Laura Kolbe, The Decadent Movement

 

TEACHING SPEECH

Saying yes to no and yes to yes to
the baby boy so many times a day
it’s like a people’s protest chant gone non-
electric harboring a claim belonged
to everyone who cares, we care, we crawl
outside and spy more like to point and yes
at with a name. What do you call the fence
around a tree? Who is the life you seek
when indexing the noon moon’s matte navel,
gray and nervous, and tell her wait for night?
To mother is a power ever to be
repeating, peat-cut to provide a weight
of burnable goods by cons replaced,
a turf, a moniker, another yes.

The latest from New York City-based “physician, medical ethicist, and writer” Laura Kolbe [see her '12 or 20 questions' interview here] is the collection The Decadent Movement (Pittsburgh PA: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2026), following on the heels of her full-length debut, Little Pharma (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2021), both included in the Pitt Poetry Series. There is quite a lineage of physicians who also publish poetry, from the American poet William Carlos Williams (1883-1963) to Guelph poet and editor Shane Neilson to Toronto poet Conor Mc Donnell [see my review of his 2020 debut here], among so many others, not to mention the 2022 full-length debut by poet and paramedic Candace de Taeye [see my review of such here]. Although my first thought is to wonder how Kolbe’s specific work as a medical ethicist impacts her literary writing. As well, one might cite, whether in comparison or counterpoint, an array of poet-lawyers (another high-end profession involving an extensive education and high-stress problem solving under strict ethical guidelines)—Toronto poet M. NourbeSe Philip, Winnipeg poet Chimwemwe Undi [see my review of her debut here] or Ottawa poet natalie hanna [see my review of her debut here]—able to articulate through literary work elements that their specific professions might not provide an outlet for. “There are places / you can’t go back, even if the site remains,” offers Kolbe, as part of the three-page “HINGE,” “even if the gift of you is storked against // the doorstep where we found you in / the footpath of an otherwise ordinary Tuesday, // day I took piano lessons as a child, / day of learning over and over to loosen // my shoulders so the sound came down / with greater say over piano or forte, from the whole // body’s choice and not just its outer limits.” Their literary work providing a valve, as it were, against immense pressure. All that being said, Kolbe writes of pregnancy and motherhood with striking, rich language, articulating the relationships between body and mind, body and body, with all the inherent complications and confusions. “Milk has ruled me as writing / has ruled me,” she writes, as part of the extended “WRITING AND NURSING,” a piece subtitled “August,” “in squat shudders / of pain with no proportion / to output, which can for all the buildings be a pinched / crude approximation of real storms like the shot blue dribbles / of wiper fluid from a car […].

“A bowl where dripped the blood I ushered / from myself, afraid that if I didn’t take it // out of me and store my life in secret, / it would be robbed so cunningly I’d forget // I’d once loved din, disorder.” As the back cover of The Decadent Movement offers, the collection is “a reverse-diary in poems that chronicles the first year of motherhood and nine months of pregnancy, from end to beginning,” reversing the temporal experience, allowing the perspective of everything that followed to hold sway across her narrative trajectory. Set with opening “Afterword,” the book is assembled in four untitled clusters of poems before final poem, “MINUS TIME,” a poem subtitled “March, and the infinite Before,” Kolbe writes of time, with most poems offering temporal subtitled markers, citing individual months, beginning at the end, with “January,” and in reverse order, back to the end, which is also the beginning. “Something in the state / of pregnancy made each life- / edge stand out brighter,” she writes, as part of the extended four-page flow of “ADDENDUM,” “chapter by old chapter / selvaged, thick, more keen / the recall—what each // desire had meant and through / what small channel of / planet’s opportunity had / stone flung up in waves.” There’s such a lovely meditative cadence to her pieces; such a lovely and carefully precise ease to her lines and phrases and line breaks, taking time even across its own urgency. I’m struck as well in how the poems exist in relation to each other, showcasing where she was within each particular moment, each period of progress or development, evolving backwards through the counterpoint of “A Mother Is a Paperweight” in the first half of the collection to “A Pregnant Woman Is a Scarecrow,” mid-way, and, finally, “A Pregnant Woman Is a Comet” near the end. A book that runs in reverse order towards enthusiasm from exhaustion, stepping with an exactness that acknowledges every moment of slow progress and limited capacity, shifting physically and within a marriage, creating this new member of their expanding family. Or, as the three-page poem “MARCH 25, 2023” offers, mid-way:

Let us defer
to astronomical spring, here and five days
old, however slipped with tired
and frozen things, and come out
with our babies and forsythia lambed
and then felined with half-frosted feet.
And under our coats keep
no layers we could not as easily
remove. A spring we, a local we,
smudged by the fan of clayish washout
on the park path. And so long
as we keep finding whatever little-brown-job
birds stir up our cerebral glossary
and incite a pen in the chore coat,
pecking at the dropped shoppings
as they do, the metronome of Saturdays
will stretch out its neck like a horse
for us from grain to lippy grain. 

The fat, smooth park in March
and the pocked, wee market:
like a ring resized down
and its comma of refunded tact.
Like any insistence on snug fit,
it wagers on the future as commodity
with some sap still, the truth. Just so
the park begins early on its angles
and dewpoints, cranking Avogadro’s number
for finding pale atoms in so much of mostly
just space. It’s cold, devices say.

I would also be curious to know elements of Kolbe’s compositional process, fully aware that the length and width of Dr. Williams’ poems were infamously shaped due to him composing quick first drafts on prescription pads. “What was this year—a long fear stretched / till it broke like taffy and caught itself up?” opens the first poem, “AFTERWORD,” a curious beginning well beyond the end.

 

Tanis MacDonald, Tall, Grass, Girl: poems

 

She larches the woods,
the pond sedges her. 

Back lane brome brushes
her ankle. 

Sun on asphalt,
dandelion juice, 

the iron tang of
a train whanging by at night. 

Wild licorice by the tracks
holds a creosote whiff. 

She breaks trail past
reed grass and twinflower, 

dogwood and stinging
nettle, sow thistle and willow. 

Aspen is and aspen does.
Tall mulleins nod her on her way. 

All those cattails, narrow leaves,
fat velvet, frogs croaking elm, elm, 

burr oak, burr oak, birch, balsam,
mountain ash, sandy shore, 

loon, moose, coyote, girl
crossing a field of foxtails. (“LAST SEEN WITH CROW”)

The latest from Southwestern Ontario poet, writer and editor Tanis MacDonald is Tall, Grass, Girl: poems (Toronto ON: Book*hug Press, 2026), an assemblage of lyric gestures, responses and examinations that stretch out into a kind of book-length lyric sentence. “Ancestors, I was shocked to hear / this craft of woolflesh,” begins the poem “CABLE STITCH,” “this coursing of / wonder past fear into making, news to me / who was encouraged to disregard / my mother’s body, to think of my / birth like a hatching, [.]” The poems stretch into an ongoingness, each piece set as a further step in a lyric document of witness, survival, agency and observation, centred around the author’s experiences through adoption and assault, and attempting to seek a place of safety, healing and survival. “A girl needs / a poem with seams / that can be let out.” MacDonald offers, within the four-page extended “GIRL, INTERRUPTED,” “A lune oughta make / room to go / mad as bald batshit.” In the end, we all need to feel safe, and the poems in this collection directly confront those experiences, amid the choices of others, to seek out how to feel safe once again. “The students are writing exams and I am / thinking of old Woody Allen jokes.” begins the poem “STARLINGS,” “Woody Allen is an old Woody Allen / joke. Woody Allen is an old rape story. // Do we tell old violences so we don’t / have to tell new ones?”

Through Tall, Grass, Girl, MacDonald speaks from the perspective of an adoptee, writing on ancestry, connections and what we might inherit, and what we might choose to inherit. “I was born then whirled away,” she writes, early in the short piece “ADOPTION REEL,” “the offspring to be named later.” A bit further on, writing: “I slipped from hand // to hand like a baby made of soap. / Enough, then. Start again. Accent // on first and third beats. I left / in a hurricane and crossed // the bridge over the fault line.” Both experiences can be entirely upending, the trauma of assault and a feeling of dislocation as an adopted person, and requiring very different approaches to navigating how best to feel grounded and safe from either, let alone both. Through the poems of Tall, Grass, Girl, MacDonald examines, as the back cover provides, “living in the space between belonging and non-belonging, between victimhood and bold survivorship. She makes no apologies and pulls no punches, taking us on a journey through adoption and assault, to subsequent escapes, and eventually, into full-feathered survivor joy.”

Set with prologue—“PROLOGUE: EVERY PURCHASE WILL HELP / A WOMAN OR GIRL IN NEED”—alongside seven cluster-sections of lyrics—“Trail,” “Stutter,” “Bravado Waltz,” “Smithereens,” “Dress Down,” “Girl Rampant” and “Selvage”—the poems connect as extended lyric accumulations: constructed via individual parts that assemble into poems, into sequences, into sections, into a book-length line. Plying shades of the first-person confessional, MacDonald’s poems articulate anger and frustration and escape; they articulate an agency that should be presumed, retaken when needed, and with absolutely no fucks left to give. “our heroine comes from a long line of barren women,” begins the poem “SMALL FIERCE FACT,” “sparky girls who / could and did but never reaped for they had not sown despite all // efforts, our heroine’s mother comes from a line of farm girls who / knew how it worked, but after her wedding wakes to July blood, // then August, and then she is next year country: no yield, no workforce, / without swell or glow, there’s no crying, normal is as abnormal does // when it does it every month for twelve years [.]”

 

12 or 20 (second series) questions with Emer O’Toole

Originally from the West of Ireland, Emer O’Toole [photo credit: Trevor Browne] teaches performance, theatre and Irish studies at Concordia University. Along with her impressive academic credentials and publications, she is the author of Girls Will Be Girls (Orion, 2015), a humorous and thoughtful take on gender as performance, now translated into French, Spanish, Italian, Swedish, Icelandic and Korean. O’Toole’s gleeful refusal to shave her body hair made her an internet star of the 2010s. More recently, she has published Contemporary Irish Theatre and Social Change: Activist Aesthetics (Routledge, 2024). She lives in Montréal, QC.

1 - How did your first book change your life? How does your most recent work compare to your previous? How does it feel different?

When Girls Will Be Girls came out in 2015, life was such a whirlwind that it’s difficult to know what to attribute to the book. I got a generous 2-title publishing deal from an imprint of Hachette and a tenure track job offer that involved moving to Canada at exactly the same time. I should probably have chosen one or the other. Instead, I thought – I’ll do everything! I’ll be an author, and a newspaper columnist, and write and deliver six new undergraduate courses, and take on graduate students, and edit an academic collection, and turn my recently completely PhD into journal articles. So, ill-advisedly, that’s what I did.

Visibility brought additional asks – everyone wanted me to be on their board or committee, there were public events and trips and media things, and just so many e-mails. It wasn’t sustainable; I ran myself into the ground. The year after Girls Will Be Girls was published, I experienced two big bereavements, and my partner dumped me. I shifted into first gear and stayed there for a while. The second book for Hachette never materialised. I tried, hard. But I was all out of things to say, and my writing voice felt forced.

Girls Will Be Girls remains the thing I’m proudest of from that intense period of my life. I re-read it about two years ago before a talk I gave on creative non-fiction, and I hope I won’t sound conceited if I say that I think it holds up. There’s stuff I’d write differently now, of course. There are parts I wish I’d researched more fully and personal sections that I’d choose not to share if I were doing it over again. The process was quite rushed, and that definitely shows in the writing. All the same, I think Girls Will Be Girls offers a way of thinking about gender that remains unusual and valuable in popular culture, and, even now, a decade later, I get e-mails from readers for whom it has been important. And Girls Will Be Girls is fun. I think it’s fun, anyway.

I wrote Girls Will Be Girls on a deadline with a significant advance from a major international publishing conglomerate and the promise of lots of media attention. I’d get home from the university in the evening, make dinner, and then write late into the night, with a readership in mind, and a team of professionals reading chapter drafts.

Comparatively, I wrote my novel Do It Yourself when my little boys were babies and toddlers. There was no deadline, no deal, no guarantee it would ever be read at all. It took seven years from the first words on the page to the book on shelves. It’s a very different beast. But it’s still fun. I think it’s fun, anyway.

2 - How did you come to non-fiction first, as opposed to, say, poetry or fiction?

I fell into it. I blogged from the early days of the internet, and found my writing voice that way. Near the end of my PhD, I contributed to a feminist group blog edited by Rhiannon Lucy Cosslet and Holly Baxter called The Vagenda – it was a whip-smart, hilarious platform by and for women who’d grown up with media instructing them in bad body image and casual misogyny. A piece I wrote for The Vagenda on body hair went viral, and my writing got picked up by The Guardian. From there, I got a great UK agent, who encouraged me to write a creative non-fiction feminist book. Voilà. Girls Will Be Girls was born.

Fiction is my first love and I’ve always wanted to write creatively. It feels magical to have a novel published, finally, in my 40s.

3 - How long does it take to start any particular writing project? Does your writing initially come quickly, or is it a slow process? Do first drafts appear looking close to their final shape, or does your work come out of copious notes?

Depends what I’m writing. With newspaper columns, I can comfortably go from having a pitch for an 800-word column accepted to having the column researched and written in about 8 hours. (Or I could before I had children!) With academic projects, the research takes a lot longer, of course – you need to compile a bibliography of what already exists in the field, then figure out what you’re going to study deeply, then actually do the reading, then write. I don’t enjoy the process of academic writing very much, although I do love having written something. With both columns and academic articles, I usually over-write and then chop back.

With creative non-fiction, a lot of it happens in my head before I sit down. I need less structure. I trust my voice to find the melody. Writing can be a flow-state activity for me – I look up at the clock and can’t believe I’ve spent hours on a few paragraphs, re-positioning petals, moving sprigs of baby’s breath about. I’ll tend to edit yesterday’s work, which warms me up, then write fresh stuff. I make editing less painful by transferring my darlings to a document entitled “snippets” rather than outright murdering them.

Fiction is alchemy, isn’t it? My characters appear from God knows where. Like, I can hear their voices yabbering away, and sometimes I have a pretty good visual on them. Then I have to figure out where they are, and what’s happening to them, and why they won’t leave me alone. Every piece of fiction I’ve published has gone through multiple drafts. Do It Yourself is a fifth draft and is unrecognisable from draft one.

4 - Where does a work of prose usually begin for you? Are you an author of short pieces that end up combining into a larger project, or are you working on a "book" from the very beginning?

I’m learning from these questions that I have multiple author personalities. I work in all these ways. Girls Will Be Girls was a book project from the outset. I thought Do It Yourself might be a novella, but it had other ideas. And I’m currently pulling some short stories together into a larger project.

5 - Are public readings part of or counter to your creative process? Are you the sort of writer who enjoys doing readings?

I’m a theatre kid.

6 - Do you have any theoretical concerns behind your writing? What kinds of questions are you trying to answer with your work? What do you even think the current questions are?

With Girls Will Be Girls, I was trying to make academic gender theory accessible to a general audience, and also figure out how much agency we might have over our genders within the cultural systems that have formed us, and which reward and punish certain types of expression. With Do It Yourself, I was interested in questions of the performance of self in the age of the internet, and of the ways in which the private and public spheres have been changed by online spaces.

7 – What do you see the current role of the writer being in larger culture? Do they even have one? What do you think the role of the writer should be?

Well, funny you should ask. Why not pick up a copy of my riveting best-selling block-buster academic monograph Contemporary Irish Theatre and Social Change: Activist Aesthetics, and read the introductory chapter, in which I wrestle with questions of the cultural, social, and political utility of the artist for approximately 50 theory-dense pages! No? You don’t want to? Fine.

Essentially, I think that artists, including writers, can (and evidentially do) involve themselves in wider cultural issues, sometimes with activist intent, and this is just great; however, it is also fine for writers to privilege art for art’s sake, to lean into the aesthetic autonomy of their craft, to refuse to be mouthpieces, and to make things happen in fictional worlds that we would not condone in real life. I think it’s wrong to hold art to the cultural standards of the real, or to expect that artists toe some kind of line. There are lots of different types of writers out there, and there is no one writer’s role.

8 - Do you find the process of working with an outside editor difficult or essential (or both)?

I love working with editors, readers, and advisors. I am always so grateful for an eye on the work. That’s not to say that my immediate emotional reaction to criticism is always pleasant, but it is always information, and there’s nothing more valuable for a writer than a reader who isn’t afraid to offend them.

9 - What is the best piece of advice you've heard (not necessarily given to you directly)?

Margaret Atwood’s advice: “Read, Write, Read, Write, Read, Write.”

10 - What kind of writing routine do you tend to keep, or do you even have one? How does a typical day (for you) begin?

Nope, no routine, just moments wherever I can snatch ‘em.

My day begins with little feet running to my bed, usually far earlier than I would prefer, it begins with breakfasts and packed lunches and school bags, with confiscating pirate swords, then confiscating the chopsticks that have replaced the pirate swords, with begging people to please, please put on their shoes, before somehow, miraculously, leaving the house.

11 - When your writing gets stalled, where do you turn or return for (for lack of a better word) inspiration?

I let it sit. I go work on some other thing. It helps that I always have fingers in a few pies.

12 - What fragrance reminds you of home?

Coal fires in the cold night air.

13 - David W. McFadden once said that books come from books, but are there any other forms that influence your work, whether nature, music, science or visual art?

Theatre and film for sure. My fiction is dialogue heavy. I love trying to capture certain rhythms or cadences of speech.

14 - What other writers or writings are important for your work, or simply your life outside of your work?

How long you got? Here, in no particular order, is an inexhaustive list of writers who have shaped me: Octavia Butler, Leo Tolstoy, Toni Morrison, Ursula K Le Guin, George Saunders, Thomas Hardy, Samuel Beckett, Mona Awad, Eugène Ionesco, Ali Smith, Lisa McInerney, Oscar Wilde, Salman Rushdie, Hilary Mantel, Edna O’Brien, Kevin Barry, Fyodor Dostoevsky, George Eliot, Agota Kristof, Doris Lessing, Joanna Russ.

15 - What would you like to do that you haven't yet done?

I would like to travel to India.

16 - If you could pick any other occupation to attempt, what would it be? Or, alternately, what do you think you would have ended up doing had you not been a writer?

I can’t imagine not being a writer. Who would I even be?

I love my two jobs – theatre professor and writer – and I have very little desire to attempt any other (harder) occupation.

17 - What made you write, as opposed to doing something else?

Well, I do other things! You’re not interviewing George RR Martin here – the HBO Specials have yet to start paying my mortgage.

I write. I always wrote. What made me like this? Um, I am going to blaaaame, let’s see… astrology? Or maybe we’re living in a computer simulation and I was coded this way.

Anthony Burgess once said, “To some of us, the wresting of beauty out of language is the only thing in the world that matters.”

My children also matter to me, obviously. Those guys aside, I’m with Burgess.

18 - What was the last great book you read? What was the last great film?

Last great book: George Saunders’ Vigil – about phantoms attending to the immortal spirit of a soon-to-be-deceased oil baron.

Last great film: Ariane Louis-Seize’s Humanist Vampire Seeking Consenting Suicidal Person – about… well, the title is doing a lot of heavy lifting here.

19 - What are you currently working on?

Three things!

1.     A short story collection centred around my hometown, Galway.

2.     A second novel about the allure and cultural creep of the far right

3.     A series of performance lectures from the perspectives of Irish animals.

12 or 20 (second series) questions;