Featured Review: Alex Manley’s We Are All Just Animals & Plants. Review by Klara du Plessis.

Alex Manley‘s We Are All Just Animals & Plants (Montreal, QC: Metatron, 2016, $12, 61 pages). Review by Klara du Plessis.

“Instead of writing a poem about this mess I made, / what if I wrote a poem about the natural sciences?” Alex Manley asks in his debut collection of poetry, We Are All Just Animals & Plants. Here he projects imagery from the natural world onto a series of reflections on the contemporary climate of dating and relationships. In contrast to the emotional distance and cynicism that is often associated with millennial love, the inherent growth narrative of the organic images employed throughout—namely, animals and plants—allows Manley to capture a sense of vibrancy, even in the face of rejection; if not outright optimistic, the poetic speaker is willing to keep putting himself out there. Accepting present-day dating at face value, and not comparing it with past or alternative modes of romantic love, he is able to highlight the charm of contemporary times; when lovers check their phones in-between bouts of passion, they are not separated by technology, but rather insulated from the landscape of “Instagram flakes” snowing outside, together in a moment of quiet tenderness.

While the title We Are All Just Animals & Plants insinuates a devolutionary agenda—humanity being governed by their baser, animalistic instincts, the proverbial birds and bees—one of the collection’s major concerns, on the contrary, is the poetic speaker’s persistent urge towards personal evolution or reinvigoration of self: “All I want is for it to be springtime … so I can be a new me.” Absorbing the vitality of verdure in order to discard the old, unwanted self, the poetic speaker imagines himself to be “sprouting / leaves, vines, tendrils” burgeoning from his limbs as “a new person grow[s] over top of you, like / ivy.” The implicit caveat within this duality, and coexistence, of old and new is that, while a linear narrative of maturation may lead to a stronger, more rounded sense of self, dependency on change can also become a cyclical avoidance of difficulty in favour of the constant thrill of renewal.

Case in point, the accretion of vegetal images of revitalization soon leads
to a body superseded parasitically by plant matter: “I just have all these
bonsai trees growing in my torso. // It’s pathetic, I imagine them whispering,
a grown man / who can’t stop accumulating miniatures.” It is one of
Manley’s strengths as a poet that figures of speech consistently maintain
the vividness of metamorphosis. The bonsai trees are more than the poetic
speaker’s psychological state. In contrast to other “people [who] are
photographers / dancers, chemists, lepidopterists,” the poetic speaker is
immobilized, unambitious, unable to manipulate his transformation to his
benefit; he is paralyzed by “the way the roots snake; the way the leaves
fall,” by the way his entire being has morphed into that of a tree. The poetic
speaker never reverts from this transfiguration back into his human
anatomy. Instead the image lingers intact till the next metaphor, the next
metamorphosis, and poetic suspension of disbelief when he suggests:
“I’m the panther.”

Formally, the collection is divided into three sections labeled as Animals,
Paraphernalia, and Plants. The poems in the first two sections of the collection
are exclusively written in couplets—a constraint, which maintains
an orderliness and thematic resolve to break away from solitude, to meet
someone, and to couple with them. The final section opens up to stanzas
of varying lengths, and a concomitant dissolution of the hopes and dreams
expressed before. Stripping the poetic speaker of the drive to find his better
half, Manley revokes the gentle insinuation of domestic animals and
houseplants, embracing the feral instead. We Are All Just Animals & Plants
concludes with an apocalyptic poem “Noahtic,” a reversal of the biblical
tale, not leading to redemption and safety, but destruction and bloodshed;
now the “animals will not / be loud as we kill them off. The / leaves will
not be loud as they detach, slow, languid / bodies, from the evaporating
trees.” As the violence abates, the collection leaves the reader with a pervasive
sense of calm, a dismantling of the metamorphic jungle of dating,
and a clearing, a blank page, for Manley’s next book to germinate.

Klara du Plessis is a poet and critic residing in Montreal. Her chapbook Wax Lyrical (Anstruther Press, 2015) was shortlisted for the bpNichol Chapbook Award, and her debut collection Ekke is forthcoming (Palimpsest Press, 2018). She curates the monthly, Montreal-based Resonance Reading Series.

This review was published in issue 14:1 The Wild. To see more from this issue, please visit Vallum’s website.

Vallum magazine is also available in digital format. Featuring additional content such as: AUDIO and VIDEO recordings of selected poets, further poems, interviews, essays, and MORE!

Download the FREE APP and FREE SAMPLE EDITION for your tablet, kindle or smartphone through PocketMags OR iTunes

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Featured Review: Laurie D. Graham’s Settler Education. Review by Megan Callahan.

Laurie D. Graham’s Settler Education (Toronto, ON: Penguin Random House Canada, 2016, $18.95, 128 pages) Review by Megan Callahan

Laurie D. Graham is a Canadian writer, reviewer, and editor from Sherwood Park, Alberta. Settler Education, published in March 2016 by McClelland & Stewart, is her second book of poetry. Work from this collection was shortlisted for the CBC Poetry Prize and Arc Poetry Magazine’s Poem of the Year contest, and awarded The Puritan’s Thomas Morton Prize. Graham’s Prairie roots are evident in all her work, and the landscape is particularly meaningful in her newest collection.

In Settler Education, Graham offers us a contemplative and critical look at the painful and violent history of Western Canada—in particular, the Plains Cree uprising at Frog Lake, the imprisonment of Big Bear, the European settlement of the Prairies. The collection is structured around Graham’s journey by train from Ontario to British Columbia; as she travels past the Great Lakes, through villages and fields, she also moves in and out of time, carrying us back to the 19^th century. Many poems are named after the towns she visits—Battleford, The Yellowhead, Fort Pitt, and Frenchman Butte—with maps and photographs to guide and ground the reader. As the title implies, this is a history book, one that rewrites the facts we’ve been taught to include a perspective so often left out, glazed over, or swept under the rug.

Graham’s collection opens with the poem “Number One Canadian”—the name of the train that runs from Toronto to Vancouver, one filled with irony in this context. While Graham’s voice is ultimately critical, her tone remains meditative and tinged with sadness. There is very little anger or aggression in Settler Education; rather, each poem is infused with profound and sincere empathy: two women walking, misshapen. That’s not the word. They walk in pieces. / A grief that makes the body plural. Graham’s point of view shifts throughout the work; at times she writes in first-person, while at others she echoes the voices of the dead. In “Theresa Gowanlock”, Graham embodies the wife of a European settler killed during the Frog Lake massacre, and creates a fictional account of her experience: We cut the woods, thick brush, creeks and logs, / fording a stream. / On we went not knowing / where we were going. She also plays with pronouns and perspectives, directly addressing the ghosts of Cree warriors and European settlers as You or We: Who knows or cares that you were here / perched with your men over the North Saskatchewan River, / hauling up your life by the pail? The overall effect is a sense of broken, unravelled time—but Graham’s strong use of imagery keeps us firmly grounded in space and place.

Overall, the language in Settler Education is beautifully conversational. At times Graham’s writing is sparse and disjointed, like the broken sentences of old telegraphs: Through tree scenes, tableaux in the dome car, / the soldiers, the settlers, the track laid, the way made. Other passages flow in a stream-of-consciousness river, full of subtle assonances and alliterations: the travellers restless rounding the big lakes, they buy the wild blueberries, / they take photos of each other beside dead buildings along the line. Several poems are interspersed with quotes and excerpts from historical texts. These add layers of meaning to the stories being told, and add depth to the work as a whole.

The last dozen pages of Graham’s collection are filled with notes and historical references. These added bits of information give the reader context and help ground Graham’s work in reality. Poetry is an inherently abstract and metaphorical form of writing, one that falls somewhere between fact and fiction. But Graham’s ultimate purpose is to educate, and this is why her appended notes are intrinsically linked to the work itself. Without them, readers could easily forget that Settler Education is above all a history book—reworked and reworded to expose the aboriginal experience we so rarely learn about in school. This is the beating heart of Graham’s work, the pulse we feel throughout the long journey. She wants us to know that these things happened. In “The Train Back”, the final poem of Settler Education, Graham says it herself, as clearly as she can and in the simplest terms: it existed. It existed. And it exists.

Megan Callahan is a fiction writer and translator from Montreal, Quebec. Her work has appeared in PRISM International and Matrix Magazine. She holds a BA in Linguistics and Creative Writing from Concordia University and is currently pursuing an MA in Translation Studies.

This review was published in issue 13:2 The Wild. To see more from this issue, please visit Vallum’s website.

Vallum magazine is also available in digital format. Featuring additional content such as: AUDIO and VIDEO recordings of selected poets, further poems, interviews, essays, and MORE!

Download the FREE APP and FREE SAMPLE EDITION for your tablet, kindle or smartphone through PocketMags OR iTunes

Featured Review: Elana Wolff’s Everything Reminds You Of Something Else. Review by Kian Vaziri-Tehrani.

(Guernica Editions, Spring 2017, $20, 72 pages)

Balance, Opposition, & Interconnection: A Review of Elana Wolff’s Everything Reminds You of Something Else by Kian Vaziri-Tehrani

Though Elana Wolff has been a contributor to Vallum in past issues and a highly decorated poet in her own right, I myself am a relative newcomer to her work. Guernica Editions’ Everything Reminds You of Something Else is the first of her collections I’ve been fortunate enough to read.

As per the title of her collection, Wolff’s poems sew clever webs of interconnection between the mundane and the mystical, joining together seemingly incongruous notions while also pairing more universally acknowledged associations. Spread across subjects ranging from faith to nature, “Altarpieces” to “Air”,  Wolff’s poems explore the oppositions found within differing states of existence. Though this characterization is admittedly abstract, one line encapsulates the essence of her collection, and it comes from the poem “Theory of Dreaming”:

“Here I sit awaiting a car, there awaiting the war.”

The speaker posits herself in two liminal states, in anticipation of two very different situations. Though the words themselves differ only by a single letter, their meanings and connotations could not be any farther apart. The almost contrarian use of articles is noteworthy. Why the speaker would await “a” car and not “the” car  while awaiting “the” war and not “a” war raises interesting questions. Does the speaker truly know what they await?  What is the relationship between the “here” and the “there”, the “car” and the “war”? One expects more so a sort of familiarity with their ride than with a mass conflict that has yet to pass; a war does not become “the war” until after its historization. This article reversal suggests commonality in difference; it places side by side two differently charged yet orthographically similar words while complicating the expectations that are typically attributed to them. In this sense, Wolff’s poem, and her collection as a whole, speaks to opposition and balance.

Likewise, in the first stanza of the same poem, Wolff’s speaker indicates her love for “the garden,” calling it “[her] solace” but complicating the notion as she writes “especially in winter”. Her preference for a cold and snow-covered garden over one with sunshine and blooming flowers elucidates a divergence from poetic tropes while suggesting a love for the unappreciated, more inaccessible state of garden. Much like her article reversal, Wolff’s love of the garden in winter is unexpected. It comes as a welcomed surprise because it does away with the anticipated perception of this “other” state as less favorable; the garden is just as captivating covered in snow as when it blooms in abundance.

In one of the earlier poems called “The Bestiary”, an allusion to the medieval book of beasts that goes by the same name, Wolff associates predominantly human characteristics to a series of animals. Three of them were especially noteworthy and appear consecutively in the middle of the poem:

“The dog embodied the sad devout,

the mouse—the dutiful doubtful.

Conjugal life produced the spider-and-fly.”

Each association possesses tension within it.  While a dog’s loyalty is expected , its sadness is perplexing due to the characteristically happy and excited nature of the animal. Likewise, mice are known to tread hesitantly under kitchen tables and into crevices, but is it their duty to do so? Notice how the words describing the mouse look and sound similar, a common trend within her collection. But most strikingly, with the third line, Wolff marries predator with prey, subverting  both the expectations of marriage and the spider fly relationship thereby creating balance and harmony between opposing forces.

In “Grenade” Wolff’s fascination with the impact and importance of individual words is on full display. Once more, she places side by side two nearly identical looking and sounding terms, writing “Rudiments of colour/ split & spilt.” In the preceding lines, the speaker searches for a certain word, writing:

“A word escaped me yesterday. Its image came up vaguely in the

painting I was painting and I aimed to put it graphically in black.”

This desire, both beautiful and impossible, strikes me deeply. For, while certain words conjure universally common images, such as fire or cow, others are enigmatic, changing, or unrepresentable.

While Everything Reminds You of Something Else is a complex and enchanting collection, some of the poems, at times, lost me. This is most apparent in “The Innocent Spin of Dreaming Real”. The poem begins with the lines:

“I fell asleep on my elbow once and woke up

on a donkey that I rode into a monkey

sitting jauntily on its back. See me as a rabbit,

it said, believing it could speak”

I appreciate the dreamy qualities of the poem and understand that it applies a distorted dream logic. Though purposefully disorientating, the images feel inaccessible and the significance of the three animals and their actions eludes me.

The collection picks up momentum once more with the title poem “Everything Reminds You of Something Else.” Its lines are jumbled, and I use that term positively, with associations and interconnections, some of which are magical, imagistic:

“…Numeral ix

at the foot of the page springs into a walking stick, lifts its

insect wings and flits away.”

Other associations seem to have more sequential series of action , but possess the same otherworldliness:

“…Moses shines

his light on the wilds, a great white rhino startles and stops>

a football from the jeep.”

The surreal nature of the poem comes to its crux with the haunting line:

“Voices trespassed speech, surfaces failed colour.”

Wolff’s poems draw connections and seek to find balance through opposition. Every force of nature, every state of existence is dependent on its opposite. As Wolff puts it, among all things: “Eventually/ the differences collapse.”

Kian Vaziri-Tehrani is a Canadian-Iranian writer living in Montreal. He is currently in the third and final year of his B.A. in English & Creative Writing. He works for Vallum.

Featured Review: Inclinations, Preoccupations, and Obsessions: A Review of Klipschutz’s “THIS DRAWN AND QUARTERED MOON” by Bill Neumire

Inclinations, Preoccupations, and Obsessions: A Review of Klipschutz’s THIS DRAWN AND QUARTERED MOON (Vancouver, BC: Anvil Press Publishers, 2013, $18.00, 96 Pages) Review by Bill Neumire

In an interview with Canadian poet Jon Cone, Klipschutz (the pen name of poet Kurt Lipschutz) confessed, “I’m a frustrated playwright, essayist, short story writer, pundit, Casanova, cultural anthropologist…the list goes on. Which leads to a crazy quilt of approaches and subject matter: it all gets poured into poems. There are no conscious themes, just inclinations, preoccupations, obsessions.” This assessment is pretty quickly confirmed as one reads his latest poetry collection, This Drawn & Quartered Moon. It’s a real buffet of form: erasure, rhymed quatrains of iambic tetrameter, ghazal, free verse lyric, epistle, prose poem. There are nonce forms and flash-fiction-esque pieces, and sometimes, as in ‘Elvis the First,’ the poet changes forms within a single poem.

This Drawn & Quartered Moon charts the collision of a nostalgic American past with the personal ‘eternal present’ of the speaker (a speaker who, in most cases, seems to be the autobiographical lyric I of the poet) and the complex comingling that follows. The poet’s father was apparently Elvis’ doctor, a point that serves as his portal to cultural commentary, sketches of characters from his life and times, and riddling songs of interior monologue. Klipschutz centers his book on a poem titled ‘Elvis the First,’ about which the poet explained, “The poem is ‘about’ Elvis Presley, but also about my family, and reaches back to some rough times, when the ’60s were just kicking into high gear, when my siblings and I were starting to do drugs, and my parents didn’t have a clue how to handle us. Then my dad became Elvis’s doctor. … the poem gave me a way to write about family.” Indeed, the collection mixes a sense of history and nostalgia with the eternal present of the speaker’s self, his running interior monologue, even as the markers of his past fall away and his anxiety heightens: “Don’t mention the old days. / You’re talking to yourself again”.

The boo’s most engaging moments are in its formal amusements and its profiles and vignettes of quirky characters. Take, for example, Oliver Othello King, Jr., a Viet Nam vet the speaker met on public transportation:

Double O. King, that’s what they call me … Airborne Rangers, Fort Campbell, Kentucky. How many people you suppose you can kill in two years? … Death from the sky. Just so you can stand here.

When these poems fail, they come across as nothing more than reportage, a workshop word wielded when a writer writes without depth and craft to transform an event or experience into something more, but when they succeed the “reportage” serves to erase the speaker and transport the reader into different eyes; this happens no doubt most frighteningly so in “Slab of Consciousness,” a poem for which the form emanates naturally from the content: it’s stilted, with periods after every word or couple words. It’s truncated life. It cuts out the speaker, makes the experience blunter, sharper, more painful:

The facts. It’s gone: Her future. Bright. The town. On it. At the Bubble Lounge. Outside. A fare like any other. Dumped. The body. Him. Her ATM … Results. Still inconclusive. Weeks away. Semen. And if so? … Breathing. She stopped breathing. People do.

It’s like the coldly clinical diction and syntax of an autopsy. The language can be fresh and arresting, witty and satirical, as in “I shall not want / for the Lord is my Home Shopping Network” or poignantly discomforting, as in “Winter passes like a meal / that sits and hardens in this sewer of stopwatch light”. In another impressive moment from ‘The Red Wheelbarrow of Fortune,’ we get expected language and the slogans of contemporary poetry, but the language is then deployed unexpectedly such that it creates tension between the lazy comfort of the phrases and the crafty new rearrangement and juxtaposition of them, all of it preceded by that image—an impactful discomfort and surprise—of the children:

Children cheer a flag of fire
A car commercial ends
Hearts of darkness fill with light
The wind is up—so much depends…

One can almost hear that “depends” slip into “deepens” at the end of the stanza, which is exactly what this strategy does: it deepens the shallow catch phrases by juxtaposing them in intriguing ways and adding that sonically pleasing yet topically disturbing “Children cheer a flag of fire.”

Alas, this self-amused collection frequently provokes a groan like a bad pun. The speaker actually verbalizes an anxiety about this cheeky cleverness (the contradictory self-referential anxiety can admittedly be funny and interesting at times), which creates a sense of self-criticism that makes this a bit of a therapy session as the voice can even get defensive: “Okay, so my ad libs are scripted. / Like you’re never wrong. / Try running a 10k in my teeth. / Go drown your lawn” (88). But sometimes the language downright slips into abstraction and sentimentality, as in “Love lusted for Itself, pent up inside the prison of the heart”. The poems are formally diverse, but as often as individual pieces feel well-formed, the whole ends up feeling purposelessly diverse and perhaps unprofitably too long.

These poems as independent units are not Steven’s poems that “resist the intelligence almost successfully,” but rather they are, to use the controversial term, accessible. That may be part of the poet’s “street sage” mission, as Klipschutz has been in the news for such public displays of poetry as reading poems to taxi cab passengers. Like most choices, though, this one to be a sort of self-proclaimed laureate of San Francisco carries a price, the price of coming across as watering down the poetry to make it easier to understand. The flipside is that it is a poetry that is approachable, that invites a broader audience than stuffy, draconian reviewers like me, a poetry that laughs and shudders, reminisces and opines. It’s a poetry that swallows history into its eternal present, the speaker’s consummate offering to the reader.

Bill Neumire‘s reviews regularly appear in Vallum, and his poems have recently appeared in American Poetry Journal, Istanbul Review, and The Laurel Review. His first book of poems, Estrus, was published last year. He lives in New York with his wife and two daughters.

This review was published in issue 11:1 Thresholds. To see more from this issue, please visit Vallum’s website.

Vallum magazine is also available in digital format. Featuring additional content such as: AUDIO and VIDEO recordings of selected poets, further poems, interviews, essays, and MORE!

Download the FREE APP and FREE SAMPLE EDITION for your tablet, kindle or smartphone through PocketMags OR iTunes

Featured Review: Mosaic Orpheus by Peter Dale Scott. Review by James Edward Reid.

Mosaic Orpheus by Peter Dale Scott (Montreal & Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2009, $16.95 CDN, 182 pp). Review by James Edward Reid.

Mosaic Orpheus extends the concerns and achievement of Peter Dale Scott’s Seculum trilogy. Coming to Jakarta: a Poem about Terror (1988), Listening to the Candle: A Poem on Impulse (1992), and Minding the Darkness: A Poem of the Year 2000 (2000) demonstrated that both deeply personal and politically engaged poetry is possible. It is also a welcome antidote to the prevalence of navel gazing and politics of rage. The trilogy was composed in tercets, whose modest forms opened themselves to reveal a combination of the tenderness and biting laceration that recalls Dante’s limpid terza rima. In this book, poetic forms also ranges from densely packed quatrains to the celerity of two line stanzas. Other relatively free stanza forms engage with the challenge of sorting through the proliferating acceleration of information and disinformation.

Scott is a former Canadian diplomat who was appalled by the cover up of the American supported genocide in Indonesia, and wrote about it years later.Coming to Jakarta: a Poem about Terror, examined real terror, before “terror” was degraded to a cliché to justify the indefensible. Although the trilogy felt complete in 2000, Mosaic Orpheus is hopefully, not a coda, but a precursor to more poetry.

Scott’s new book opens with the memories in “Seven Canadian Poems.” The quotidian delight in the first poem (“Aunt Mary backing up the car”) was so utterly Canadian in the gentle unwinding of its humour that I found myself laughing. I tried to remember the last time I laughed out loud at a poem. But the true weight of Mosaic Orpheus rests in maintaining a balance between personal experience and knowledge of the Dickensian mills of the political world. Mosaic Orpheus looks back more than two decades to the frisson in the opening stanzas of Coming to Jakarta, “Mosaic darkness/ constellations… Why are you here?/ Have you something to tell me?”

Scott does have something to tell us: “the problem has always been/ how do we live with evil?” In addition to examining it, and sifting what truth he can from confusion, his poetry touches on the spiritual- distinct from the religious. One of the spiritual interests is Buddhism. From the evidence here, the advantage of a number of Buddhist practices is that they do not require conversion, only commitment to concentration. Possibly resembling the commitment to writing a good poem. “First Retreat: Fire Tending in the Land of Medicine Buddha” from Minding the Darkness pointed forward to “Commuting to the Land of the Medicine Buddha” in Mosaic Orpheus. Medicine Buddha practice tries to relieve the suffering of the sick and the dying. Both poems are remarkable for their honest portrayal of the discursive thoughts that surface when meditation attempts to clam the mind. In the former poem, Scott recalls “watching my mother/slowly fulfill her resolution/ to die.” In the latter he is “plotting/my early escape/ to Denise’s private memorial.” She is Denise Levertov, a fine American poet, and a good friend.

Clarity might be easier to achieve in personal poems, than in Scott’s densely argued political poetry, permeated as it is with a profound sense of history. To help the reader in both the Seculum trilogy and in Mosaic Orpheus, he provides notes and references. These notes link to Bibliographies that follow each section of the book. Notes to poetry? It makes sense- especially if you’ve ever staggered from pillar to post, trying to discern, for example, what John Ashbery’s multiple narrators are going on about.

The notes and four page Bibliography are especially helpful for “The Tao of 9/11.” This remarkable poem is the book’s sustained and ruthlessly reasoned centrepiece. It grapples with the slippery nets that entangle American Foreign Policy, the international  illicit drug trade, Al Qaeda, the Far West consortium, and possibly the worst thing Dick Cheney attempted while he was in power. And Cheney’s worst is an alarming accomplishment.

A few pages after the conclusion of this unsettling poem, Scott reminds us of Dante’s and Milton’s wager on how to live, “that to live in hope/ we must let go of our torments.” In the face of looming torments that Scott tackles head on, letting go and choosing to do what we do best, may be best. Consider his response when he returned home after one of the California fires burned his house to the ground. The fire destroyed a library built over half a century, as well as decades of writing and translating. Here is the equanimity of his response: “and the thick layer of ash/ Could this be all our books?” Peter Dale Scott’s choice to attend closely to the world, and present his experience of it, also echoes Dante’s long journey in the Purgatorio: “When Love breaths in me, I take note…and set it down.”

James Edward Reid‘s essay on Andrzej Wajda’s Katyn appeared recently in The Sarmation Review. His poetry has been published in Canada, the United States and the United Kingdom.

 This review was published in issue 7:1 Luck. To see more from this issue, please visit Vallum’s website.

Vallum magazine is also available in digital format. Featuring additional content such as: AUDIO and VIDEO recordings of selected poets, further poems, interviews, essays, and MORE!

Download the FREE APP and FREE SAMPLE EDITION for your tablet, kindle or smartphone through PocketMags OR iTunes

Featured Review: MISSION CREEP by Joshua Trotter. Review by Bill Neumire.

Mission Creep by Joshua Trotter (Toronto ON: Coach House Books, 2015, $18.95, 104 pages). Review by Bill Neumire.

No poetry book or work of art will last long without beginning ambitiously, and Joshua Trotter’s second collection, Mission Creep, is loaded with dynamic scope. It’s a caffeinated spill of cultural criticism newsfeed running on an engine of repetitious wordplay, humor, irony, and wit. Though broken into separate poems with sly titles like ‘Life Is Hard and Full of Miniseries,’ the book is really one long, somewhat narrative poem peopled with characters like Iron Wind, The Oracle, and Evel Knievel. As a long poem, it employs numerous and varied strategies of propulsion, from Whitmanian anaphoras and catalogs, to Homeric repetition of phrase. The acknowledgments section explains that the book makes use of the CIA Human Exploitation Manual, but it’s also  fairly classical in many of its references, alluding to Daedalus (which brilliantly becomes “data loss”), Icarus, The Phoenix (which becomes The River Phoenix, pointing its allusion backward to ancient Egypt and simultaneously to pop culture), and the minotaur. The major character of this mythical book, though, is the “professional life risker” Evel Knievel, an American daredevil who attempted more than 75 ramp-to-ramp motorcycle jumps and holds a Guinness Book of World Records entry for survivor of the most broken bones in a lifetime at 433.

Much of the excitement of the book comes from its grabbag of novel and quirky conventions: it employs the use of words stricken from official documents (“<unintelligible>”), but also Megahertz frequency numbers, mysterious page references, and seemingly random capitalizations of phrases such as “MAXIMUM DENSITY” and “THE BANALITY OF EVEL KNIEVEL.” Mission Creep’s words often disassemble and reform into other, similar-sounding words and phrases with drastically different meanings; for instance, the speaker in ‘A Growing Group of Concerned Citizens’  says, “The Oracle grew appendages. Penned adages. Adagios” (9). The book is also so full of allusions and erasures that a set of footnotes might be longer than the text itself, and at times it alters the language of those allusions ever so slightly, as in its nod to Cummings that removes the h from “hands”: ““Nobody, not even the rain, had such small ands” (32). In fact, the book constantly sets up predictable patterns of language only to veer away at the last moment, sometimes even heaping together cliches to imbue them with new meaning via new context; “a word repeated is another word” (60) the speaker claims, and later, “Each word is newfangled, unique, crisscrossing morning with a flashy trunket in its beak” (69). It is an inter-referential text that hinges on sentence-level and more overarching repetitions, such as the anaphoric “Let us” at the beginning of clauses throughout all of these poems. Without the breathing room of white space, the poems appear as prose in one thick block down the page, and they are long, multi-page pieces for the most part. As a result, the form makes it feel like a newsfeed deluge, like a stream of infinite data. There’s one section that even employs the language of an online Q&A: “<<Is the Iron Wind called the Iron Wind because of its colour/texture (iron-like), because it whips the victim like iron flails (whilts mutilating it of course) or because of something else entirely? Thanks!>>” (48). The book can, after a while, seem to become too complacent, too entertained by its own cleverness, such that a line like “Beware the Pacific Rimbjob” (21) struck too many times isn’t funny so much as groan-provoking. The speaker revels in the danger of such mutable language, though, and in ‘Transmission Creep,’ one of the last poems, that language quickly breaks down into nonsense: “Late summer remainder silence. Pwallowuime silence. Oovo-Bonarch butterfly silence. Ptanch-the lawking-Bannheim silence (…) uhese’p a flaph, apqark, pqou-telding” (87): Initially, the wordplay is fun and incisive, but tortured enough, it finally becomes fruitless.

Despite any minor flaws, Mission Creep is inventive, quirky, allusive, trendy, and clever. It wallows in pop culture with lines like “I once was lost in the mountains of Brad Pitt” (56) and “Don’t believe me, believe my status updates” (90). It’s deeply submerged in a complicated (and implicated) criticism of government, of war, of culture and capitalism; and its sense of the speaker’s own culpability, of any armchair critic’s culpability, is palpable as well, as the speaker asks,

if you think the name of her weapon is beautiful, are you implicated in the crime? What kind of gun did Annie Oakley use? What kind of gun did George Zimmerman use? What kind of gun did Walter White use? What kind of gun did Patrick Swayze use? See Red Dawn, Patrick and Jennifer grunting in the sun. The kids grunt in the sun because they’re hungry [masculine] and they’re hungry [feminine]. The kids aren’t lost, rather, crazed with lust, loosed among foothills with endless ammunition (60).

The voice possesses a commercial quality, as if it’s a critique that can’t escape being part of what is critiqued: it’s a voice that’s willing and thrilled to be lewd, obscene, comically dark.  It’s also a voice that presents a complex sense of identity, a sense that the “I” is created by a public, that an individual consciousness is a construct of a society. Consequently, there’s a distancing from the self that happens, for example, in ‘A Growing Group of Concerned Citizens’:

I watched my myself dig a

hole and drop my myself in. I covered my myself.

Watered my myself. I watched my myself bloom. It

grew a penis. It grew a beard and glasses. It looked

familiar. The ghost is clear, it told me (31).

But there is still an other, a “you,” and the speaker yearns to be one with the public “you,” striving to thrust himself into the public consciousness: “All I ever wanted was to drift at a great height, forever gracious, soaring through local argots in my Bell Magnum, dissembling my myselves” (97). This is a self in love with pop culture and the public in many ways but also swallowed by it to the point where “The only way to travel, now, is travel by proxy, copying and pasting my myselves over vast distances” (57).

In Mission Creep, Trotter solders classical myths, epic ambition, and Whitmanian parallelism and repetition to a sardonic, twenty-first-century voice drowning in a capitalistic, voyeuristic, pop culture war machine; it’s a voice roiling with irony, puns, sexual innuendo, witty linguistic jokes, and an ambiguous, self-implicating criticism. To this, he adds a surreal and disorienting narrative in which Evel Knievel, a man who made his living by creating arbitrary obstacles and leaping them for public entertainment–maybe not so different than a poet’s work–takes center stage in a ridiculous epic of the age of memes and torture manuals.

Bill Neumire‘s first book, Estrus, was a semi-finalist for the 42 Miles Press Award. His poems appear in the Harvard Review, Beloit Poetry Journal, and West Branch.

 This review was published in issue 13:1. To see more from this issue, please visit Vallum’s website.

Vallum magazine is also available in digital format. Featuring additional content such as: AUDIO and VIDEO recordings of selected poets, further poems, interviews, essays, and MORE!

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Featured Review: A JAR OF FIREFLIES by Josie Di Sciascio-Andrews. Review by Laurence Hutchman.

A Jar of Fireflies by Josie Di Sciascio-Andrews (Oakville, ON: Mosaic Press, 2015, $15. 95, 108 pages). Review by Laurence Hutchman.

Josie Di Sciascio-Andrew’s fifth collection of poems, A Jar of Fireflies, is about quests. In particular, it is about the quest in space and time to find a balance, whether recollecting peaceful family life in Italy where Di Sciascio-Andrews grew up, or in her present-day life in Canada. The author’s journey concerns the discovery of certain moments of the past to complete her mission in poetry. The first part of her book is dedicated to her life in Italy. Often, immigrant writers are caught between the idealized past of their old country and the reality of their new country as they attempt to adapt to their present life. Di Sciascio-Andrews has a powerful attachment to the land of her ancestors and her roots. In her poem “Sicily” she writes: “You will carry her in your heart / Like a genetic memory / Of blood, of family, of race.” She pays tribute to its long history. “Homer’s odyssey of Magna Graecia / Rome’s coveted pearl” and “Precious child of Carthage and Troy.” To evoke the Sicilian life, the poet makes an energetic use of sound, onomatopoeia and words to give a mimesis of dance and music, reminiscent of W.C. Williams’ “The Dance.”

…………The wild unshackling of Turkish tambourines
…………The unexpected thump,
…………Guttural human hum.
…………Determined heel step. Knuckle drum.

In poems depicting her family, Di Sciascio-Andrews expresses a strong love for her father. In “Red Accordion” she recalls his old musical instrument and how he had planned to replace it when the mortgage was paid:

…………The sound was good regardless.
…………How like my father to make good
…………Of the words and the mediocre.
…………His fingers harmonizing joy
…………For us, in allegro, andante.
…………Improvising the frenzied flights
…………Of old world soundscapes.
…………Waltzes and tangos. Mazurkas.

Although the reader might be easily captivated by the poet’s genuine expression of emotion,some of the poems can seem too sentimental.
If Di Sciascio-Andrews would be more open to fully exercise her thought and emotion of a scene or situation, as Keats suggested in his poetic statement in “Negative Capability,” then some of her poems could be stronger. In the second part of the collection, Di Sciascio-Andrews moves from the sunnier landscapes of Italy to the more temperate climate of Canada. In these poems she can be personal and see life through a more realistic lens, as in the poem “Landscape:”

…………Why do I feel most at home
…………On a day like this
…………When after a night of heavy rain
…………Light smudges morning
…………Onto the hard edges of things.

Here as she writes she is drawn to “Mystical philosophies / Of inner and outer worlds”:

…………On this foggy morning
…………The chrome-yellow centre line
…………Painted on the wet asphalt
…………Unfurls networks of neuronal highways
…………Intersecting through old, familiar
…………Yet forever changing channels of memories.

This is analogical thinking, and her ability to develop not number of isolated metaphors, but a series of related ones is a natural and inevitable way exploring the mind/nature relationship. The external world is internalized and the world of memories is externalized, breaking down borders, as in the work of one of Di Sciascio-Andrews’s favourite poets, Pablo Neruda.

One of Di Sciascio-Andrews strengths lies in the naturally exuberant quality of her voice, expressing itself in an epigrammatic affirmation as in “Poetic Alchemy”: “I extrapolate wonder from the commonplace” and “My eyes create reality.” I like these series of interconnected states of wonder, this expression of affirmation and celebration in her work.

The final poem “Emerald City” is a humorous adaptation of The Wizard of Oz:

…………Surely, her wide-eyed awe, her peasant braids,
…………Her blue gingham pinafore may be been construed
…………For bumpkin gullibility. “And should I, at your harmless innocence
…………Melt as I do?” Said the witch. Arm in arm with an inconstant
…………Courage, an underrated brain and a gutbucket heart
…………Dorothy tore back the sash on a sham wizard.
…………“Click! Click!” Went the shoes. “Home!” Cried the heart.

The poem is a witty and personable presentation of the story’s heroine.
It epitomizes the theme of this collection, the ability to encounter and overcome darkness. Di Sciascio-Andrews recasts Dorothy, juxtaposing a formal language with the quotation from Milton’s Paradise Lost with the colloquial language of the “inconstant / Courage, an underrated brain, and a gutbucket heart.” The poet displays these qualities in her protagonist to illustrate how she surpasses obstacles in order to return home.

Laurence Hutchman grew up in Toronto, receiving his BA from Western University in London, Ontario, an MA from Concordia in Montreal and a PhD from the Université de Montreal. He has taught at a number of universities including Concordia University, Western University and the Université de Moncton. Hutchman has published nine books of poetry, edited Coastlines: the Poetry of Atlantic Canada and In the Writers’ Words.
His poetry has received numerous grants and awards, including the Alden Nowlan Award for Excellence.  His poems have been translated into French, Spanish, Dutch, Italian, Bulgarian, Polish and Chinese. He lives and works in Oakville, Ontario with his wife, Eva.

To read more reviews please visit Vallum’s website.

Vallum magazine is also available in digital format. Featuring additional content such as: AUDIO and VIDEO recordings of selected poets, further poems, interviews, essays, and MORE!

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Featured Review: THE ROAD IN IS NOT THE SAME ROAD OUT by Karen Solie. Review by David Swartz.

The Road In Is Not The Same Road Out by Karen Solie (Toronto, ON: House of Anansi Press, Toronto 2015, $19.95 , 112 pages). Review by David Swartz.

Karen Solie’s way of approaching the reality of concrete things (and names) in The Road In Is Not The Same Road Out is to compare them to people. A thing is not a person. “People don’t stand in for each other the way things do” (“Museum of the thing”). Rather, Solie speculates:

A pail is thing. So is
the water it carries. A painting
hangs like a hat on a nail.

Judgement, perception, death are things
in themselves, they’re not nothing,
though they don’t, as things, appear.

Solie reimagines the value of existential certainty in light of her analysis of thingness. Evident in her title is an adamant refusal to become entangled by an originary intent. Truth is not a direct journey, rather, an unexpected passage. Questions never get answered. While remaining unflinchingly personal, devoid of any kind of rigorous philosophical method, Solie’s poems, unsurprisingly, reveal depth of vision. The themes are loosely laidout, wide-ranging: “the road in is not the same road out” alludes to an unexpected harvest of circulatory wanderings.

As philosopher, Solie provides us with everyday common sense suggestions: “Time is short,” and “Pedestrians, obey your signals.” Then, quite suddenly, things open to larger meanings. Unexpected metaphors loom at every turn (“a doorknob / came off in my hand like a bad prosthetic”).

After leaping into a poem, Solie takes short punctuated steps, keeping the reader wanting. She’s passionate and attentive to detail, and committed to the subject of her poem, herself, her hands writing the book, our hands picking up the book to read it

Solie deliberately brings in local imagery, colour, rhetorical questions, juxtaposing on one occasion Epicurus’ notion of injustice with the acquisition of Dion Phaneuf by the Toronto Maples Leafs. She wants to know if these are things too. Certainly they are. But once again, “people don’t stand in for each other.” A person is not a thing.

In Solie’s book, multiple ideas walk hand in hand, thoughts merge with questions, visions are born out of local descriptions and impressions. Solie’s tone is, at times, whimsically philosophical, autobiographical, impressionistic. Life is a vision to the visionary. There are many things to behold. What is the sense of these things? What is behind them? What is a thing? Solie contemplates such questions in her poems bravely.

“We are all locals now,” writes Solie. “A thing is what it is called.” To identify a thing by its name makes all of us relatives in the world of words. And yet, in a world such as Solie’s, where everything is full of metonymic significance, and where “the air is thick with personal messaging,” a thing can be what it is called, so long as the “Sad storm of objects becoming things” excludes living beings. “No thing / can survive such boredom.” In her philosophical and especially terse poem “Fables of the Reconstruction,” Solie writes: “Should a single being vanish into / what is not, so all things may vanish, as is written.” We get a sense of the kinship between thingness and nothingness. In many instances, Solie alludes to the paradoxical relationship between these two seemingly opposite poles of existence. Thankfully, her poetry does not get stuck in the mud of philosophy. Like a true artist, Solie is content to juxtapose things, names and ideas, simply to see what will happen.

Solie writes in broken-down digestible sentences (“the unknown is where we played”), and pregnant fragments (“Eternal life belongs to those who live in the present”). In her poem “the Living Option,” she maintains that 80 VALLUM the questioning method of philosophy perpetuates doubt. The only reason one doubts something is because one cannot see it. “If you can’t see it, / it’s philosophy. A game between us / and the nature of things.” Nevertheless, the place and existence of things remains steeped in mystery. “One doubt hides another.” Questions never get answered.

Solie will take another path: “he sensed in her an imminent change in direction.” She begins with self-consciousness, asserting herself through selfquestioning: “Still you … We were here once, hand in hand.” By now she is working on two fronts, addressing both herself and her reader: “What we share, though, transcends / ownership …” Aware of her rhetorical prowess and not wishing to direct herself or her reader through questioning alone, Solie indirectly suggests that poetry must rise above philosophical questioning, since “Neither question nor assertion makes sense / when truth is a tone of voice.” In The Road In Is Not The Same Road Out, Solie proudly reaffirms poetry’s ability to take on the great questions of epistemology and existentialism, by turning to the ongoing relationship between human beings and the nature of things themselves.

David Swartz is a Canadian writer, editor and visual artist. He has a Masters Degree in Comparative Literature from the University of Toronto and is currently studying painting at the Faculdade de Belas Artes at the University of Lisbon in Portugal. Check out his website: http://www.davidswartzart.com/.

This review was published in issue 12:2. To see more from this issue, please visit Vallum‘s website .

Vallum magazine is also available in digital format. Featuring additional content such as: AUDIO and VIDEO recordings of selected poets, further poems, interviews, essays, and MORE!

Download the FREE APP and FREE SAMPLE EDITION for your tablet, kindle or smartphone through PocketMags OR iTunes

Featured Review: ASBESTOS HEIGHTS by David McGimpsey. Review by Danny Jacobs.

Asbestos Heights by David McGimpsey (Toronto, ON: Coach House Books, 2015, $17.95, 96 pages). Review by Danny Jacobs.

The opening section of Asbestos Heights, David McGimpsey’s latest collection, is entitled “A Harkening of Flowers.” McGimpsey is so good at parodying the tacky earnestness of Canadian poetry that I could’ve sworn I’d heard that title before. Languishing in our country’s thrift stores are likely copies of a late-80’s chapbook by a defunct publisher (Creaky Farmhouse Press?) called just that. It’s a fitting section title: this might be McGimpsey’s most focused collection in its attempt to use CanPo banality as poetic fodder: “The asters on the roadside banks, wispy blurs,/ could be squeezed one day from the roots up/ to draw out at least three Canadian poems” (“Aster”).

Asbestos Heights spares nothing in detailing “the ivory tower’s ivoriness.” McGimpsey has always been entertaining when lambasting Canadian poetry’s constructed myths and social insularity. And some of his best quatrains are cuttingly and refreshingly frank about the population’s indifference to verse:

Outside, as the yarrow whips by, are towns
where Canadians happily live their lives,
unperturbed by who was excluded
from the Can Lit? Can Do! anthology.

In “Anthem for why you write poetry,” McGimpsey is equally entertaining while taking shots at our country’s affected literary hipsterism. The anaphoristic lines accrue in hilarity, and like a lot of McGimpsey, they flirt with absurdity but somehow seem spot-on: “You do it for microcrafted microbrew,/ for speeches about ‘the community’.” The poem’s final line is my favourite: “You do it for every cat named Salinger.” You may not know someone with a cat named Salinger, but you know the type. McGimpsey’s final lines often have a pay-off like this, relentless and carefully aimed. The poems rarely peter out.

Yet you’d be misreading McGimpsey if you thought he was penning this stuff just to spitball the professors’ tweeded backs. Its project isn’t all snarky tittering at CanPo’s cheesy themes and silly cliquishness. If that’s all there was, the poems would grow tiring, even petty, and sink under their own satirical weight. The truth is, McGimpsey loves poetry, and that is evident in his craft, in the sincerity that bubbles under every gag. The brilliance also lies in the working of his complex irony within the rigging of form. So a McGimpsey poem is funny, sure, but his best ones are first and foremost effective as poems, not punchlines. The less they seem like dashed-off jokes, they stronger they are. In “Sylvia Plath,” McGimpsey once again deftly skewers poetic pretentions, referencing Plath’s line about the “peanut-crunching crowd” in “Lady Lazarus”—a kind of lowbrow society McGimpsey is at home in. Here’s McGimpsey’s penultimate stanza:

Plath imagined her art’s insensitive foils
as the ‘peanut-crunchers’ around ball games.
When I spoke of my dream trip visiting ballparks,
my poetry teacher said, ‘What a nightmare!’

But it’s the next and final stanza where McGimpsey ups the ante with a smart tonal shift, a shot of pathos that raises the poem above flippant ridicule:

My father, at ninety-nine, could not
recognize his favourite Yankees’ faces
but knew their body shapes, averages
and what they did their last time at bat.

Baseball, in the working-class Parnassus of Asbestos Heights, is just as legitimate a subject for real poetry as anything else.

The new book, like the last, is filled to the brim with McGimpsey’s signature 16-line “chubby sonnets” (the only deviation from the four quatrain form is the italicized and untitled “I Love Noodles” poems that start each section of the book). One drawback to this repetition is a sense of sameness during some stretches. But when the stanzas are working, when they clack along within their respective poems, one gets to witness a top-level writer working in his perfected form. This is a rare and pleasurable event in Canadian poetry, where a lot of books come off as scattershot in their approach to lineation and stanza structure. In terms of voice and aesthetic aim, McGimpsey might be one of the most consistent and honest poets writing today. Please visit Asbestos Heights, and experience one of our national treasures throwing our nation back at us.

Danny Jacobs’ poems have been published in a variety of journals across Canada. His first book, Songs That Remind Us of Factories (Nightwood, 2013), was shortlisted for the 2014 Acorn-Plantos Award for People’s Poetry. He lives with his wife in Riverview, NB.

This review was published in the digital issue 12:2 “Humour.” To see more from this issue, please visit Vallum‘s website.

Vallum magazine is also available in digital format. Featuring additional content such as: AUDIO and VIDEO recordings of selected poets, further poems, interviews, essays, and MORE!

Download the FREE APP and FREE SAMPLE EDITION for your tablet, kindle or smartphone through PocketMags OR iTunes

Featured Review: SEQUENCE by A. F. Moritz. Review by Patrick M. Pilarski.

Sequence by A. F. Moritz (Toronto, ON: House of Anansi Press, 2015, $19.95 CDN, 158 pages). Review by Patrick M. Pilarski.

Sequence by A. F. Moritz exists between the driven and the drawn, in a progression from “sand, heat, and panicking light” to “the quiet click of the curtain hooks in the / light wind.” Moritz fills this gap with a percussion of leaving and arriving—a shifting space that can be readily shared and inhabited by the reader. The resulting sense of an inhabitable, inevitable journey is one great strength of Moritz’s polished and well-crafted book.

The opening image of the collection, and one that recurs throughout, is that of human motion through a desert. By bringing broad views on this landscape into sharp focus, Moritz interprets the distance between two unreachable points. A cascade of untitled, unbroken poetic segments collapses that distance into a single, resonant image that unfolds and refolds throughout the work:

motion of a journey that reached
a rest it earned or seized,
or in a night without stars or wind
has died. The motion
of a journey that has turned to rest,
and continues in the form of rest.

The result is a long poem that at different times appears modern and ancient, common and rare, solitary and communal. The effect works beautifully.What makes it so engaging? The answer seems to rest in a series of risky stylistic choices made by the author.

First, Moritz has chosen to draw on a number of voices, viewpoints, and
tenses, changing these dramatically from section-to-section, even page-to-page. These shifts could have the effect of drawing a reader out of the flow of the work. However, in Sequence the transitions fall nicely into the rhythm of the poems, and Moritz’s use of the second person viewpoint is especially engaging early on in the collection (e.g. “Whenever you stop or slow, restlessness stoops / and drives you”). His specific, precisely placed use of the first- and second-person present tense helps the reader connect and remain connected with the work in the absence of poem titles or explicit contextual shifts. The only place where the change in viewpoint may be jarring to the reader is in the shift to the first-person narrative of the book’s third section, but by the end of the section the new voice has settled and comes back like a pleasant echo throughout the rest of the collection.

A second crucial stylistic choice is Moritz’s pronounced use of repetition and iteration of both words and phrases. These repetitions occur within and between poetic frames and include “belovèd,” “rest,” “dark,” and “light.” Like a skipping stone, or a “walk slowly into a vast land / uninhabited and maybe never to be inhabited / that begins to flower or will never flower,” things that are spoken repeat throughout the reader’s and poet’s collective journey. Each time these repetitions are more welcome. In a lesser collection, or in the hands of a lesser poet, readers might find the repetitions off-putting. In Sequence, they don’t become stale or predictable, instead growing in depth with each iteration. This is a challenging effect to pull off well, and Moritz does so masterfully.

Today will be the same. First a course set in darkness.
Then in the bleaching day a wandering from it.”
[…]
The wanderer prefers to know he is lost
to the other way of seeing:
that it’s the earth that wanders lost in him.

It is also important to note the collection’s contact with our shared literature. Resonance is created by Moritz’s skillful use of allusion to other works (as noted in the book’s well-detailed after matter). Most allusions are subtle, emphasizing the shared journey of the book, the feeling that it gives the reader of being both alone and not alone in the motion from one place to another.

The macro-rhythm that is created by the arrangement of poems in Sequence makes it a rare and well-executed book. Paired with Moritz’s use of changing times, places, voices, and allusions, the overall effect of Sequence as a union of restlessness and “a search / through the place to be found” makes it a collection not to miss. The reader will have ample room to leave, to wander, and to return.

Patrick M. Pilarski is the co-editor of DailyHaiku and the author of Huge Blue (Leaf Press) and two short collections. Patrick’s poetry has appeared in journals and anthologies across North America, Europe, Asia, and Australia, and he has served as Vice President for the League of Canadian Poets. He is a professor at the University of Alberta.

This review was published in the digital issue 12:2 “Humour.” To see more from this issue, please visit Vallum‘s website.

Vallum magazine is also available in digital format. Featuring additional content such as: AUDIO and VIDEO recordings of selected poets, further poems, interviews, essays, and MORE!

Download the FREE APP and FREE SAMPLE EDITION for your tablet, kindle or smartphone through PocketMags OR iTunes