Camilla Gibb, I Used to Be a Pisces

 

Organ Meat

I spent years with a therapist
who encouraged me to unravel
the ways in which my mother
had failed us. 

I was resistant

preferring to listen to a butcher
who kept steering me
towards better cuts of meat. 

Only once I was led toward the organs
did I realize I was eating
my own tongue.

Curious to see a debut poetry title from Toronto writer Camilla Gibb, I Used to Be a Pisces (Toronto ON: Book*hug Press, 2026). For those unaware, Gibb is an award winning and bestselling prose author, having published five novels and a memoir, a position not always followed by an announcement into a poetry debut (or at least, not one usually followed by such a compelling debut). The poems of I Used to Be a Pisces, collected with accompanying collage-works by the author, are intimate and sharp, taking narrative twists, overlays and turns; they begin, offering a series of openings and suggestions of where each might travel, allowing the reader their own scope and agency to enter. “The disappointment of a peach,” begins the short “Fruit, End of Season,” “chalk fibres at summer’s end // the chemical of love / dying beyond its season [.]” Interestingly, one might see connections, echoes of tone and tenor, between these poems and certain works by Canadian poets Alice Burdick [see my review of her latest here], Jaime Forsythe and Lillian Nećakov (another poet who works with visual collage) [see my review of my latest here], all of whom are known, through varying degrees, for pushing their lyric up against (and through) a boundary of surrealism. “We watched a red setter carrying rocks into waves / and forgot about my broken sandal.” begins the short descriptive lyric of “Ashore,” “We were young then, holding hearts, / hands, on a cusp of faraway ocean // convinced of the earth’s beauty, / our own, the shore // my mouth open like an oyster / to taste the pearl on your tongue.”

Set in the table of contents as untitled clusters (over more overt sections), Gibb’s lyric narratives push against that surreal edge, one pushed further through her use of collaged image, although one less overt than holding a sense just out of focus; a narrative clarity that occasionally drifts into elements of dream: both tangible and intangible. There’s an intimacy to these pieces, one that focuses on detail, and the possibility of how the form of poetry might provide that attention. “You have missed the garden,” writes the poem “Between Seasons,” “I have missed you.” One might wonder what Gibb considered possible through the poem that her prose might not have allowed, or if this collection is simply the result of writing that occurred across the length and the breadth of her writing life.