Caroline Szpak, Slinky Naïve

FRENCH REVOLUTION

I watched the live action

version of Alice in Wonderland.

It came with the cereal. I grew

confused and inherited

the apartments with fistfuls

of red table grapes from each

synthetic nurse, a flyover

until I can wet the sum

like a quote. My citron a seal

of interim perspective – grain

height hysteria in tenth-grade

art you somehow grind into

a chagrin of milk illocution

until you can forecast lactic

tempers. Queue blue jays

in a sauceboat, and its still

a counterpoise.

Toronto writer Caroline Szpak’s first trade poetry title, following a small handful of poetry chapbooks, is Slinky Naïve (Vancouver BC: Anvil Press, 2018), a collection of poems constructed as narrative accumulations and odd turns. Szpak’s poems give the appearance of randomness, with line upon accumulated line until the narrative threads click, and finally reveal themselves. There is a looseness here that is quite appealing, and a series of threads that could never be anticipated, coming together brilliantly to form a collection of intriguing and even unusual poems. As she writes in the poem “BLACK MADONNA”: “a crawl in residents / that feel the water / tastes sweet may be / part pigment / edible cosmetics a loss / of emphasis fine tuning / sweat must have eyelids / like a husband a school / group sells shoddy / in that mud state .]”