Memory’s hauntings permeate words, space

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This article was published 25/05/2024 (812 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

From its opening poem, Ellen Chang-Richardson’s debut Blood Belies (Wolsak and Wynn/Buckrider, 140 pages, $22) challenges the very limits and possibilities of the page. This poem, base notes hit the edge of a high, reads “like:” followed by groupings of punctuation arranged across the page, which has the effect of emphasizing its whiteness and inscrutability.

In resonate this, the end of which calls back to the first poem, Chang-Richardson intervenes in a number of documents pertaining to the Asian-Canadian experience, from the 1902 Sessional Paper No.54: Report of the Royal Commission on Chinese and Japanese Immigration to playground songs to newspaper articles from 2020. “We/ are built, heritage language/ whip lashed,” Chang-Richardson writes, before citing the history of the head tax on Chinese immigration.

This forms the background against which other exclusions take place: “Red Rover! Red Rover! Send Ellen right over!/ Chinese! Japanese! Dirty knees! Honk! Honk!” By juxtaposing these two playground chants, in addition to the way they render the second in greyscale, Chang-Richardson charts a map of memory’s hauntings.

In this singular collection, Chang-Richardson scores the page with line, punctuation and blank space to hold a range of experiences: family and national histories, racism, illness and injury. “But memory,// has a way// of skewing,” they write across three pages. The capacious way Chang-Richardson uses the page allows space for the skew as well as for possibility.

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The speaker in Joelle Barron’s second collection, Excerpts from a Burned Letter (Nightwood, 96 pages, $20) inhabits the queer edges of literary and cultural history. In these poems, Barron explores the way queer history has been obscured, including the ways in which her speaker has been complicit: “We read it to our children,/ censor each queer into strange,/ little acts of violence.” In addition, the speaker resists that erasure: “Death to oh my god, they were roommates.”

In the opening long poem, Barron begins on an uneasy note, poised between faith, grief, desire and self-discovery: “Arrived/ at Catholic sleepaway camp three months after the meningitis death/ of my sister, my throat full of grief-thirst that received/ no answering gulp.” Throughout this poem, which takes place in 2003, the contemporary speaker’s experience is braided with that of Benedetta of Vellano, a 17th-century nun.

In an aside, Barron writes “I didn’t know/ about Benedetta, or time, how it’s not really moving forward.” Although some of the poems are dated, Barron’s use of the epistolary form as the collection’s structuring element has the effect of holding time in suspension. This sense of timelessness is a truly extraordinary aspect of this collection, held in tension, as it is, with coming of age.

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In his latest collection, Teeth (Nightwood, 108 pages, $20), Dallas Hunt challenges the sorts of legibility the literary world demands: “just imagine! if you were outside the bounds of legibility, especially by literary communities. where you didn’t have to write about trauma and moose meat and berries,” he writes in there’s a poem for everyone.

In the opening long poem, ankwacas, Hunt establishes a moment when he and his friend encounter a dead squirrel, and his friend asks if he would like to say something: “i laugh/ at the presumed/ implication that,/ because i am/ cree, i will have/ a prayer nested/ in my pocket.” This moment moves from a joke between friends to mark a rupture: “i have none of this/ in my lack,/ [… .]/ in shame i ask/ would ankwacas/ do this for me?”

The collection is structured in three parts — squirrel, otter and black bear. With these structural choices, as well as with his linguistic choices, Hunt provides the shape of the legibility he resists. Within this shape, however, Hunt’s direct language and vivid sense of image make their own demands in opposition to the ruptures imposed by colonial demands, literary and otherwise: “this is not the way/ of our elders/ but we make do/ we make/ use of the everyday/ as it makes use/ of us.”

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