Toronto ON: From Ryan Fitzpatrick’s ENGC86 Creative Writing: Poetry II, the spring 2022 class at the University of Toronto Scarborough comes The Girls Who Get It, Get It (Toronto ON: Block Party, June 2022). As Fitzpatrick’s “Foreword” offers:
At the beginning of the semester, I tasked this group of promising writers with the problem of the poetry project. In other words, I asked them to tell me what they wanted to write about and we’d hash out the how and the why together. We’d grapple with the three corners of a questionably drawn Venn diagram I threw up in the middle of a Zoom call. We’d concern ourselves with form as an extension of content and content as an extension of relation. We’d move from the problem of just how to approach the villanelle to the explosive narrative possibilities of a million internet forms. We’d occasionally ask the dreaded question “So What?” like someone was about to go down for elimination in the MasterChef kitchen. We’d move between narrative flows and imagistic surprise. Eventually we reached the oft repeated refrain “The girls who get it, get it” as a way around the complex and sometimes messy specificities of our poetry, because life is messy and not everyone will understand everything all the time, but you also have to have faith that what you write will find the audience who has been searching everywhere for the right words at the moment they needed them.
The collection includes writing from Isla McLaughlin, Mary Maliszewski, Shanti Dhoré, Catherina Tseng, Morgen Mulcaster, Regina Zhao, Timea James, Sonika Verma, Georgea Jourjouklis, Alexis Murrell, Kasthuri Kanesalingam, Uniekar Bacchus, Lamia Firasta, Rana Sulaman, Alexa DiFrancesco, Victoria Butler and Joseph Donato. “share that quote from / Maggie Nelson,” Isla McLaughlin writes as part of “is this what it means to be a girl online?,” “hope at least one / person recalls // your crying, it’s / intensity // continue to / suffer so loud [.]” “it’d be so sweet if things just stayed the same,” Alexa DiFrancesco writes, as part of “when mom is ukrainian,” “do you know who you are?” There is such a lovely mix of confidence, swagger and curiosity through the poems assembled here, each of them reaching out in their own ways into attempting to get a handle on writing, thinking and where this all goes. As much as anything, also, it is the range of styles that intrigues about this small collection. “But they’re not available at 11:50pm,” Lamia Firasta writes, in “Assignment: 11:59,” “When I am checking all my citations / And wondering if there’s an i in lowercase [.]” I am intrigued by the narrative leaps and associations of Sonika Verma’s “Kaleidoscope,” a piece that begins: “to this day my bank pin number is my middle school friend’s / birthday. every winter i bake a cheesecake the way a bakery which / i haven’t gone to in four years advised me to. my pajamas are a / worn-down shirt from high school volunteering of an event that / relocated.” Or the first half of Catherina Tseng’s “pear-shaped ladies,” a poem that includes some very sharp phrases and observations:
scar-slicked thighs stick
to the bottom of the plastic chair,
twisting uncomfortably as
white men walk with their asian
girlfriends. at starbucks
a girl with small tits and sweat-stained
armpits browses for swimwear
on amazon. her mid-range crop
top says that there is no
ethical consumption under capitalism
as she clicks clicks
clicks lrg tankini two-piece red women’s sexy
cute high-waist tie knot
into the cart. body knows nothing. only
instinct and survival and
potential and nerve. body is divine.
gooseflesh rises along
roadmaps of stretch marks and cellulite,
charting rivers, climbing
mountains, marking crossroads,
claiming territories. a god
is just a baby.
I
am hoping to see more work by these folk; I am curious to see where they might
go. I also have an extra copy of this, if anyone is interested. Otherwise, check here.
Vancouver BC: I recently received a copy of the chapbook Brine (2022) by Vancouver’s Harbour Centre 5. I hadn’t been previously aware of this particular writing group, although I’m aware of at least two of their members (I interviewed Christina Shah through the “Six Questions” series, and both Shah (posted June 16, 2021) and Robbie Chesick (scheduled for August 23, 2022) have poems in the “Tuesday poem” series). As Shah’s opening poem, “dig in,” begins:
learn to become lignin
living, but stiff
the interdependent men
will talk
over you
at you
about you
object, topic
nascent agent
put your roots down
and pretend
the storms are normal
The poets collected here are Christina Shah, Jaeyun Yoo, James X. Wang, Rebecca Holand and Robbie Chesick, all of whom, according to their author biographies, have been emerging in a variety of literary journals across Canada, but haven’t yet chapbooks or full-length collections. There is a nice narrative bob and lyric bounce to the poems of Jaeyun Yoo, such as the final stanza of the three-stanza “a woman of water,” that offers:
most days, she scurried
past and went to bed
a tadpole hiding under
clumps of mud
another day, I had to
wrest the bottle away
and watched her balter,
like cattails lurching
their swollen heads back
and forth
some days, she nibbled
the sandwich crust
curled around me as if a
warm palm to a cup
then I would finally lean
my weight
boulders in her water,
briefly buoyant
As
they write at the back: “Brine is a collaborative chapbook created by Harbour
Centre 5, a collective of emerging poets who met through Simon Fraser
University’s Weekend Poetry Course. They craft poetry with a process akin to
brining—words submerged, cured, until rich in flavour.” Dedicated “to our
mentors, Fiona Tinwei Lam & Evelyn Lau,” I’m reminded of when I was first
introduced to the work of Newfoundland writers Michael Winter, Lisa Moore and
others, through a group anthology self-produced back in 1994, the culmination of nine years of self-directed workshopping a group of emerging writers had managed, after their creative writing class had ended. It is, as they say,
possible to get there from here.
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