Michelle Hardy

A Review of:

If You Lie Down in a Field, She Will Find You There

Colleen BrownRadiant Press, 2023
ISBN: 978-1-98927-494-1
110 pages
$20.00 CAD

Remembering an Unremarkable Woman:

Colleen Brown will not allow memories of her “perfectly human and unremarkable” mother to be overshadowed by the “spectacle of her murder.” Brown’s memoir If You Lie Down in a Field, She Will Find You There, published by Radiant Press in 2023, investigates the story of her mother’s life. Only eight years old when Doris Brown died, Colleen Brown consolidates her own childhood memories with present-day adult interviews of her siblings and cousins, as well as with an essay written by her sister Laura twenty-five years ago. In the opening pages of her book, Brown admits that when younger, the only way she could attribute meaning to her mother’s life was to “willfully excise her death.” Now, Brown writes to understand the whole of her mother’s existence. During the process of remembering, this author’s childhood recollections create new interpretations of her family’s past.

Colleen Brown is an artist, primarily a sculptor, and this memoir is her first book. Brown chose to shape this work of creative nonfiction into modular sections of varying lengths. Narrator sections are untitled, while sections attributed to the memories of each of the five siblings are headlined by their first names. As writer, artist, and subject, Colleen Brown occupies all possible points of view in this text.

Brown is the first-person narrator as well as first-person Colleen, youngest sibling residing within the home. Also, Brown’s siblings refer to her in the second and third person when they speak to and about their youngest sister in interviews conducted for her book. The author is everywhere on the page yet often nowhere in the history; twenty years younger than her oldest sister, many family memories were created before Colleen was born. Sibling anecdotes and conversation snippets provide the colour and texture Brown needs to write about family events and circumstances she did not directly observe. Her brothers and sisters’ stories fuse with Brown’s own childhood memories to evoke images of her mother’s care. The result is a memoir in which Brown’s adept handling of language blends with innate artistic ability to push past the narrative pull of true-crime blockbuster into the aesthetic realm of literature.

Texture plays a large but subtle role in Brown’s memories of her mother. For example, she recalls her mother’s bedspread: thin sage-coloured cotton covered in chenille popcorn tufts. Looking back now on the memory of that fabric, Brown writes:

“Thinking about this weak backing having to support the regime of gridded chirpy pom-poms makes me feel slightly sick.”

The author’s present-day queasiness, at the recollection of her childhood mother’s bed, does as much heavy lifting as the tiny squiggles used to separate certain small but graphic blocks of text. These hard-break symbols, far more explicit than the description of a bedspread or the memoir’s gentle poetic spacing, warn readers to stop. To contemplate violent realities that create temporal and logical disconnects within Brown’s story. Not only are references to violence bracketed by these hard-break symbols, but also the syntax of the references is clipped and direct. These sentences stand alone. They are kept separate from descriptions of Colleen Brown’s mother, her family, and their life. What skill and authorial guts. To convey the weight of violence within this story while giving little time and space to heavy, morbid detail.

My favourite passages from this book contemplate the connection between language and violence. Specifically, language is examined in terms of its relationship to the buttons on the Brown’s new 1970s blender. Each button had a unique name young Colleen could neither read nor understand:

“The violence of chop and crush beside the whimsy of whip and puree, finished off by a horrifying liquify.”

After Colleen’s sister Laura carefully shows her “the inside where the blades spin to invisibility,” Colleen, even at her young age, remembers characterizing the text of the blender buttons as “flim-flam.” Too big of a gulf between “the actual mechanics of the machine and all the language” represented, she recalls. Skip now, past the blender metaphor, to the memoir’s end when narrator Colleen theorizes “a violent death contains narrative dark matter…do not touch.” In other words, language describing violence may initially exert a gravitational pull. But those same words become devoid of meaning when applied to someone’s life story.

Colleen Brown hypothesizes she would have been a different person had her mother lived. She also admits they may not have liked one another as adults had her childhood mother been permitted the opportunity to age. This kind of honest, raw self-examination is the real subject of memoir. Images of bedspreads and blenders aside, what kind of woman was Doris Brown? Colleen writes:

“Family and friends have used larger cultural narratives to place her in history and explain her to me at different points in my life. The most common contexts reached for are feminism, economics, and justice.”

But Colleen Brown has an artist’s eye. So, she weaves these strands of ideology with her family’s memories of colour, shape, and specificity. Eventually the whole texture unifies, and it’s more than a statistic. It’s a woman, a real woman who existed in time and space.

Some components of the book felt unexpected or difficult to process. Uncaptioned photographs caught me off guard, despite the text’s detailed bibliography. And I found Laura’s interaction with her mother’s murderer in the psychiatric ward unsettling. But I think this says more about my own contemporary-media-shaped expectations than any deficiency in the writing. The pronoun shifts caused a minute amount of confusion. But overall, the multiple voices, style, tone, and structural setup worked for me. Readers should also visit https://colleenvbrown.org/  to view the author/artist’s same-titled art exhibition; the images posted there relate directly to this memoir.

The title If You Lie Down in a Field, She Will Find You There evokes both haunting threat and comforting reassurance. Despite the heartache it induces in me, I find Colleen Brown’s memoir quiet and restful. This true-crime story is not a plot-driven thriller. However, it does contain momentum as readers strive to comprehend: what happened to this woman? And in a broader sense, how has her daughter coped? Colleen Brown’s memoir subordinates her mother’s murder to her unremarkable life, and by doing so underscores that death was not the conclusion to Doris Brown’s story.

The post If You Lie Down in a Field, She Will Find You There appeared first on FreeFall Magazine.

Five Little Indians
by Michelle Good
Harper Perennial (2020)

Michelle Good reminds me of my grandfather and the time when storytellers spun words into magic. Five Little Indians is a curl up book. Residential school survivors, fresh and innocent to the horrors of living in a big city, are woven into a compelling tale. The characters, already Isolated and torn from their natal families, these children became masters of survival while at residential school; but life in the cloistered church school could hardly prepare them for life on the tough Vancouver streets. Their ages vary somewhat from 16 to early 20s when they are ‘dropped’ into their new lives. Naïve to the difficult conundrum of living alone, and under employed in Vancouver, each one is confronted with the bias of the colonial world. Good unfolds a tapestry that illustrates how these young adults limp through the
new challenges. Below is an introduction to some of the characters Good creates with an enticing quote.

Maisie
“I sat in front of the vanity mirror, looking at the reflection, this stranger. I looked close into my own eyes and saw a truth there I knew I would never be rid of.” pg 76

Kenny and Lucy
“Not a day without fear. Through it all, she had relied on Kenny. Not just for his encouraging notes and shy smiles, but because he ran and ran and ran. He would not let them beat him. And he believed in her. He even told her so. He was not as hollow then as he was now.“ pg 106

Clara and Mariah
Clara stiffened, the familiar rage rushing through her veins. “Pray? You mean talk to myself and imagine some guy in the sky will make it all better?” pg 193

Howie
“You have no idea what that man did to me and a whole lot of other boys. He deserved what he got and a whole lot more. Where was the law then when he was beating us, breaking bones and other, even worse things?” pg 16

Some escape, some die, and others survive despite the agony of their recurring nightmares they all live as best they can. Good creates compelling and convincingly real scenarios. Her characters desire to be regular men and women whose lives are not driven by their past, nor compelled and unchangeable. They shoulder each other to get beyond the camaraderie of nightmares. Though Good’s dialogue style has been commented on, it fits, it all fits so well as to be believable. Good’s book does not depend on sympathy or misery, it harkens to hope and healing. Even to an awakening. Like Maisie, take a good look in the mirror, you just might see truth staring back at you.

This book is a compelling read and highly recommended.

Shelley McAneeley ponders art in its many forms. You can enjoy some of her poems in Drifting Like a Metaphor, edited by Micheline Maylor, and available through Frontenac House.

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Fields of Light and Stone
by Angeline Schellenberg
University of Alberta Press (2020)

Fields of Light and Stone is a book of poems through which Angeline Schellenberg pays homage to her elders, their complicated histories, and her connections to them. The book is dedicated to “all who seek comfort in story/ with love for these imperfect saints” and from the start, Schellenberg connects herself to these “imperfect saints” through the land she grew up on and her grandparents’ stories.

Half the book is dedicated to her maternal grandparents and the other half to her paternal and throughout memories, biblical quotes, and religious ceremonies as well as letters and historical documents create and inform the poems that are personal and detailed, but also rich with deep contemplation.

“Everything there is to say” is her opening poem, which begins with “Everything there is to say/ has already been said about trees.” and what a grand statement, but then to go on and say more, and link “The Siberian elms (like my ancestors)” to those who “would not stay in one place.” From this beginning the poems move through time and memories, as if the narrator is sitting by the bedside of each of her grandparents and while listening to their stories, interweaves her own memories and lived tales. The book ends on “The First Trees” as if trees are structures creating a framework for these poems to live within the bounds of, “Lighter than oak or regret, aspen crates are perfect/ for carrying the books our ancestors/ have yet to write.”

Schellenberg’s careful layering of moments is captured in “The Night of the Fair” where, after being caught in a rainstorm, “we ran to her condo,/ mini-donuts dripping/ and sat four-generations deep” there they talked of Tsarist Russia “and my husband’s bald chest peeking/ out of grandma’s mint-green robe.” Throughout the first-half the grandparents letters are used as touchstones, and journals as historical documents.

Sometimes shifts in pronouns “you” and “I” made me pause, read more slowly to discover who was being referenced and what the clues were. Not all stories comes easy, as in “Between Seed and Harvest”: “After great-grandma dies and you marry her sister/…she will try to starve your daughter and leave/ your family broken./ There are no fairy-tale endings.” The you here, her grandfather.

This folding of the narrator’s life and her family’s weaves throughout in poems like “Deep Breathing” where the narrator gives birth, and that breathing is equated or recalls the grandmother’s last breaths.

A narrator with sometimes childlike-wonder and adoration of these elders moves through the relics of their lives. In the second half, her Oma and Opa are so much a part of the young Schellenberg’s life and stories shape those “Fields of Light” : “She perches on the edge/ of a piano bench/ in a Field of Light.// It’s 1919 in a Ukraine/ before famine and Oma/ is singing.”

Later when the Oma dies, the poet wonders, knowing her Oma will not meet her future children as she faces death: “is that sheen/ the morphine, or the rheum of angels?”

A deep and contemplative book that shuns linear telling favouring voice, and brief recollections from here and here and there and lets them resonate, like keepsakes – letters and recipes, her Opa’s German bible – through shifts in time and perspective.

Yvonne Blomer’s The Last Show on Earth, her fifth book, came out with Caitlin Press in 2022. Yvonne’s poetry books include As if a Raven (Palimpsest Press, 2015), and the anthologies Refugium: Poems for the Pacific and Sweet Water: Poems for the Watersheds (Caitlin Press, 2017 and 2021). Sugar Ride: Cycling from Hanoi to Kuala Lumpur (Palimpsest Press, 2017) is her travel memoir exploring body, time, and travel. Yvonne is the past Poet Laureate of Victoria, B.C., and the past Artistic Director of the weekly reading series Planet Earth Poetry. She lives on the traditional territories of the Lək̓ʷəŋən (Lekwungen) people. Yvonne mentors and teaches in poetry and prose and has students zooming in from across North America.

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Waves
by Diane Girard
Volume Publishing (2021)

What was I expecting inside this simple cover on a seemingly self-published book? I don’t mind admitting I recognized my own prejudice as I opened this book, which was quickly washed away by Diane Girard’s facility with telling tales. As an author of fiction, frankly, it’s difficult to understand how someone who writes with such fluidity and insight into people can remain virtually unknown except by her local Kitchener-area literati.

That first story convinced me, as I have a family member who battles addiction. Her protagonist in Thirty-Day Wonder seemed to verbalize everything I had ever learned about their condition. All it would have taken is to change the names and the tale could have told of my own family member instead. That is how real her work is, and how authentic her characters are. But could she maintain her grip on me through the entire collection?

Waves is a collection of vignettes; it’s easy to imagine are pulled from real life experiences. The characters are so authentic that the reader can visualize sitting in the room with them as they share their tales. Diane Girard presents as something of an enigma. My assumption is that she simply hasn’t been discovered yet. That should change dramatically if enough readers are made aware of her debut collection.

I was immediately impressed by this collection of short tales, both for her facility with language and for her deep observations of the motivation of her character’s experience. Yes, there are fresh characters in every tale, and each of them is presented with new problems. While these stories are quiet on the surface, each has an undertow that exerts a pull on the reader’s imagination. In other words, the title of this volume is appropriate as each story exhibits the energy of waves with their undertow.

Lori Hahnel says Girard treats her characters, “with kindness, with humour and always with respect.” This is true, but there is something even more important about these stories. Each one reads as so thoroughly authentic that every character feels like they are someone that you know or are bound to meet. Most of these tales deal with people experiencing some gritty trial in their lives, but Girard’s connection to their inner thoughts is both clean and brilliant. It may be a woman resisting her addiction to drugs as in Thirty-Day Wonder, a worker who worries about a cranky; and independent elder on her care list in Unlocked, or someone who counsels a friend who is leaving her husband in The Prevalence of Chocolate. All of these stories are told with a depth of heart that is rare for a first collection.

Are there any stumbles along the way? Yes, there are a few. Her story of an ex-soldier rings true except for the portrait of his PTSD within the tale Unlocked, which ironically lacks the emotional connection to make it believable. It isn’t difficult to predict the ending to Peach Fuzz and Sunflowers, as Rosalie mistakes the young man paid to do her yard work for her long-passed husband with an even more predictable, but less believable, result. Yet, each story opens with an unusual setting, the dialogue of the characters is ever-so authentic, and the endings usually give us a satisfying twist. Overall, this is a remarkable first collection.

Sharon Berg writes poetry, fiction, nonfiction, book reviews, and articles. She has published poems in periodicals across the world, as well as several books of poetry, chapbooks, and short fiction collections.

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Watershed by Doreen Vanderstoop
Freehand Books (2020)
ISBN: 9781988298597

The dystopia in Doreen Vanderstoop’s Watershed is one worryingly reasonable: it’s 2058, no one has enough water, and being a farmer is rough—even rougher than usual. While corporations are looking to pipe out what H2O Alberta has left for a profit, Willa Van Bruggen and her husband are barely keeping their cattle-turned-goat farm alive amidst never-ending dust storms and disease—all while their son Daniel, who betrayed Willa for the city, attempts to make some high-level change. Vanderstoop’s writing is strongest when it centers on Willa, her difficulties understanding her son, her white-knuckle grasp on her late father’s property, and, eventually, her encroaching madness. When it comes to the dystopian setting itself, however, the writing dips into a classic sci-fi mishap: overabundant exposition from characters who narrate like historians.

Take, for example, Daniel’s first scenes walking through the Calgary of 2058. The narrator, in limited third-person perspective, describes everything as Daniel sees it—including street names, the writing on signs, the types of garbage by his feet, the names of the buildings he passes, and etcetera. Or take chapter 6, which begins with “Dan sat down at the back-corner table of the nearly deserted Starbucks at Crowfoot Centre in northwest Calgary.” The back corner might establish Daniel’s character, and the near-empty Starbucks sets the scene and the ambience; the Crowfoot Centre and northwest Calgary, on the other hand, are irrelevant details, especially to a non-Calgarian reader.

In contrasting then Calgary and now Calgary, Watershed strikes for the hearts of real-life inhabitants who know the city’s landmarks themselves. The Palliser hotel, once extravagant, now houses the homeless. The Olympic Plaza, made for winter sports, now sits abandoned and pointless in the dust. The problem with these otherwise-powerful details, however, comes from the delivery. From the perspective of Daniel, the narrator stacks exposition upon the reader in long bursts that interrupt the flow of the plot and seem unjustified coming from a character who would have no reason to take note. In chapter 3, there are 11 references to different streets and locations, most of which are irrelevant to the plot and all of which had no place in the character’s mind at that moment. In chapter 10, the reader gets a full explanation of the current products in Calgary grocers, where they’re from, and why farmers changed from potatoes to less “thirsty” crops—all because Daniel’s landlord looks malnourished.

These issues in Watershed seem to appear most often when the narrator becomes distanced or dishonestly representational of the point-of-view characters. Conversely, moments in which the narrator is closest to the current character is where Watershed succeeds—and where Vanderstoop writes her most efficient lines. In characterizing Willa, Vanderstoop uses clever imagery and metaphors; for example, “Willa strained the bad news from the pile of innocuous facts. Picking nits from a mink, her father would have said.” Later, in the juxtaposition of assisted suicide with the euthanizing of a horse, Vanderstoop weaves desperation in-between the vivid sights and smells in a room full of death. In fact, Vanderstoop excels in near-all moments of literal confinement within the novel: whether it’s the room of a dying man, the office of an inflated executive, or the cell used after the novel’s late thriller twist, these moments of intimacy bring a tender honesty to characters that might otherwise have been left in the dystopian dust.

Watershed is written by a Calgarian for Calgarians. For some, this may be its primary selling point, and such readers will likely be happy with what they find. For others—non-Calgarians or impatient sci-fi fans, especially—the exposition and straying focus may hinder an otherwise tender and honest experience.

Vincent Potter is a Calgarian writer and editor. Since graduating from Mount Royal University’s English program, he fills his time with freelance editing and writing poetry next to his guinea pigs.

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TreeTalk
by Ariel Gordon
At Bay Press (2020)
ISBN-10: 1988168279
ISBN-13: 978-1988168272

First of all, TreeTalk is an innovative poetry collection. While most entries are from Gordon, many others come from quotes or members of the community, as poems were attached to and later collected from an elm tree in Winnipeg. In creating this collection of poems, Gordon slowly transitions from being a writer to being a curator and finally an arborist. TreeTalk seems fairly random in its assortment of poems in the beginning, but as the collection grows and branches out, patterns emerge. The poems work in tandem, creating a discourse about community and the relationships between nature and humans. Gordon uses short forms packed with imagery and depth to produce these patterns, growing the book one leaf at a time in a way that keeps the reader interested the whole time. 

The connection between plants and humans is in lines such as “I am shrinking like a violet” and in poems which do a taxological breakdown of Winnipeg and elm trees. In some cases, Gordon explicitly compares herself to plant life. In cases such as the taxonomy lessons, one must consider the two poems in relation to make the most of the collection. This comparison of poems is often a necessity, as some are not strong on their own. For example, a sense of community emerges from the quotes used throughout the collection, as one states “Why do you fight to save the elms… they are all going to die anyways” while others claim “we may never see trees of this size in Winnipeg again” combined with a quote praising “Little towns that worship big elms.” It is this clash of perspectives, the inclusion of poems from passersby, and the attention paid to Winnipeg specifically that make the elm and this collection a kind of living artifact for the city, intertwining the two forever. However, these poems by themselves are nothing to write home about. 

In addition to a sense of kinship between the city and the elm, Gordon also adds a sense of dread about how capitalism views the tree. This sentiment emerges in lines such as “I’m sorry for what we are doing to you. I want us to be better” and poems which outline “the utility of trees” which discuss how humans consume wood for “barrels, boxes, crates, furniture…” In these poems, Gordon makes the most of her economic forms, transforming the simple elm into a martyr for the city of Winnipeg. 

Lastly, I must discuss the use of form and space. There are often pages with as few as three or four lines which is kind of an ironic waste of paper given the critique of consumption. One whole entry for example is “I am shrouded, cooled. / I am canopied, in good / company. I am treed.” It is poems like this, standing alone in the middle of a page, which leave me wanting more. The empty space could turn into the tree itself if Gordon had used more concrete or emblem poems. Even these three-lined poems, presumably the haiku mentioned in the book’s intro, were a letdown to a reader of Japanese literature. They often lack a kireji—the cutting word on which haiku depend so essentially—and are too heavily influenced by the “I”. 

At the end of the day, however, this critique of form is my only gripe with the collection. Gordon presents the themes in the book with an interesting variation in media, and the idea of creating a collection of poetry with the community is an innovative idea that Gordon masters. The collection is an artifact of the community, and provides well-written commentary on the relation between humans and inner-city trees. It is a collection I would recommend to anyone who is a fan of short forms, an arborist, or a Winnipeg resident. 

Skylar Kay is a not-so-new writer who has a passion for Japanese forms, specifically haiku. Her work has appeared in several online and print journals, including Autumn Moon Haiku Journal and Ephemerae. 

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Catherine Owen’s Riven is a collection of poems woven together to blend the feeling of loss with the introspection of life offered by the river. Captivating imagery engulfs the reader, allowing them to be transported to the banks of the Fraser River; to smell the moss growing on tree stumps, to hear water lapping against river’s edge, to be entirely encompassed by the sounds of nature in its purest form. 

Humans have always settled near the water, and Owen transcendentally moves the readers to the banks of the Fraser River to explain different life lessons, as told by the rushing water and all other organisms present in the river setting. The loss of life is transcribed by the author in such a manner that is exploitative of the circle of life as told from the point of view of loss-veiled eyes. 

In many instances, the author allows the readers to two different perspectives; the first coming from the individual emotion conveyed due to the loss of her loved one, whereas the second is metaphysical in nature and focuses on external surroundings. Metaphorically, the river acts as a representation for the life and death we encounter throughout our lives, focusing on the loss, the hope, and the memories created throughout the navigation of life itself. 

Though a majority of the grief-stricken content focuses on the natural aspects of Owen’s environment, it becomes apparent that even manmade structures exist in the serenity created by the banks of the river. These structures and their interaction within the ecosystems act as key players in the author’s understanding of the two worlds working with and within one another to create a complete picture. The water is ever flowing, ever moving, and this coincides beautifully with the ever-changing landscape of human nature and the effects of manmade structures as they mingle with nature: 

Prolong me along the estuary 

where the cataclysmic wildflowers, all their poppy-joy- vermillion smitten in pointillist manifold burgeon 

and there are discarded rust hangers too beautiful not to be unwedged from granite and shouldered home, such bolds & rivers of ruin. (14) 

Throughout Riven, readers are taken on an introspective, personal, and relatable journey through the evolution of love, loss, and the memories that flow in the same manner the Fraser River flows through the Greater Vancouver region. Despite the heavy themes present throughout the collection of writing, Owen is a master of her craft, giving readers the opportunity to float verse after verse with a melodic approach. 

Just like the waves lapping the shore, flicking the banks with its soothing tongue, Riven captivates, moves, and encourages readers to delve into contemplation and raw emotion, all whilst connecting to the serenity of nature. Through life, loss, and the searing pain that memory can bring, Owen sums up her own collection with the single statement: 

You will never entirely appreciate O River, which is what gave it this name. (78)

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A Handbook for Beautiful People
Jennifer Spruit
Inanna Publications (2017)
ISBN: 978-1-77133-441-9

A Handbook for Beautiful People by former Calgarian Jennifer Spruit is a gentle love letter to the imperfect and broken set against the backdrop of the 2013 floods. A compelling and complicated story of making impossible choices and finding grace, Spruit’s characters are at times quirky and original, at times desperate and violent, but always filled with fierce love for one another.

Marla, a young woman with Fetal Alcohol Spectrum Disorder, is a free-spirited, often flighty soul, with a strong voice and a murky past that she battles to keep hidden from her emotionally-distant boyfriend, Liam. A hallmark of Marla’s FASD is her struggle to stay focused on following through on attaining even the smallest goal. Marla is late for work, forgets to return from breaks, and is easily diverted from her duties. But she knows for sure that she loves Liam, and that she is good for him, even if he sometimes seems embarrassed and overwhelmed by her.

Liam is a straight-laced music teacher who desperately wishes for a career as a musician, but his future as a professional cellist is hampered by an increasing ache in his hands. He loves Marla, but her over-the-top-ness and fun-seeking is sometimes more than he can take.

Liam also despises Dani, Marla’s housemate and best friend since the “old days” when the two women clung to each other, turning to prostitution to survive. Now, Dani is weighed down by an addiction she supports by selling sexual favours from her basement suite. Dani hates Liam, too, with his judgmental looks and expectations, and would like nothing more for him to disappear from Marla’s life.

Marla is managing both relationships as best she can when two things happen: one, she gets pregnant, and two, her deaf brother, Gavin, returns from out east after years away. Gavin communicates through a combination of lip-reading, signing, and writing in a notebook – which means he often misses the context and intent of a conversation. He is a keen observer, a preacher of clean living and honesty. He writes his most secret thoughts in his journal, the cover of which bears the inspiration for the title of the novel.

Spruit has chosen to make Marla and Gavin narrators, each alternating a section to tell the story as only they can – Marla, who hangs her emotions and needs out for everyone to see, and Gavin, who is introverted and silent, keeps everything locked up, closed inside his Handbook.

Now pregnant, Marla’s well-intentioned good-heartedness is still derailed by her inability to hold onto her thoughts long enough to follow through on what needs to be done, and what needs to be done is “what’s best.” Best for her baby, but also best for her. Marla holds an image in her mind of what being a good mother means. She and Liam will be the loving, safe family that she herself never had. They will provide a home, and sanctuary.

Then Marla and Liam break up and Marla is set adrift. Gavin and Dani collide in a violent confrontation that changes everything.

Set against the backdrop of the oncoming Calgary flood, each character begins to flounder under the expectations and limitations they face. Lies are told and compounded, people are hurt, and boundaries erode until the ties that connect all these disparate, desperate lives together snap under. Rising flood waters amplify the increasingly difficult and complicated choices Marla must make for her baby. Liam has left her, her brother is having a breakdown, and her drug-addicted best friend is jealous and acting out. Marla struggles to simplify choices and relationships, to distill them down to what’s best.

When the flood comes, each character is pushed to his or her limits – the baby arrives, along with the most heartbreaking choice a new mother can make. Should she keep the baby? Marla must rely on her optimism and faith to make the best decision she can for her child.

A Handbook for Beautiful people is sad, yet filled with grace and forgiveness. The characters are funny, kind and, at times all too human and enchantingly infuriating. They are always looking to be better, to try harder and to reach higher in spite of the difficult circumstances they face.

In A Handbook for Beautiful People, Jennifer Spruit has written a vibrant, original story that, in the end, leaves the reader more aware of and more empathetic to those who struggle to live and thrive on the margins of society.

Kim McCullough is a writer and teacher from Calgary, AB. She is the author of the novel Clearwater. Her writing has appeared in various literary journals including The New Quarterly, Room, FreeFall Magazine, and Grain. Kim is currently working on a collection of essays about education.

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Ruba’iyat for the Time of Apricots
Basma Kavanagh
Frontenac House Poetry (2018)
ISBN: 978-1-927823-81-1

Basma Kavanagh’s Ruba’iyat for the Time of Apricots is a long-form poem written in earthy quatrains that are woven together with delicate alliterative sound and entrancing imagery. Like streams driven by gravity towards a great body of water, Kavanagh’s narrative quatrains flow together under the weighty contemplation of one ultimate topic—heritage.

Kavanagh’s work nimbly braids three narrative threads—Ahli, Astura, and Ana—through the stanzas. Ahli explores Kavanagh’s Lebanese heritage and family history, Astura binds the oppression of women with environmental crisis, and the third thread, Ana, explores the relationship between poetry, language, and life. The overlaying of story allows Kavanagh to uncover the many histories of her identity.

Ruba’iyat for the Time of Apricots is a poem enchanted by the science and mystery of creation. Notice how effortlessly Kavanagh blurs the line between the creation of human life and the crafting of a poem:

An embryo grows cell by cell, a poem word by word –
kalima bi kalima. From a kernel, each invents,
then discovers, its limbs, lungs, heart. Its pulse. A recipe
for breath, for blood. Both nurture unborn language in the dark. (49)

Creation need not be comfortable; Kavanagh’s poem explores how raw the process can be:

It is painful to gestate a poem, body given
wholly to its growth. Bones robbed, their mineral arsenal
slowly emptied. This insatiable poem scavenges
the carcass of memory, pulling until its skin snaps. (13)

There is a rhythm, a pulse, to Kavanagh’s work achieved through her precise use of meter, internal rhyme, and alliterative sound. The lilt of her words pulled me through the fourteen syllable lines—stressed and unstressed, up and down. The motion evoked is well-suited to the poem’s content which shifts easily from microscopic to macroscopic. Organic yet transcendent, Kavanagh’s detail is focused as equally on dirt as the cosmos.

Her poetry digs, unearthing images of women buried overnight in caves ritualistically by men. Wholly immersed, I imagined myself buried alongside the women, surrounded by mole-rats and taproots, wondering, “Is this a dream? Will [we] wake at home to sounds of river?” (31). In one breathtaking line, Kavanagh shifts the focus from underground to outer-space and ascribes a cosmic flair to human creation, writing: “women sew sun, moon, and stars inside their robes” (22).

Kavanagh’s poetry yearns to understand motherhood, and to the reader she poses a beautiful question, to which she offers answer:

Who are we, who are not mothers? I am Im la ’ahad,
mother of no one. Im shi’er, mother of poetry. (39)

Arabic words dot her poetry like fractured memories—her own as well as ancestral ones inherited through generations. The relationship between lineage and language is seamless, and the overlapping of body and poem extends back through time and Kavanagh’s matrilineal line:

Seventy years ago, I was an infant egg among
a million, my sister and brother, and unknown sibling,
in the womb of our mother, in the womb of her mother. (10)

The undercurrent of the poem is laced with critical commentary about masculinity. Kavanagh associates the masculine with violence and often alludes to historical and generational traumas. In a powerful quatrain, she appeals directly to men:

Men, if you saw our hidden blood, would it sate you? We fill
a lake each day, a sea each year – why seek more? Lift the veil,
re-feel your brutal origin – and ours. Birth, primal gift
and trauma. Come, return to the root of the root of your self. (26)

Thankfully, Kavanagh doesn’t let her reader linger in despair about violence and injustice for long; instead, she offers solution, asking men to “unlace the rigid armour [they’ve] come to know as skin” (40). To women, she offers advice of liberation:

Violence to self is violence. Sisters, forget pen,
forget paper, permission. Just string your words together,
fill strand after stand, bind them. Slide them under your pillow.
Wear them, cherish their whispered jingle at ankle and wrist. (33)

Environment is invoked in every quatrain of Kavanagh’s poem. In one of my favourite lines, she reveals how elemental a body can be: “I am writing from within / the nucleus of an atom, eye of my own small storm” (8). In this moment of stillness amidst chaos, self is understood through external environment—internal pause powerful as any storm. Kavanagh’s poem searches for the words to express her heritage and identity, but in a breathtaking line the urgency to transcribe her life falls away to reveal her profound and heartfelt recognition that like “a mysterious script of worms, bees, / seed-leaves, eggs, roots and snails—I too am untranslatable” (42).

At its core, poetry asks us to pause and listen, to notice. Kavanagh’s poem is pure artistry, the product of a poet who pays attention. Equal parts earth and empyrean, her words contain in the balance revelations, and in the breadth of one poem whole worlds are birthed and unearthed.

Megan Nega is a poet from Calgary, Alberta. She recently graduated from Mount Royal University with a degree in English (Honours) and minors in Creative Writing and Ancient & Medieval Studies. Her work has appeared in Freefall Literary Magazine and New Forum Literary Magazine. When not writing poetry she enjoys writing about all things writing-related on her blog, Writer’s Hearth, at www.writershearth.com

The post Review of Basma Kavanagh’s “Ruba’iyat for the Time of Apricots” appeared first on FreeFall Magazine.

by Beth Everest

Common Brown House Moths
by Laura Zacharin
Frontenac House (2019)
ISBN: 9781927823989

Common Brown House Moths by Laura Zacharin is anything but common. Already the first line, of the first poem, tantalizes my senses. The poet’s word choice and use of image are stellar. “Amygdala” is compared to “golf ball innards;” and then, the evocative “loop after loop of rubber strand stretched” (7) becomes the interconnected imagery of loss and memory and grief and sorrow that link one poem to the next and the next. Take the final image of the first poem, for example: “newspapers flapping in a tree” is not only a strong visual in its own right, but it serves as metaphor for small glimpses in different lives, and links to the second poem with “glancing up from his paper, spread out / when she tried to explain how nerve fibres/branch” (8). We find echoes of the newspaper, plus other kinds of papers, such as in “Shadow Twin” (35), we have the character complement to Rosie; and in “A Beginner’s Guide To”:

It isn’t really mine, it’s just
a noise that skitters through me,
the weather, buzz of traffic,
an occasional loon on a lucky summer night
but mostly, other people’s conversations,
wrappers, empty bags and jars
and scraps they’re done with (67)

The it (and the variety of paper in the poems) not only creates the image but reminds us of the poem that is a shared happening before and after it is in a written form. This is what I so like about Zacharin’s collection, the seamless gathering of leaves / edges / branches of images lighting other images, in poem after poem, or paper, or like a moth after another moth.

And there it is, the title image: common brown house moths. The title doesn’t simply refer to a single bothersome housemoth or two buzzing lazily, but a scourge in the kitchen and all over the house:

Exhumed moths and moth parts. Under the rug.
In the coats. Inside shoes, ball caps. Desiccated shreds.
…tangles of webwingbodylegs. (8)

Notice the poet’s evocative word use with exhumed and desiccated and the squash of webwingbodylegs. The scourge becomes a problem, at first for the mother referred to in the poem, then later for the speaker of some of the other poems, but clearly the moths become metaphoric for so much more as we move through the collection. It’s cleverly done.

Even so, the words introduce a death, of sorts, or at least a developing change in the amygdala, that “pair of shriveled almonds between a rock and a hard / place” to which we were introduced in the first lines of the poems. They work as a satisfying set of images.

The interlapping, as we might call it, of imagery continues, and the primary images of paper and moths develop throughout the poems as we witness the mother’s progressing illness. Watch how this works:

Now, she starts losing weight, “could hardly breathe,” forgets, loses words:

The aaahs, and uhhhs, a kitestring in the Boxwood, newspages strangled
the Summersweet. She smacks her lips. And besides
they say poetry of witness is dead. They the new poetry
is poetry of absence. Just forget it. Just I said anythi (11).

Not only do we see this absence/illness in the absence of letters on the page, but many of the poem titles are suggestive of the change in the mother: “Same Same and Different” (12), “That Summer Between Everything” (16), “Watches the Mouth for the Shape of the T”(18), “When the Weather Turned.” These pieces resonate gripping truth, “like in that dream loop when you can’t get to the other side” (16), or moths that won’t go away, or lice “the whole scalp dizzy // with bugs. Leggy and frenetic, bellies taught with blood” (41),

But the messages keep coming,
Like sideways rain or darkness or drunkenness or

Like someone’s trying to tell me something
I should know by now. (13)

For the persona, the messages become the moth scourge. And the mother loses so much weight, she becomes moth-like, and more like paper, as we see in the “tissue paper flaps, barely tethered at her back” (36). It is implicit that we could even refer to the mother as the moth(er), “Light/ like a shadow. Like she was by then” (37).

Where does all the flesh go
when she slowly disappears
like that. (65)

Where does all the flesh go? It is a good question; and in this question the poet asks not only of the corporeal self, but of the mother who returns in flashes of the old self, in flashes of the before:

She squints back to a time
when she was kind
long ago, before she was or
before she became or before she
before she felt the, before
… (48)

Notice the change in poetic form as the mother moves from the before to the later stages of the Alzheimer’s:

She grew fangs  a curve
in her spine, her nails curled
to claws. In a burgundy housecoat (53).

It is the scourge of the disease.

There isn’t only one mood in Common Brown House Moths. Changes are shown in content, image and rhythm, but also by layout of text on the page. The poet slides adeptly between the more conventional freeform poem, to the looser broken line that begs to be read aloud, to block-text such as in the evocative “In the Light Of “(22), to a sense of urgency created by the use “Watches the Mouth for the Shape of the T” (18)

The variety in form works both visually and for sound/breath pauses. The interrelated images hold the book tight in this beautiful collection. I enjoyed the double meaning created in the line breaks, and the lighting in and out of the serious subject matter. The moths and their referents are gorgeous.

Perhaps the poem that moved me even moreso than many of the others was “Before I Leave, I Wrap You in Red” and especially the final stanza:

I hear it. The ice breaking, at the lake, the low pitch wail beneath.
It’s like someone crying at the bottom. But no one’s crying
And this time, I’m not too late. I hear
The broken floes and deep below, their sorrow song. (44)

Beth Everest recently retired from 30 years of teaching, and hopes against hope for more time to write and make jewelry. Her most recent book, silent sister: the mastectomy poems was shortlisted for numerous awards and went on to win the BPAA Robert Kroetsch award.

The post Review of Laura Zacharin’s “Common Brown House Moths” appeared first on FreeFall Magazine.