Home Waltz
by G.A Grisenthwaite
Palimpsest Press (2020)

Set in 1973, in a town near Kamloops B.C, Home Waltz by G.A Grisenthwaite is a typical coming of age story with a not so typical twist. The story revolves around fifteen-year-old Squinto (Bob) and his 4 friends: Skinny, Jim Jim, Cody, and Bimbo—friends being a very loose term to describe this group of misfits. What we have here are a group of boys mostly together because they’re all they’ve got. They have grown apart; they just haven’t said good-bye. The first three are tied by the familial, cultural, and experiential but Bimbo is not part of the indigenous community and also from a family that moved to town when he was young; so he’s not really a local and even more outside than the world of his friends. There is teasing and then there is I-hate-you-and-you-know-it-but-you-won’t-leave-me kind of teasing, which is often woven with a thick thread of I’m-hurting-but-don’t-understand-the-complexities-of-why-it-hurts kind of teasing. It’s all there for this group. Bimbo, so desperate to be accepted, tolerates an intolerable amount of verbal abuse from the other boys. Squinto, for his part, is second in line on the punching bag scale, joins in because if it’s Bimbo, then it’s not him. Squinto describes Bimbo as “his worst friend” and his distaste for him is no secret, though it is misplaced as much as it is well-placed. Nothing is simple. And on the surface, this is the tale: A group of teenage boys trying to make it to the dance of the year without being picked up by the cops, running out of booze or money, and maybe getting laid. It is The Outsiders, The Wanderers, “The boys the boys” (“The Montague Boys” by Justin Warfield), the weekend that will change their lives and set the pace for who they will become. If only they knew how true that really was.

They are not loners. They have other friends and family. Community. This group of boys offers a glimpse into the complexities of being a native youth in a colonial system, deeply entwined within it and an outsider from it. In their softer moments the boys are endearing with the appropriate fear and respect of their local waitress at the diner, their singing group they are all so proud of, and Squinto, a boy who wants to see his favourite band and have his first home waltz, a very simple request for a young man. But here’s the twist, Squinto is both too old for his age and just a child at the same time. He harbours a responsibility that he barely understands. He is not alone on this journey; his cousin, Erica, who took her own life when he was nine, is with him. She interrupts his “hot” dreams, reminding him to stay grounded, pay attention. Things are not always as they seem. Stay vigilant. Remember those who have gone before you. Remember those who are still there. He is guilt ridden because he was the last to see her alive. He believed her lie—going to meet her boyfriend, a picnic—and why not? He was just a kid and didn’t know there was a reason to not believe her. How could he be held responsible? I only wish Erica played a larger role in Squinto’s journey on the page. There is a perfect moment when she tells Squito to “stop haunting [her] death” when the reader understands the full circle of grief, love, and realizing there are some things we just have to accept and let be in the world. This moment is bursting with possibility.

Grisenthwaite weaves the classic coming-of-age tale into a story of deep grief and longing for place, the unfair treatment of First Nations people, but also the heart and kinship of First Nation’s communities. The nuances of being native, being young, being part of both an indigenous community and a Town in the interior B.C (or anywhere, really). The messy love and the cycle of pain, the fun and the fears. Squinto swears to Erica he will never let another friend die like her on his watch. He has a lot to learn. The road to healing is not linear, and sometimes it feels like the cycle has no off-ramp, but sometimes there is a glimpse of how to move forward; sometimes, if you’re paying attention, it comes from a late cousin teasing you in your dreams, teaching you from the spirit world, whispering from the trees.

Does Squinto get his home waltz? I guess that’s for the reader to decide. Sometimes it’s not the destination we want, but the journey, that we really need.

Crystal Mackenzie was born and raised in Calgary and has been writing for over twenty years. She studied creative writing in both fiction and poetry at Mount Royal University. She has been an editor at FreeFall Magazine since 2013, taking over as Managing Editor in 2019. She writes out of her childhood home where a postcard view of downtown and the Rocky Mountains often distracts her.

The post Review of G.A Grisenthwaite’s “Home Waltz” appeared first on FreeFall Magazine.

Dan Lockhart joins Shelley McAneeley to discuss his new work Tukhone, the Winsor area, and much more.

The post Dan Lockhart Interviewed By Shelley McAneeley on Tukhone appeared first on FreeFall Magazine.

Crystal Mackenzie

On Huron’s Shore
by Marilyn Gear Pilling
Demeter Press (2014)
ISBN 978-1-927335-34-5

We all have to grow up, some of us are just better at it than others. I’ve often wondered about the importance our society places on individualism, the lack of rights-of-passages we have for our children, and what that means for their ability to move successfully from childhood, to adolescence, to adulthood. Can we ever truly be individuals or is the influences of our elders too strong? For just as any rebellion is shaped by its opposition, any break or push to be different from our family is really an opposition shaped by them.

Marilyn Gear Pilling’s On Huron’s Shore is a collection of linked short stories threaded together to tell the tale of one Ontario family. Told from the perspective of the oldest sister, Lexie, it begins with the memories of a child. The reader is quickly reminded of a time when toddlers freely climbed from the front seat to the back of a car, from mother’s lap to siblings, while driving down the road, a time when children played on hills and dirt piles on streets not yet scarred by development. The first part of the book is a mixture of vibrant descriptions and harsh realizations of what goes on behind closed doors. It is where we are introduced to the forces that will shape Lexie’s adult life. The first chapter, “Tomatoes,” captures the dynamics of this family of five. The father is a man who gallops to the garden before dinner to “pluck eight or so large tomatoes from their stem” (3-4) so he can slice and eat them before dinner has even begun. He performs all his actions with enthusiasm and purpose. Lexie’s mother, on the other hand, is one not easily impressed and reminds me of my grandmother in her vigilance to ensure outside appearances never reveal the true dysfunction of her family. The contrast between Lexie’s father and mother is highlighted after Lexie receives 100% on a spelling test. While her mother’s response is “don’t blat that mark of yours all over the neighbourhood” (p. 61), her father helps prepare her for the upcoming spelling bee, “he works hard to make his children stick out above the multitudes” (p. 63). But this contrast is not meant to see one as bad and one as good; rather, it’s who they are (and who any of us are is always more complex than what meets the eye).

I didn’t want the childhood narratives to end but just as children must grow up, so did I have to move on to the next two parts of the book. Each story reveals little anecdotes of family, sometimes about the need for intimacy and sometimes about the need to push as hard as one can in the opposite direction. Gathered together they delve into the influences that relationships, both chosen and forced, have on all of us – how the complexities of who we are come to be. The stories transition smoothly and with little repetition. Lexie’s intimate, inner thoughts about her family are revealed to the reader with the essence of journal entries not meant to be read by outsiders. We see Lexie grow from the kid who understands life in the literal and sometimes misunderstood way of children, “their mother explains this behavior by saying their father was marked by the depression. Lexie has seen the depression. It’s a sharp dip in the farm lane. If their mother is driving, their father always warns her to ‘slow down for the depression’” (p.9), into one who has awareness of the big picture, the abstract, life beyond the what exists in the moment as it is right now, “some day my mother and father and Aunt Bea and Uncle Tommy and Ephram and Aunt Anna will be dead . . . Somebody else is going to live here. When I’m old, I’ll come back to Aunt Bea’s and everybody will be gone” (p74).  This is the first time she understands life beyond her family boarders. It’s the beginning of a passage that will witness the elder generation of the family become the ancestors and the children become the mothers and fathers, the grandmothers and grandfathers. From this moment Lexie has no choice but to move into a world of awareness that one can never turn back from, ready or not.

Born and raised in Calgary, Crystal has been writing for over fifteen years. She studied creative writing in both fiction and poetry at Mount Royal University. She writes out of her childhood home where a postcard view of downtown and the Rocky Mountains often distracts her. Other welcomed distractions in her life are her daughter’s ever evolving views on humanity, listening to her talented partner Ryan read drafts of his own work, and wine. Crystal is most inspired in her own writing when exploring the Rocky Mountains or the banks of the Bow River.

The post Crystal Mackenzie’s Book Review of “On Huron’s Shore” by Marilyn Gear Pilling appeared first on FreeFall Magazine.

gillian harding-russell
a

Morning After You
By Carmelo Militano
Ekstasis Editions (2014)
ISBN 978-177-10343

Carmelo Militano writes from the perspective of an immigrant to Canada from Calabria, Italy whose landscape shares some similarities to the prairies in summer but provides more of a contrast in winter. As well as the freshness inherent in being a foreigner, Militano’s eye for detail and his imagist approach work together with a fondness for unexpected angles and surrealistic effects. Frequent allusions to English literature combined with homely images from his native Calabria weave irony and a layer of suggestion, and lend sophistication and a European homeliness to classical effect. Whereas in“ The Atlas” Militano uses a metaphysical conceit in the manner of Donne’s iconic image in “The Compass,” in “Bus stop, Main and Logan,” the poet builds the poem on an allusion to Ezra Pound’s “In a station of the metro.” Meanwhile, in “Winnipeg Noir,” a piling and patchwork of literary allusions is reminiscent of T. S. Eliot’s “The Wasteland.” Altogether there is a natural grace and energy to Militano’s writing while his experience builds on the tensions between his homeland with its weight of cultural history and the modern Winnipeg setting with its anonymous grey streets, between literary /classical traditions and a contemporary popular culture of poet societies in which the poet-speaker complains about “this ceaseless habit / of writing on shadows in the middle of the afternoon” (82). Humour and elegance and archness in the poet’s style and tone draw the reader in even as one detects a certain self-irony.

Reminding me of the scene with the rescue of the nun on the bridge in Ondaatje’s In the Skin of a Lion, Carmelo, in the opening poem, “Finding 17^th Century Poetry on the Window Sill at the end of August in Italy” juxtaposes the sacred and profane and the historic and the contemporary. From the cool breeze that “swells the curtain of nine months,” with that image’s association with the gestation of pregnancy, the following lines liken the house to a “convent”:

white washed walls, with narrow black cross above the headboard
plain wooden chair turned away from the table
open closet door on an angle like the lid of a coffin (11)

Here raw juxtapositions and paradox are smoothed into long lines that flow with an unexpected mellifluousness, and the poem ends on the turn of yet another surprise association. While the female figure in the poem identified as “you” is pictured reading Marvel’s “To a Coy Mistress,” she turns away from the sun’s “winged chariot” to reveal her “full breasts / away from the modest Calabrian sun.” There is a naughtiness and a playfulness amid the erudition that entices the reader with intricacies of conflicting impression that have a net-effect of strengthening each others’ ironies.

While reading the erotic “The Atlas” with its central metaphor of maps, I was reminded of Donne’s “The Compass” in which the poem hinges on a single point of similarity between the compass and the always returning ‘faithful’ lover. Accordingly, in the Atlas, the map metaphor is extended and developed in ingenious ways:

just before the bells on a camel caravan ring
to cross the flat desert of your belly
pause to smell salt
near your original connection to the sea
register a promise
to your solitary prisoner on the embankment
who now waves and stiffens
above your dew filled valley (22)

Militano has a talent for erotic poetry, and this dramatization of the lovemaking is poignant through the freshness of his images. In droll romantic denouement, the speaker urges “the moon, stars, sun to return / send light back into the universe” while in “in a single, fitful blast simulating orgasm all the maps born under (the lover’s) skin” must be redrawn (Ibid.).
That the poet-speaker finds himself caught in a northern hemisphere where the skies are wintery and grey becomes most poignant in “November.” Here images drawn from Italy and the old world have the effect of accentuating the differences between Winnipeg in November and Calabria during its extended period of seasonal mildness. In these lines an implied old woman image captures the natural setting and humanizes it in an old-world way:

Low mud green rivers under the city bridges
move slow as swollen legs
ice thin and clean as a silk scarf
sits on the edge of the riverbanks (64)

I imagine Ceres become an old crone as transported to winter and another hemisphere while biding her time until her daughter, Proserpina, may return to her for a visit in the spring.
In the closing lines, the poet is impelled to “undress the evening “with the invasion of a thousand sighs” and he feels a detached association with the moon pictured with “a fat crooked smile” that reminds this reader of Hades in his craven and slightly disturbing marriage to Proserpina after taking advantage of her having eaten three seeds of a pomegranate (Ibid.).
Unlike “November” in which the poet makes contrasts between the current and remembered setting, in the summer poem “Light and Sky in Winnipeg” the poet discovers surprising similarities between Winnipeg and his memory of Calabria which might even convince the reader that he has come to welcome his new home, at least during the summer.

my tomatoes are plump and green
pagan sunflowers worship every day
and beans scale the mesh fence
like ancient Roman soldiers (52)

In these lines, Militano brings alive the current setting by allowing his Italian experience to influence and add resonance to our seeing what may otherwise be too familiar and taken for granted. As do the romantic and classical poets, Militano uses personification (usually considered too formal contemporary poetry) that comes naturally to him and does not feel imposed in reference to this western Canadian city as seen through Mediterranean eyes.                            In “Winnipeg Noir,” carrying the subtitle “suite of poems at the intersection of who we were and who we are,” Militano similarly brings together classical and contemporary allusions.
The Latin phrase “pulchritudinous night” may to our modern ears sound closer to ‘putrid” than beautiful,’ and what follows suggests how this speaker’s disenchanted romantic view may have been converted to one who now discovers pleasure in the city’s salacious or ordinary fare. The following anaphora beginning with ‘the city’ combines a choral effect (characteristic of Greek drama) with something like modern rap (as Militano would read the poem aloud in a coffee shop):

City where the streets are shiny with pools of wet light
City where a cat slips under the fence at midnight
City of broken streets, big box stores and broken houses
beside the red-wheel barrow Williams insisted we see for the first time
City where you find yourself and lose yourself over and over again (76)

“What remains” for this disillusioned but somehow invigorated speaker is the “Holy Trinity of   coffee, fries and burgers, hissing like/lovers” (Ibid).
Here is a poetry collection that juxtaposes classical and modern traditions as returning to the poet-speaker’s homeland of Calabria, Italy as well as offering a unique immigrant slant on the city of Winnipeg itself.

The post Book review of “Morning After You” by Carmelo Militano appeared first on FreeFall Magazine.

Nikki Celis

“Pride, I suppose. Stubbornness. Greed. Some defect in myself, which proves I am my father’s son and also the son of Adam.” – Jim Hawkins, in Motion, Andrew. The New World. New York: Crown Publishers, 2015. Print.

Greed, a concept so familial with the psyche, is something that yearns to be satiated through our actions, whether it is to the benefit of others or not. It is thus both destructive and rewarding. This serves as the foundation and the driving force of Andrew Motion’s novel The New World, sequel to Silver (2012)—both serving as a follow-up to Robert Louis Stevenson’s literary classic, Treasure Island (1883).

Although The New World serves as the second book in the series, it works well as a standalone novel. Any reminders of Silver and Treasure Island were dispatched within the first few (short) chapters, save for Jim Hawkins Jr. and his un-reciprocating and wholly singular love interest, Natty Silver—descendants of Jim Hawkins and Long John Silver, respectively, both now former ghosts of themselves, stuck in the past and unable to let go.

Picking up immediately after the events of Silver, returning with the remaining treasure left behind in Treasure Island, Jim and Natty wake on the shores of Texas after surviving a devastating storm, leaving the ship, Nightingale, a wreck, and its crew drowned and deceased. The protagonists find themselves ‘robbed’ of their treasure, taken captive by a band of aborigines that Jim so eloquently calls “savages,” and are held prisoner for a period of time in the village. Upon being freed from confinement thanks to the innocence of a young girl, not yet corrupted by the villages’ more base, violent nature, Jim and Natty deem it fitting to claim a possession from the (sleeping) chief, Black Cloud: a prized silver necklace etched with carvings of animals. This single act of greed lays the stepping-stone for many of their encounters with various people throughout the story. Their journey home takes them from the desert of Texas to the Mississippi River and finally to New Orleans, while at the same time being relentlessly pursued by their former captor.

The degree of influence (as well as the repercussions) of colonialism and greed are apparent through the actions of the protagonists and their unwillingness to return what they have stolen—as well as through their encounters with the three tribes they meet over the course of their journey.

There’s Black Cloud and the Painted Man’s obsession—or love—of the necklace, a source of power that Black Cloud uses to enthrall the villagers, as well as instill fear in the tribes throughout the region; Chief White Feather and Hoopoe, members of a peaceful, spiritual tribe of Native Americans, who show particular disdain for the English more-so than the French or the Spanish as Jim notes in their initial interaction with Hoopoe, “…I thought he wanted me to understand that these new arrivals were scooping up the earth;” and the more direct and strikingly morose encounter with the third tribe, led by Chief Talks to the Wind and Fire Wife, driven from their land by the “White Man”, and as a result have become sick and destitute.

While, until nearing the end of the novel, Jim and Natty are being pursued by a vengeful and vicious Black Cloud, the aborigines of North America have been affected by their own Black Cloud as well: that of the destructive nature of British colonialism. It is a concept that is expertly conveyed, and one that should be lauded. However, Motion, is no Thomas King or Richard Wagamese, and even though he did plenty of research to characterize his Native American characters, there’s a typical disconnect (often evident when a non-minority writes about these subjects). Even still, Motion conveyed the story as proficiently, and beautifully, as he could.

Though Motion is able to illustrate each tribe quite eloquently and is also adept at distinguishing each individual with their own particular identity, each character other than the two protagonists (as is with many adventure novels) are static, one-note characters that, more often than not, are used to push the story forward. Jim’s passive and often self-absorbed personality is contrasted with that of Natty’s determined, also self-absorbed, take-charge attitude. As the two main characters of the story, both Jim and Natty are intended to be the individuals that the reader should be empathizing with the most. Rather, I often found myself frustrated with their actions, shaking my head and gritting my teeth with their selfishness.

However, such frustrations were abated due to Motion’s beautifully crafted descriptors as his background in poetry gives him the advantage of painting a scene that is not only aesthetically pleasing, but also emotionally alluring. Each chapter is relatively short, allowing readers to absorb each scene much more easily.

And, while the progression of the novel was quite slow, I found the pacing to be smooth and fitting, as The New World is not an action, swashbuckling romp, but that of discovery and reflection.

The post Book review of “The New World” by Andrew Motion appeared first on FreeFall Magazine.

gillian harding-russell

In Verge, Monahan writes slender verses that carry a MacEwenesque self-discovery and wisdom. Just as MacEwen associated with ‘magic animals’ and talismans as an extension of her Jungian-conceived consciousness, so Monahan identifies with the fox figure in a series of “verges” or prayers that run through the collection. The term “verge” indicates some brink of discovery through pain—as on the verge of tears—or experience, which Monahan often conceives as a physical landscape. Interspersed with these verges, Monahan writes about family members in terse verses where small details evoke whole lives.
Although these intermittent prayers dubbed “verges” supply the title for the poetry collection as a whole, the word “verge” appears in “verge 8,” which I will call the ‘title verge’ for this reason. Here the poetic phrasing once again recalls MacEwen’s finely chiselled, sparse verses:

I am on the verge
of some understanding
some thing I am meant to know

(102)

“Dark Pines under Water” with its Jungian depths of consciousness comes to mind. Rather than using the landscape as analogue and psychological metaphor, Monahan reflects her delight in the nimble and alert creature of the fox itself: “I dream of the small hello / of your ears / pricked and listening” (102).
In spite of a mystical tendency in which the speaker identifies with the fox figure throughout these ‘verges,’ Monahan can be down to earth. In the poem “my mother’s name was Nancy,” the speaker describes her mother as a young woman who “pinched her cheeks / to give them colour” and “met a young French man / who broke her heart” (16).

Later she married dad in a long satin gown
fifty tiny buttons down her back.

(16)

Monahan’s interest (tinged with amusement?) in the number of buttons at the back of her mother’s dress adds a no-nonsense human quality to the poem that contrasts with the more elusive voice in the verges. In that parallel thematic series, the poet is seen to follow her poetic-of-the-artist-as-vessel for inspiration, as expressed in the poem “not I”:

it’s the fire woman
who turns and turns
in the shiver of silver flames
words sparking from her mouth.

(62)

Here the “fire woman’ who “turns and turns” at once evokes MacEwen’s dance and echoes Yeats’ similar application of the image.
Not only does Monahan have a minute and particular musical sense that is heard inside and at the edges of her verses, but also a humanity that is warm without sentimentality. The ending in the poem about the speaker’s mother “my mother’s name was Nancy” ends with the portrait of a woman of strong character who does not give up, causing her husband displeasure while she repairs the eaves when dying of cancer:

She stayed home as long as she could
showing me how to make seven layer dinner
when to add the fabric softener
two weeks before Christmas
in the middle of the night

(18)

The poem’s ending, with the doctor’s reported words, is moving: “Nancy it’s time we took you to the hospital now…” To which her mother “after hesitation” replies “yes.”
Similarly, the poem dedicated to the speaker’s father, “dad’s angel” shares this hard-headed quality. Monahan begins the poem matter-of-factly: “No Billy Graham angel / all glory and grace,” her father is not without flaws. In fact, he keeps playboy magazines under the bed, drinks beer with his buddies, and “loved the heft of a good gun.” Monahan builds up to the poem’s ending with a storyteller’s grace and gentle irony, stating that her father’s angel didn’t hold her father in his arms or smile a “beatific smile”:

Dad’s angel just showed up
said c’mon Bill, let’s go.

(32)

Contrasting with the more cultured elements in the verges with their nature imagery and the fox image, there is this no-nonsense human quality to the family poems that have a folksy quality.
Monahan, who is writer-in-residence for the wards Victoria Hospital in Prince Albert and facilitates the Writing For Your Life group with the Canadian Mental Health Association is a strong advocate for individuals with psychological afflictions. That her experience may be firsthand is suggested in the poem “there was a time.” The speaker recounts, “I was a thin walking stick of pain,” and likens her experience to that of an “insect” “wearing my exoskeleton / living on lettuce leaves.” That she skips two or three days eating and “the lighter I became / the less weighted I felt” tells us the speaker is afflicted with a form of anorexia:

food pulled me down
into the overfull lap
of my father and grandmother
fat with disapproval

(34)

The appeal of this new state of being as a “will-o-the-wisp-woman” or “a magic wand” becomes clear as the speaker expresses the desire to “tap three times” and make herself disappear. There is a mystical suggestion in this poem that, while about family, seems to have more in common with the more introspective verges.
Perhaps the most moving poem about family comes in the long poem about the speaker’s sister who suffers a stroke (“the word for every thing”). In an amusing dramatic tableau, the speaker teaches her sister words that she has lost, and in her sister’s fumbling calls her “the poet.”

the coyote in the field is papaya
slippery ice is itchy
            my slip on shoes are coupons

(95)

The mistaken words do indeed have the freshness of malapropism that make the speaker see the world anew, but her sister’s response is that she is still the poet: “no she says and hugs me you” (95).
In the final poem “verge 10,” the fox reappears as a figure of redemption that in identification with the woman “waits in the forest’s calm palm”: “I want to be / like you   unhurried and graceful / accepting of what comes next” (118).
Here is an elegant collection held together lyrically with the fox running through the forest, and the speaker divided between her introverted and extroverted selves as she celebrates life in its beauty amid family losses while also striving to come to terms with herself.

The post Book review of “Verge” by Lynda Monahan appeared first on FreeFall Magazine.

Lisa Deane

The Vacationers
By Emma Straub
Riverhead Books
ISBN 978-159463157

Gistnopsis:

Middle-aged married couple Franny and Jim, 28-year-old Bobby, and 18-year-old Sylvia, along with Franny’s best friend, Charles, his husband, Lawrence, and Bobby’s unwelcome over-40 girlfriend, Carmen—vacation in Majorca for two weeks. Despite their enviable display of plenty during an economic recession, the leisurely literary fiction plot is driven by vividly realistic relationship tensions. Like any group, not everyone is looking forward to spending time together: Sylvia wrestles with being a teen in the 21st century, Jim and Franny arrive at their thirty-fifth anniversary in anguish, Charles and Lawrence battle insecurity while soothing baby fever, and Bobby and Carmen discover the perils of lukewarm “love.”

Impressions:

This novel lifted my mood on an emotionally gloomy weekend and elicited multiple, genuine bouts of laughter within the first 100 pages. I came across The Vacationers on a top ten list of books to read this summer, so naturally I snubbed it. But when I took a spontaneous family weekend getaway myself, I downloaded a Kindle sample on a whim and couldn’t stop reading—which is exactly how it should be. On my solo night, I read 40% in one go, easily, on a lounge chair by the beach in Bequia. I braved chikungunya, potential burglars lurking in the shadows, and pirates sailing through Friendship Bay on powerboats to stay up and glide through the pages in true vacation form.

Straub’s prose is funny, and feels current without being too current. In other words, it’s not my generation current: rife with curse words, drug use, and indiscriminate sex, like a favourite HBO or Showtime series. Instead, there are quaint scenes I sometimes feel alone in relating to, like an eighteen-year-old virgin who has tarnished her reputation by kissing too many boys. Even Sylvia’s sex scene with Majorcan native, Joan (pronounced Jo-ahhn), is demure, but still sexy, causing just as much of a physical reaction as the ones I’m used to reading, which go more like, Pussy this, fuck that, harder here. Their rendezvous on the beach isn’t love—which places it outside the bounds of ideal sexual/emotional conservatism—but it is lovemaking, the pace and aura falling in tandem with gentle civilization as well as the gait of the novel as an introspective on daily-life intimacy. The condom sort of ruined things for me (don’t they always?!) but I suppose Straub wants to display the pleasant side of impulsivity and risk-taking without seeming to encourage unplanned pregnancy and the unnecessary spread of disease. Still, engulfed in the moment, I found it hard to imagine that Jo-ahhn would have anything but perfect, gentlemanly sperm.

By page 293, we’ve come full circle from catching a cab in front of the Posts’ Upper West Side home to taxiing down a Madrid runway. Ultimately, The Vacationers succeeds in portraying a family struggling with the universal human challenge: relationships. There are countless novels that try to accomplish the same thing, but they read stiff, as if they were written by a person with a laptop and a dictionary, but no real passion for the visceral nature of literary language. I started a couple hopefully, but, although the content was interesting—betrayed wife may murder husband, artist’s mistress dumps him to get married and he pines for her while tolerating his frigid French wife and toddler daughter—each word felt contrived, leaving me uncomfortably aware that I was reading. With The Vacationers, you’re a fly on the characters’ internal walls, and all the intangible aspects, the relationship dynamics, the good bits, are experienced instead of retold. Sadly, in the Kindle version there were two jarring typographical errors—one early on with faulty subject-verb agreement, and the other a misplaced letter in the middle of a word. Novels this enjoyable deserve the best editing.

Include in a 1000-book lifetime limit?:

Yes.

Lisa Deane earned a well-decorated honours BA in English Literature from the University of Toronto, St. George, 2011. She is a freelance writer who reads relentlessly and has an affection for fiction.

This is exclusive FreeFall blog content.

The post Book Review of “The Vacationers” by Emma Straub appeared first on FreeFall Magazine.

Shelley McAneeley

Do You Think This is Strange?
Aaron Cully Drake
Brindle and Glass Publishing
ISBN 978-1-927366-387

Having just completed my usual morning talk with my aged mother, I notice that I panic, and mentally search for meaning during the conversation with her.  I hope to respond at the right moment, which requires knowing what we are talking about. I think I am listening, I try to listen, but I am often challenged to even know what the topic is. It seems to be skipped over, assumed perhaps, and I have to solve the puzzle quickly before the test question comes. Are you listening? What are you thinking about? I wonder if the conversation includes me, as she will often hang up mid-sentence. I wonder if the difficulty arises from age, or if communicating has always been this way, and I chose to ignore the problem? I wonder if youth has its own focus and finds most conversations irrelevant enough to ignore. But here, too, is Freddy’s problem.

Drake’s plot focuses on the strange world of Freddy, a high functioning autistic. I laughed often when reading this book at the weird dilemmas caused by miscommunications. Freddy’s dilemma below illustrates the issue. He is resisting his mother’s efforts to take him to meet a stranger called Jesus, who he is not sure he really wants to meet.

At the time, I had not yet met Jesus. Many people recommended that I get to know Him, but I had yet to be introduced, and my mother decided it was time for me to make His acquaintance. I remember struggling with my mother, who held my mask in the air as I jumped frantically, trying to snatch it back… “You can’t go to church with a mask on,” my father told me as he watched from my bedroom door. “Jesus might think you’re a mugger.” (Pg. 25)

Freddy’s world is logical, and in his mind everything proceeds without the emotional investment that plagues most humans. Literal translations are typical of his understanding of language. His worldview lands him in difficult situations where his meaning and the perception of the listener are at odds. Another event occurs for Freddy on a cold winter day.

This was the state of my thread when it was interrupted. If allowed to continue, I would have reasoned that people preface remarks with other common words, such as “Jesus Christ,” but I shouldn’t infer that the person is Jesus. Proof of this it that my father frequently addresses me, as Jesus Christ, but we both understand that my name is Freddy. “Jesus Christ!” he will shout. “I swear, the next time you spit toothpaste all over your shirt, I’m going to make you wear the damned thing all day!” (Pg. 93)

The book is not about religion. Above are delightful examples of how we assume meaning in our quick-paced daily discourse. Our social experience is tied to our ability to make giant leaps in our understanding through language. Freddy’s internal dialogue yields an interesting and heart-warming journey into his adulthood. The absurd is part of Freddy’s life, just as it is for my aged mother. The gap between two people is bridged through communication.  The richness of the world is embedded in the magic of words, words that embody emotion, but for Freddy, this is missing. Freddy’s world is a mystery to most others, understanding him and his understanding of the world are at odds. And, perhaps through the elderly, we get a first hand glimpse of that gap. Words can trigger memories, allow extrapolation, grant conceptualization and share reporting, only if the mind does its job. Do You Think This Is Strange explores a new language, and if you make the effort to discover Freddy’s world, you will be amazed. The book is a delightful read full of laugh-out-loud moments.

This book review is exclusive FreeFall Blog content.

The post Book Review of Aaron Cully Drake’s “Do You Think This Is Strange?” appeared first on FreeFall Magazine.

Friday night at Hastings Park.
Our beer in plastic cups. Pre-race,
the announcer tells us to look for
a big ass, a line of muscle along the abs
as horses bounce and prance past
patio tables, retirees with circled stats,
hipsters in fedoras, weekend warriors,
families and first-timers craving novelty.

The regulars drink inside,
beer rings stamped on betting slips.
Bred for impulse, live-feed TVs.
Minutes till the starting gun,
exam hush as their pencils wager
cubicle earnings against Luck
of the Devil. A flurry of hunches
before crack.

Cramped on their saddles,
Jockeys jack-in-the-box.
Horses try to outrun
whips. Call it sport or
9 to 5 odds I can’t watch.
Close my eyes.
A wall of noise
at the finish line.

Squamish, British Columbia poet Bren Simmers adds her voice to the poetic geography of Vancouver through her second poetry collection, Hastings-Sunrise (Gibsons BC: Nightwood Editions, 2015). Every time another poetry collection on and around Vancouver social geographies emerges, I’m amazed at the growing list of authors who have articulated that particular city through the scope of the poem, from George Bowering’s George, Vancouver (Kitchener ON: Weed/Flower Press, 1970) and later Kerrisdale Elegies (Toronto ON: Coach House Press, 1986; Vancouver BC: Talonbooks, 2008) to Daphne Marlatt’s Vancouver Poems (Toronto ON: Coach House Press, 1972) and updated Liquidities: Vancouver Poems Then and Now (Talonbooks, 2013), to Michael Turner’s Kingsway (Vancouver BC: Arsenal Pulp Press, 1995) and so much further. There has been a whole slew of poets who have worked to articulate Vancouver, including: Meredith Quartermain, Stephen Collis, George Stanley, Elizabeth Bachinsky, Sharon Thesen, Fred Wah, Sachiko Murakami, Cecily Nicholson, Oana Avasilichioaei, Roy Kiyooka, Earle Birney, Clare Latremouille, Gerry Gilbert, John Newlove, Christine Leclerc, nikki reimer and Shannon Stewart, among so many, many others. I ask again: what is it about the city that inspires poets in such a way?

People we pass every day
become our landscape,
and we, theirs.
A friend tells time
by where she passes
the same woman
on her way to work,
which block. On
Granville, it’s opera man,
who belts out Puccini,
Rossini, Verdi maybe,
as he strolls the sidewalk.
Here, it’s the woman
in a tiara begging
outside McDonald’s,
the old man we watch for
at sundown, and he for us.

One of Vancouver’s oldest neighbourhoods, the working class neighbourhood of Hastings-Sunrise sits immediately east of Vancouver’s fabled “Downtown Eastside” and has been experiencing a resurgence over the past couple of years, moving from abandoned buildings and evidence of drug use to a gentrification that includes condo development and an increase in small business. Simmers’ portrait, a lyric suite of poems that exist predominantly without titles, includes sketching out poems-as-maps, such as “Maps of Neighbourhood Swings,” “Map of Open Doors,” “Map of Autumn Tree Colour,” “Map of Christmas Lights” and “Map of Neighbourhood Routes,” all of which end with the caveat, “Not to Scale.” Simmers’ exploration of the Hastings-Sunrise area is very much constructed in terms of creating a portrait of the area through the lens of her experience, and one that works less as a portrait specific to Vancouver’s Hastings-Sunrise than the ways in which a neighbourhood becomes absorbed within the body, whether one allows it to, wishes it to, or not. This is a book about being present. Less critical than exploratory, Simmer’s Hastings-Sunrise is closer in tone and temper to similar works by British Columbia poets Elizabeth Bachinsky and Sharon Thesen than to, say, Stephen Collis or Cecily Nicholson, and her notes at the back of the collection echo that idea of domestic immediacy, as she includes: “A shout-out to Hastings-Sunrise for insisting I pay attention to my life in the present moment […].” Presented with little commentary, historical elements or critical gaze, Simmers sidesteps the usual portrait of a geography for a portrait of how a geography becomes internalized, and the ways in which we interact in urban spaces. In a poem on the local wading pool, she writes: “This park a shared / backyard, erases divides, draws / zebra foals and lion pups / to the watering hole.”

This book review originally appeared at robmclennan.blogspot.com.

Born in Ottawa, Canada’s glorious capital city, rob mclennan currently lives in Ottawa with his brilliantly talented wife, the poet, editor and bookbinder Christine McNair, and their daughter, Rose. The author of nearly thirty trade books of poetry, fiction and non-fiction, he won the John Newlove Poetry Award in 2010, the Council for the Arts in Ottawa Mid-Career Award in 2014, and was longlisted for the CBC Poetry Prize in 2012. His most recent titles include notes and dispatches: essays (Insomniac press, 2014), The Uncertainty Principle: stories, (Chaudiere Books, 2014) and the poetry collection If suppose we are a fragment(BuschekBooks, 2014). An editor and publisher, he runs above/ground press, Chaudiere Books (with Christine McNair), seventeen seconds: a journal of poetry and poetics (ottawater.com/seventeenseconds),Touch the Donkey (touchthedonkey.blogspot.com) and the Ottawa poetry pdf annual ottawater(ottawater.com). He also curates the weekly “Tuesday poem” series at the dusie blog, and the “On Writing” series at the ottawa poetry newsletter. He spent the 2007-8 academic year in Edmonton as writer-in-residence at the University of Alberta, and regularly posts reviews, essays, interviews and other notices atrobmclennan.blogspot.com. He currently spends his days full-time with toddler Rose, writing entirely at the whims of her nap-schedule.

The post Book Review of “Hastings-Sunrise” by Bren Simmers appeared first on FreeFall Magazine.

rob mclennan

Undercurrent
By Rita Wong
Nightwood Editions
ISBN 978-0-88971-308-6

both the ferned & the furry, the herbaceous & the human, can call the ocean our ancestor. our blood plasma sings the composition of seawater. roughly half a billion years ago, ocean reshaped some of its currents into fungi, flora & fauna that left their marine homes & learned to exchange bodily fluids on land. spreading like succulents & stinging nettles, our salty-wet bodies refilled their fluids through an eating that is also always drinking. hypersea is a story of how we rearrange our oceanic selves on land. we are liquid matrix, streaming & recombining through ingestic one another, as a child swallows a juicy plum, as a beaver chews on tree, as a hare inhales a patch of moist, dewy clover. what do we return to the ocean that let us loose on land? we are animals moving extracted & excreted minerals into the ocean without plan or precaution, making dead zones though we are capable of life. (“BORROWED WATERS: THE SEA AROUND US, THE SEA WITHIN US”)

Vancouver poet Rita Wong’s fourth poetry collection, undercurrent (Gibson’s BC: Nightwood Editions, 2015)—following monkeypuzzle (Vancouver BC: Press Gang, 1998), forge (Nightwood Editions, 2007) and sybil unrest (with Larissa Lai; Vancouver BC: Line Books, 2008)—is, as Wang Ping informs on the back cover, a “love song for rivers, land, and sentient beings on earth.” Constructed out of lyric fragments, prose poems, memoir notes and extensive research, undercurrent is an extensive pastiche of the story of numerous bodies of water, and our relationships to them. Writing in, around and through the lyric flow, the poems exist, in part, as an extensive call to action against an increasing level of human carnage inflicted upon the earth and its inhabitants: “midway at midway, sun glares plastic trashed, beached, busted / bottle caps, broken lighters, brittle shreds in feathered corpses // heralded by the hula hoop & the frisbee, this funky plastic age / spins out unplanned aftermath, ongoing agony” (“MONGO MONDO”). Unlike a number of other British Columbia poets writing on the dangerous effects of capitalism, Wong’s undercurrent, much like Cecily Nicholson’s From the Poplars (Talonbooks, 2014), allows her subject matter to be the focus, existing not as victim but as robust character, describing a series of affronts, assaults and toxic tales, as well as positive stories on the beauty and power of the undercurrent. As she writes:

after eighty destructive years
industrial blockage of salmon habitat
we celebrate this uncanny return in the city:
salmon to Still Creek in 2012
alert, adept swimmers
kindle, perpetuate, astound
with sleek scaly stamina
miraculous as the salmon that grace Musqueam Creek
with each year’s turn around the sun
an unbroken vow between relatives

Composed as collage, this is the story of water.

In spring 2014, canoeing in the gentle River of Golden Dreams near Whistler, BC, I fell in when we snagged on a branch and suddenly tipped over. The shock of cold water awoke me into vigilance. Wearing a lifejacket did not eliminate the fear I felt as the river enveloped me completely, reminded me of its power.

 Ironically, I cannot swim, though I have taken lessons over the years, and continue to try learning in an on-again, off-again way, as skin and health permit. Having addressed barriers to swimming in the city one by one – finding an ozone-purified pool instead of a chlorinated one, getting prescription goggles, practicing kicks, etc. I have improved but still find myself woefully clumsy and tense in the water, as it conducts so much sound and stimulus, thicker than air. How can someone write a book with and for water, and not swim? Very humbly and respectfully, I would say. It’s not so much that I fear the water, as I fear my own inability to manoeuvre in it, based in part on my reluctance to relax, the resistance to submit to the water’s own dynamics for more than a few breaths. This is partly what I mean when I say that I am still learning water’s syntax. I mean that in a much larger way too, though. One water body flows together with other water bodies, a whole greater than its parts. “What you cannot do alone, you will do together.”

Thanks to the river’s prompting, I will return to the swim lessons when the time and conditions are right. In the meantime, even for those who don’t swim, water rules! Our cities and lifestyles are built upon it, whether we know it or not. Try going a day, or three, without water. Water gives us life. What do we give back to water?

This book review originally appeared at robmclennan.blogspot.com.

Born in Ottawa, Canada’s glorious capital city, rob mclennan currently lives in Ottawa with his brilliantly talented wife, the poet, editor and bookbinder Christine McNair, and their daughter, Rose. The author of nearly thirty trade books of poetry, fiction and non-fiction, he won the John Newlove Poetry Award in 2010, the Council for the Arts in Ottawa Mid-Career Award in 2014, and was longlisted for the CBC Poetry Prize in 2012. His most recent titles include notes and dispatches: essays (Insomniac press, 2014), The Uncertainty Principle: stories, (Chaudiere Books, 2014) and the poetry collection If suppose we are a fragment (BuschekBooks, 2014). An editor and publisher, he runs above/ground press, Chaudiere Books (with Christine McNair), seventeen seconds: a journal of poetry and poetics (ottawater.com/seventeenseconds), Touch the Donkey (touchthedonkey.blogspot.com) and the Ottawa poetry pdf annual ottawater (ottawater.com). He also curates the weekly “Tuesday poem” series at the dusie blog, and the “On Writing” series at the ottawa poetry newsletter. He spent the 2007-8 academic year in Edmonton as writer-in-residence at the University of Alberta, and regularly posts reviews, essays, interviews and other notices at robmclennan.blogspot.com. He currently spends his days full-time with toddler Rose, writing entirely at the whims of her nap-schedule.

The post Book Review of Rita Wong’s “Undercurrent” appeared first on FreeFall Magazine.