sophie anne edwards, A Mouth of Vowels

 

59. The baby rolls her head unevenly around the cervix. The mother ties her palms to a flock of birds feeding on burnt orange ash berries. If the cervix is a half-moon, will the baby be a girl? The midwife measures the cervix with the sound of an opening wing. If the midwife’s fingers span the width of a cervix, will blackbirds fly out of the pic? Will the pastry sprout o’s? the fingers of the midwife spreading open a cervix voice a loosening of questions.

The debut novel by sophie anne edwards, A Mouth of Vowels (Toronto ON: Guernica Editions, 2025), published through Stuart Ross’ 1366 Books, is a book that begins and opens with silence. It begins with an empty page, with a single footnote set at the bottom. The book begins with silence, offering footnotes to that silence on every page, a silence that offers shades and shapes and faded text in the main body of the page, until one realizes that the narrative sits in the footnotes themselves. “There are twenty-two steps from the yellow bedroom to the front door. The light under the door of the blue bedroom is a red fire. If his words craw like worms under her skin,” offers footnote thirty-two, on page twenty-three of the book, “will a cake rise when a hunter knocks on a door?” With more than four hundred footnotes in total across one hundred and sixty pages, the narrative of the book unfolds, unfurls, as slowly and as gracefully from dark to light as dawn, offering a slant and an undercurrent of violence and dark possibility. As footnote one hundred and eighty one writes, half-way through: “Each morning she blows on the baby’s stomach to release the worms. The worms she has gathered have spread from her skin to the baby. The baby’s fluttering hands spin strings of light that float around her mother’s head, a cocoon.” Writing a narrator through pregnancy and birth through such deep interiority, this is a book of sounds and slow movement, a book set in the margins, offering such gradual accumulation. After a while, the narrative-through-footnotes offers a kind of outline around the hints of an unseen centre, that perpetual silence, as a clear shape begins to emerge.

Following her full-length poetry debut, Conversations with the Kagawong River (Vancouver BC: Talonbooks, 2024) [see my review of such here], there’s something far more lyric across A Mouth of Vowels, certainly far more than the poetic study of her river assemblage. There’s something of A Mouth of Vowels almost comparable to Sheila Watson’s classic novel The Double Hook (1959) for a requirement to reread, to attempt to catch what one might have missed on first reading, including hints of violence that finally can’t not be seen (again, like Watson). As footnote number three hundred and thirty-one offers: “Sometimes there are no answers. The answer is worse than the bullets, which are his fingers. Sometimes a baby should not be born where it germinated.” This is a remarkable book, and there is such a density to edward’s text, and a narrative composed somehow simultaneously straightforward and slant, all of which will reward the attentive reader.

80. Are steps toward a door the baby’s cries? Are steps away from a door the mother’s mouth? Twelve steps forward are a flock of birds. The sudden uplifting of wings from the ash tree is a heart. The feet at the door lift and settle, lift and settle. A grouse runs three times around the base of the cedar tree. She tucks the baby’s cries, which have startled the grouse, into the pastry. Her heart thrums in her throat. Her throat may be a grouse or the flight of birds. Twelve steps backward are a closed throat.
81. Nine months of gestation sometimes carries the same scent as wings thrumming across the sky.
82. The door is a knocking against the hand.