Speak to me as to thy thinkings, as thou dost ferry, (part three,

[catch part one here; part two here]

Thursday, August 20, 2026: Aoife and I went for a wander, for coffee and pastries, walking by the array of lobster traps. So many! We wandered over to the cafe they found the day prior, with quaint wee bookshop. Apparently Rose picked up a copy of Ocean Vuong's novel On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous (2019) from this charming shop. This is a book I've heard good things about, but can't really ask her if she's enjoying without making it weird, apparently. What kid would want to read something their parents find interesting? Cringe. Still, I am curious to know what she might think about it.

The cool air around water, and the view back to the mainland (if one could see that far, certainly). A morning of a brief walk in one direction, returning for the sake of an eventual spot on the beach. Apparently we're going to the beach? Repeating the brief jaunt we made yesterday evening, nearly losing Christine and Aoife along the shoreline, the walk along the sandy shore not the roundabout direction the car wished to take us (not every line is a straight line, after all).

The way of things. A splash in the water, as Christine and the young ladies wandered the beach, splashed around, collected smooth stones and other items. Aoife, who returned with handfuls of shells and small stones. An hour-plus at the beach, and then a quick jaunt back to Cricker's Creamery for ice cream, and a slip into the post office (to be able to send off my second round of postcards). Ice cream, and then a toy store, en route to the ferry. Where was this? I can't even recall. The children picked up nonsense and insisted on photos by the array of items outside in the yard (but requested that they not be posted, of course). And so, my own.

Naturally, any visit to the island requires as much Lucy Maud Montgomery as possible, so we drove and we drove, heading back to the ferry, but stopping along points as best as possible, none of which interested our young ladies in any way. I keep forgetting that Montgomery married a MacDonald, wondering if he was related in any way to eldest daughter's maternal grandmother, another MacDonald from the island. 

And, to the ferry. The ferry, where I attempted to take notes, but Aoife was more interested in wandering. And so, we wandered. Once landing in Halifax, we were hanging with Christine's brother and his family in their new house, having moved this way after five years in England, a house myself and the young ladies had not yet seen. And to a variety of baseball tournaments over the next two days, although I was already back to Ottawa by the next afternoon, due to my above/ground press event [see my report on such here] on the Saturday night. It would have been good to spend further time in the area, perhaps even visit the handful of folk either Christine or I or both know around this way, but the timing didn't allow. Neither, the drive. I was one night in Halifax, back Friday afternoon; Christine and the young ladies back by Sunday morning. Will we attempt again next year, possibly? Might we ever have enough time?

Amanda Moore, Requeening

 

Confession

In the chapel of our first days,
I put you to my breast again and again
and let you refuse me. 

Half-life half-lived and with you
as my witness: I have been more
mother than woman. I have stayed up
all night lining the shelves of my life
with your toys and books. 

It might be a comfort
the way my whole world spins
on the tip of your smallest toe,
but you will learn to be a woman
from the way I am a woman
in this world
and this is the litany
of my mistake.

From San Francisco poet and essayist Amanda Moore comes the full-length poetry debut, Requeening (Ecco/HarperCollins, 2021), 2020 winner of the National Poetry series, as selected by Ocean Vuong. Bees are, I’ve garnered, the earth-equivalent of the canary in a coal mine, and poets seem to return to bees fairly regularly, from Tonya M. Foster’s A Swarm of Bees in High Court (Brooklyn NY: Belladonna*, 2015) [see my review of such here] to Renée Sarojini Saklikar’s Listening to the Bees (Gibsons BC: Nightwood Editions, 2018) to Muriel Leung’s IMAGINE US, THE SWARM (New York NY: Nightboat Books, 2021) [see my review of such here], among others. For Moore’s part, the figure and mantra of the bee follows from opening to central image: “This might have been the way I was born,” she writes, close to the beginning of the opening poem, “Opening the Hive,” “to move over my mother and wash from her / what was left of painful birth, her legs / like the old wood cracked with a hive tool, / my lips clamping and the bees burrowing / into honeycomb, bathed in sweetness, / a taste fresher when robbed this way.” She writes of the wisdoms and lessons passed from one generation to another, such as the poem “Sonnet While Killing a Chicken,” that opens: “The most important thing a girl can learn / is how to kill a chicken for a meal / to feed a man, so she begins to turn / the bird by neck and bound feet—this skill real, / precise, my mother wringing damp both towels / and snapping them on our rumps like the neck / snaps in the hand, wings sputter, bowels / release shit.” Moore writes of labour, industry, mothering, birth and daughters; a sequence of women and bees, and the physicality of bodies and work. “I prefer the mystery / of a bee’s body returning,” she writes, as part of “Waggle Dance,” “bright orange streaks of pollen / in the sacks on the backs of her legs // like fistfuls of hazy, polluted sun.”

“Everything beautiful can be reduced // to scientific measurement:,” the same poem offers, to open, “this language / this dance // this swoop and waggle / across the hexagoned surface of comb [.]” The word “precarity” is utilized in Vuong’s blurb on the back cover, and Moore speaks to issues of health and other complications, writing a motherhood of bees and of just how easy the entire hive structure might simply collapse, and everything completely lost. Composing poems around the metaphor of bees, Moore writes of aunts, wasps, mothering and the lessons that emerge from each and all of the above, structuring her hard-won lessons through a variety of structures, from sonnets to a section of haibun to her carved accumulations of lyric couplets. And such hard lessons, certainly, through the ebb and flow of her prose lyric narratives, such as the opening of “20905 Caledonia Avenue Hazel Park MI,” that reads: “After tuning each floorboard / and scraping walls to chalky plaster // layering checkerboard tile and nailing / every shingle to the roof we made // a baby and I bore her in my body / until she broke me and we brought her there // where I milked myself each morning so happy / to make a home // for suffering, down to / the location even: the old place perched // on the edge of a city waking / from decades of cold dormancy.”

There is an attentiveness to Moore’s language; a precision to her explorations through mothers and bees, wasps and ants, and her own thoughts on mothering her own daughter. The slow evolution through the collection from writing of her mother to mothering to her own daughter is reminiscent of a couple of other titles over the years, most recently Silvina López Medin’s Poem That Never Ends (Essay Press, 2021) [see my review of such here]. Moore writes not only of mothering, but of the shifts in perspective that emerge with the role. She writes of love, failure and exhaustion, and of moving through the accumulation into something akin to appreciation, and even wisdom and accomplishment, such as the end of the poem “Everything Is a Sign Today,” that offers: “The only difference / the season and time of day, which is to say / they are like this grief these months later: / all the same but for the light.”

B.J. Soloy, Our Pornography and Other Disaster Songs

This is the montage that shorthands

my childhood,

quelched by the knell—

a dénouement ringing ringing

ringing ringing ringing ringing until rung.

Elsewhere, sisters are erecting statues

to temperance. There’s early morning

light, morning after pills, our rented room.

We seem to have these desires

   to cut a hole through a profile,

my eyes snuffed embers.

From Kansas City poet B.J. Soloy comes the full-length debut Our Pornography and Other Disaster Songs (Slope Editions, 2019), winner of the 17^th annual slope editions book prize, as chosen by Ocean Vuong. Composed in three “chapters,” Soloy’s book-length exploration bobs and weaves across the first-person lyric essay-poem, meanders in a slow and steady rhythm, catching and capturing everything and all in and around their particular American experience. As he writes: “Now I’m at happy hour // in the Town & Country Lounge, / where the screens are flat & bright // & the tears come in pitchers. In this state, // I’m unable to answer your questions or your letters, / so I’ve drawn you a picture.” As Vuong’s “Foreword” to the collection open:

While reading through the manuscripts for this year’s Slope contest, I found myself perpetually haunted by Our Pornography, even long after I put it down, long after I was immersed in another manuscript, and then beyond the project of judging a contest—the book and its language entered my world, inflecting my daily living. It’s no surprise that a book so invested in American detritus might burrow its way into a reader inhabiting an America at a time replete with this nation’s now classic mode of joy and horror. And to such a culture this book holds up a mirror, but one that’s distorted, its imagistic syntax rearranging at the joints. What is reflected then, is not mimicry—but revision. Or perhaps, more accurately, a new vision entirely. Echoing, to my mind, a literary ancestry as rich and myriad as Alice Notley, Frank O’Hara, John Keats, Anne Carson, Richard Siken and Gwendolyn Brooks, the book length poem oscillates between wonder and bewilderment, between the commitment to linear time only to just as quickly dismantle it.

Soloy’s book-length poem is accumulative, building narrative and steam through an extended through-line, stretched out across the whole of a culture and contemporary moment, which, themselves, are constructed out of legions of cobbled-together cultures and moments, many of which confuse, confound and conflict, but somehow all fit together to become something greater. Somehow this is less collage than a re-working, or a re-imagining, as the third section, “INFLAT- / ABLE PRO- / LOGUE” begins:

    with the urge to faint, I swoon on the diet

of the calendar’s sad flesh. I hope to someday throw

my shoe at the president. I’m walking around, untreated,

ready to spoil. I shit myself for rock ‘n’ roll in this soundless room,

                panting for water. Listen to the world, to the nearest iteration,

amplified, but, my dear dear, don’t let them lie to you—

    Iowa is ugly. Missiouri is wounded. We both grew up in dirty houses.