to the cross and each time I hope that the Pope has died.”

Freure’s debut delves into the sense that the city has failed you, then labelled you as the failure. “The bottom of the bottomless coffee is full of goblins and the ends of things.”

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