Calgary AB/Nanaimo BC: British Columbia poet Neil Surkan’s latest, following the full-length On High (2018) and Unbecoming
(2021) [see my review of such here], both from McGill-Queen’s University Press,
as well as three prior chapbooks [see my review of one of them here], is the
chapbook Die Workbook (Calgary AB: The Blasted Tree, 2024), a short
sequence assembled through self-contained and accumulated fragments. “Like a
steaming cup in a shaking room,” the poem begins, “unmoored, your life belongs
to chance. / Attend the damage. Our purpose is damage. / Once the earth reveals
its restlessness, / the dead can’t protect you. / You mustn’t defend the dead.”
The detailed sketch of his lyric is compelling, offering dense lines of lyric
that extends into sentences, combining structures in a way I’d be interested to
see him push further.
Drafting in my little shorts when I got home,” he writes, “my focus turned to a
die: I began to experiment with corresponding each trapdoor with the die’s six
sides, with precisely six options, so that a reader might roll a die and find one
of six words filling in a given gap. In turn, they would come up with a
particular poem in a particular moment (a riff, I suppose, on bibliomancy).” He
writes of endings, of chance, writing a randomization process comparable to
some of the sound work Ottawa poet Grant Wilkins has been doing lately, for example;
he writes short bursts that assemble into something larger, more ongoing, one
step after another.
The dead can’t protect
you
once the earth reveals
its relentlessness
like a brimming cup in a
shaking room.
Sacred, your life belongs
to chance –
you mustn’t defend the
dead.
Accept the damage. Our
lot is damage.
Toronto ON: Having heard her read a couple of years back through the Ottawa International Writers Festival, I was curious to see a copy of Let Me Evaporate (Toronto ON: Anstruther Press, 2024), the debut chapbook by novelist Katherine Alexandra Harvey, who, according to her bio, “splits her time between Newfoundland and Montreal,” working to complete a second novel and a full-length poetry debut. Harvey’s poems are first-person observational and gestural, comparable to monologues one might hear from a stage. “When you think of me in LA,” she writes, to begin the opening poem, “Hollywood Happened Differently For Me,” “think of Hollywood Hills // recovering from that death flu, my cough rattling across the wrap / around deck, how it was all painted white and I listened [.]” There is a clarity to these poems, these narratives, akin to lyric diary entries, working a narrator-character across a range of experiences. “All I really wanted,” she offers, as part of “Your Father’s Reputation Never Got You Anywhere,” “was for my father to know his lessons / resonated.” There are times I would like her lines to be a bit tighter, certainly, but I would be interested to see where she might land with a first full-length poetry collection; I suspect such an announcement isn’t that far off.
The Wake
I removed my belly button and paid attention to the healing process. No one believed I could feel the hole closing over, that it reminded me of being born. My mother was laid out on the kitchen table for a week. Formaldehyde high, you never noticed when my skin blackened. I felt undesirable. You called me a perpetual victim. I plucked out my eyelashes and pencil curled my hair so you wouldn’t see my edges. I watched them dig holes for all the women. Your only comment was that dress is too tight for a funeral put something else on for the love of God. My watery silhouette shadowed the tombstone. I swallowed dirt by the fistful. Found a worm and fed it crabapples for a calendar year. Get off on the cleanup. I pocketed ones all over town. I never bought the flowers after all this time.
Fredericton NB: From Ian LeTourneau’s Emergency Flash Mob Press [see their periodicities note on the press here] comes Fredericton
poet and editor (qwerty magazine and Gridlock Lit) Jamie Kitts’ Girl
Dinner (2024), an assemblage of poems composed as a curious mix of purpose,
lyric styles and exploratory shapes. “I’m clay, sand, and limestone, / three
parts,” Kitts writes, to close the poem “I’m at the Global Climate Crisis,” a
piece subtitled “after a skeet by Juno Stump,” “three names / Bill and
Blaine and Pierre / marked-up Sharpie my square body / the sudden nearest
soonest violence / not the first, never / the last to serve cunt / at the global
climate crisis.” There’s a swagger through Kitts’ explorations, politically and
socially engaged and self-aware, composing poems attempting different elements
around the first-person narrative lyric to see what works, what fits, what
plays. There’s a confidence here, and an openness, seeking out what might be
possible. “You over heaven, me in your eyes,” Kitts writes, as part of the
playfully serious “This is not a poem, it’s a meme,” “Girl, I’m so
fucking glad we’re not guys / Gender’s fake but we are not / IF SHE BREATHS,
SHE’S A THOT [.]”
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