Amy LeBlanc, I used to live here

 

When a bird crouched
on Anne Boleyn’s neck
 

The sweating sickness
descends like a swallow
to rest in the throat—
if only she had kept rabbits
and held tears that could fill
a thimble or a room,
she may have climbed down
from the tower and opened
an apiary or a bird sanctuary—
she could have been a hatter
like her great-grandfather
and named herself Alice.
When a bird crouched on Anne
Boleyn’s neck, no one stopped it
from pecking, pecking, pecking.

The second full-length collection by Calgary poet Amy LeBlanc, following I know something you don’t know (Guelph ON: Gordon Hill Press, 2020), is I used to live here (Guelph ON: The Porcupine’s Quill, 2025), “an examination of chronic illness, disability, and autoimmunity.” On the surface, I used to live here might seem to hold echoes of ” Guelph poet Jessica Popeski’s The Problem with Having a Body (Guelph ON: Gordon Hill Press, 2025) [see my review of such here], but both are, instead, part of an expanding wealth of titles that connect through a conversation around “disability poetics,” a conversation that Gordon Hill/The Porcupine’s Quill has been deliberately working to expand for some time, and also moves through titles such as Montreal poet Eli Tareq El Bechelany-Lynch’s knot body (Montreal QC: Metatron Press, 2020) [see my review of such here], Toronto poet Roxanna Bennett’s The Untranslatable I (Gordon Hill Press, 2021) [see my review of such here], Toronto poet Therese Estacion’s Phantompains (Toronto ON: Book*hug, 2021) [see my review of such here], Concetta Principe’s DISORDER (Gordon Hill Press, 2024) [see my review of such here], Regina, Saskatchewan poet Tea Gerbeza’s How I Bend Into More (Windsor ON: Palimpsest Press, 2024) [see my review of such here], Kingston, Ontario poet Ashley-Elizabeth Best’s Bad Weather Mammals (Toronto ON: ECW Press, 2024) [see my review of such here], Christine McNair’s hybrid/memoir Toxemia (Book*hug, 2024) [see my essay on such here] and Philadelphia poet and publisher Brian Teare’s reissued and expanded The Empty Form Goes All the Way to Heaven (Boise ID: Ahsahta Press, 2015; New York NY: Nightboat Books, 2022) [see my review of the original edition here], among many other titles.

Across a quartet of first-person lyrics—section titles set as “The Leech House,” “Sympathetic Magic,” “Something in the Water” and “Copse, Corpse, Catastrophe”—LeBlanc’s poems sit amid tightness and looseness, providing carved lines the space through which they might properly breathe. “The doorbell chimes and you / want to drill a hole through wires,” the title sequence begins, “pull them out of the wall and make / a bouquet. The babies cries and you hear / marbles clatter to the floor. You / wish for your grandmother’s knocker— / vibration clipping against wood, / tremor in your kidneys when someone / arrives. Your baby cries. Thirteen / months old.” She writes on connection and disconnection, shades of illness and disability, outreach and cultural touchstones, which allow her to speak on and around what otherwise might seem more difficult. “Webspaces tug. Above her head,” she writes, as part of “Undead Juliet at the Museum,” “a nest rests in the rafters. A mother / magpie dives at museum guests, / just not at Juliet. Her father once said, / Things belong in museums when dead.”

The gestures of LeBlanc’s second full-length collection write through witches, Shakespeare’s Juliet, Hecate’s daughter, Anne Boleyn, and even Gwen Stacy (Spider-Man’s girlfriend, infamously killed by Willem Dafoe’s Green Goblin in the 2014 flick Spider-Man 2, but in the original books way back in 1973) in the poem “Gwen Stacy,” that begins: “The night Gwen died, / the Bow River                flooded / knocked / over / signs,      taxi cabs,          dog leashes turned loose / along the tide.” She writes of historical and fictional women not allowed their own agency, beyond their associations to others. Or on illness metaphors, as through the poem “Counterpoints to / illness metaphors,” seeking an updated language to reframe or reshape a sequence of experiences too long misunderstood, dismissed or outright ignored. “Not an alarm clock,” she writes, “a car with two doors / strip mall / inverted heart [.]” That does seem to be the crux of this collection: seeking a new language to reshape and reframe perception around this particular lived experience; finding a new way to speak on illness and disability, for the sake of a far better understanding of what has so often been compartmentalized as either imaginary or invisible. LeBlanc wishes you, the reader, to better understand from the inside what you’ve only seen so far from the outside. Further to that reframing, LeBlanc also references infamous accused (but not convicted) American axe murderer Lizzie Borden (1860-1927) [to whom I am distantly related, I will remind], as the sequence “Lizzie Borden takes an axiom” provides:

They tell you that my father
twisted heads off
my pigeons. 

It’s a myth
but the hatchet
is fact. 

My laughter is fictitious
but my father made
coffins and I used
to climb inside
to avoid
small
talk.