Trickster’s literary adventure stunning
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Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 28/04/2018 (3063 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.
Joshua Whitehead’s Full-Metal Indigiqueer (Talonbooks, 120 pages, $19) follows a trickster figure named Zoa through popular literary works in order to meld such disparate influences as the Western poetic canon, traditional Indigenous storytelling, cyberpunk, horror film and pop culture — with nods to Shakespeare, Peter Pan, Leatherface, RuPaul and others.
Whitehead manages this mess of material with confidence: “‘m’boy, i am a leatherface’ / my face is a mass proliferation of masks / (that you sewed onto my head / to say: this is you.” A constant tension between the demands of the body and the dissociation of poetry, both desired and despised, produces a furious need to keep insisting on the self’s presence.
“i have to stop myself / remember that my people are dying / during every metaphor in this poem,” writes Whitehead through Zoa. The complex structure and crashing of disparate elements threatens to overwhelm the reader, but Whitehead keeps steady command of both material and mission (“this ndn, too, fights back / semtex semen syntax”) to produce a stunning, startling debut. (His first work of fiction, Jonny Appleseed, was released earlier this month.)
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Lesley Belleau’s Indianland (Arbeiter Ring, 132 pages, $19) ranges poems across time, from first contact to present day — to consider broad themes of birth and sex alongside a more narrow focus on historical tragedies such as residential schools, forced sterilizations and missing and murdered Indigenous women.
Belleau’s lines sing straight and taut: “take your drum and cradle it like a baby / a spiritchild taken / your womb billowed, / emptied / small cradleboards placed in a corner for the / next generation / for the ghost babies / that scream like the taken / that cry against the flesh of these trees / that scream a song that no one hears.”
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Kai Cheng Thom’s A Place Called No Homeland (Arsenal Pulp, 84 pages, $15) blends fierce, furious poems like warning shots with calmer, more traditional meditations on marginalization, and how violence, sex, and skin mingle on a marked body.
Most times Thom is enraged, defiant: “violence is pretty a funny thing / isn’t it? / go ahead and laugh. / laugh.” At other times, Thom is calm, sad, maybe even scared, dropping the pose.
The most affecting poem, book fetish, notes that “i hoard my books, / hide them in unconventional places … / … a leftover reflex / from childhood, when my parents would take them / away to punish me, or my sister would rip them up / just to see me cry. that worked better than hitting me, they said, / because i cared more about my books that i cared about my body.”
Vivid, lush and strutting, Thom’s poems careen across the page.
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Joe Fiorito’s City Poems (Exile, 104 pages, $19) draws on his time as a Toronto newspaper columnist, offering small, minimalist poems that use a few sharp images to paint a portrait or scene from the poor, drug-addled, disaffected pockets in the cityscape.
The most shocking and depressing aspect of the book is how familiar so much of it seems. One couplet — “They said I had a gun; it was a phone. / I clutched my guts and died alone.” — fits right into our current news cycle, although it’s about another incident.
So many of the poems work that way. They may be about specific people, specific places, specific moments, but there is an everywhereness to them, a sense that this is what happens and keeps happening everywhere everyday.
Winnipeg English professor Jonathan Ball (@jonathanballcom) lives online at jonathanball.com, where he writes about writing the wrong way.
