Britta Badour, Wires That Sputter: Poems

 

: Hurricanes :

IF YOU START SOME SHIT IN PUBLIC
better not come home

bend all the ways I howl          or be cut
out                   baby photos

            don’t dare

                        who would

 

drop this whip? heat? help?
                                                what help

I’m only just now going through Wires That Sputter: Poems (Toronto ON: McClelland and Stewart, 2023), the full-length debut by the award-winning Toronto-based artist, public speaker and poet Britta Badour (a performer otherwise known as Britta B.). I get books in the mail nearly every day, and it took nearly a year to realize that McClelland and Stewart hadn’t actually sent along the spring 2023 list (which is why I’m so late), so this title only landed quite recently. There is such a wonderful sense of performative expansiveness to these pieces, poems composed through a blend of pattern, rhythm, confident gesture and deep sense of the personal. She writes with a sense of loss and of heart; an open-hearted intimacy, whether writing on family, politics or culture. “In May, if asked,” she writes, as part of “: If His Mama :,” “I would’ve said you’ll either have hurricanes / or become one.” These poems are performative, declarative and substantive, offering a deep sense of storytelling and rhythm, as well as a deep moral foundation, one that holds through and despite all as an anchor against any storm. “here we are bewildering,” she writes, as part of “: Letters to Miranda :,” “our single mothers’ make-believe, we sisters / here we are dancing to Boys II Men / here were are maybe four and six and Miranda is leaving / I repeat the alphabet for twenty years [.]”