Paired poems’ context crucial

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This article was published 24/06/2023 (1180 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

T. Liem’s second collection, Slows: Twice (Coach House, 96 pages, $24), examines identity through pairs of poems. The way the poems are structured and ordered and their relation to one another have the effect of emphasizing the pleasures and possibilities of unanswered questions.

The poems are paired so they recontextualize one another. For example, the two poems called Advice each take up the theme of cosmic punishment in such a way that they unsettle one another. In the first poem, Liem considers punishment as self-imposed: “It’s hard to look back,” they write, “That’s easy punishment./ Harder to face what looks back at you.” In the second poem, though, they argue that what we see as punishment is a harmful framework. With this refusal to centre the narrative that punishment is in some way just, the speaker opens the possibility of finding pleasure in re-encountering oneself.

“(I)t is a learning process/ to trape tenderness around our questions,” they write in the collection’s hinging poem, The Second Half Folds in on Itself. This poem stands out in the collection, both because it’s the book’s only long poem and because its pair is its own second half. The way the end of this poem recapitulates the beginning suggests that one’s identity is, indeed, an unresolvable question.

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In their collaborative collection The Suspect We (Palimpsest Press, 256 pages, $25) Roxanna Bennett and Shane Neilson open an essential pandemic conversation, one that centres disabled, mad and neurodivergent people, their survival and their webs of care. Each poem is signed by either — or, rarely, both — of the writers, and the collection is structured so that it takes the rhythm of a long-standing conversation that resists the shame imposed by the “(n)ot us” of the “able bodied given.”

The breadth of Bennett and Neilson’s critiques and expertises — which range from capitalism to literary culture to empire to love and beyond — reach their apotheosis with the Canadian response to the COVID-19 pandemic. Holding all these critiques together is the theme of care, or lack of care: “How many people/ have to die before we realize/ that no amount of money// is worth a single life,” writes Bennett in Empire of Unkindness.

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From the opening poems in her debut collection Rebellion Box (Radiant, 80 pages, $20), Hollay Ghadery writes into the fault lines where lives and experiences are divided. In It won’t stop, but it will be divided into four stages, the speaker names stages that imply a trajectory toward the internal resolution of a loss to structure a poem that moves between the poles of a modern breakup, the story of Count Dracula and the possible historical origins of the story. It’s not only that the story will be divided, but so too will the self: “More or less// a better looking version of yourself. They’re on the street/ laughing and it’s more or less/ ruthless// but it won’t stop. You will be divided.”

In the collection’s title poem, the image of the rebellion box — which is a tiny box political prisoners of the Upper Canada Rebellion of 1837 made of stove wood in order to pass the time and keep themselves focused — becomes a satisfying metaphor for writing. In this poem, written as a letter from Joseph Gould, one such prisoner, to his love interest’s mother: “Ask your husband about the honey bees,” the poem opens, and then procedes to move between the speaker’s present and his memories until the two come together: “I write to avoid hurt, boredom — being forgotten (…) You may// remember the summer we cleared your husband’s land. May came hard, and the bees came early. I was stung twice. It hurt, but Mary was in blue, and it was something else to think about.”

This conclusion implies that writing, like carving a rebellion box, like seeing one’s love, might not cure the pain, but it remains unconsumed by it.

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Poetry columnist melanie brannagan frederiksen is a Winnipeg writer and critic.