Nautilus and Bone by Lisa Richter
Frontenac House (2020)
ISBN: 9781989466124

I’m usually drawn to poetry books that feel like old friends: collections that put music to my own experiences of domestic prairie life. Especially during a pandemic, when my concentration is faltering, it takes a strong lyric to pull me into an unfamiliar narrative. Lisa Richter’s poetic retelling of the life of Yiddish-American poet Anna Margolin, with its sensuous language and fantastical images, did just that. 

Nautilus and Bone, a member of Frontenac’s 2020 Quartet, is the Toronto poet’s second full-length collection. As she explains in her introduction, Richter’s kinship with Anna Margolin (the pen name of Rosa Lebensboym, 1887–1952) includes the fact that Richter’s great-grandfather was a Margolin (she imagines him handing Anna his name like a string of pearls) and that in Anna, Richter recognizes her own parents’ wild and sensitive spirit. 

Writing in the persona of Margolin, Richter labels the collection an “auto/biography.” Like trying to extract flour from cake, it’s impossible to discern where Anna ends and Lisa begins. Margolin’s poems and the records of her life meet Richter’s memories and imagination in a delightful blur. “I look in the mirror, cough up my snarling double. / She sticks to the glass and demands compensation” (98). The book itself is a mirror: is it Margolin or Richter looking back at us? 

This is particularly true in the poems aptly titled “Marriage” that pair Margolin’s terse poetic lines with prose poems that expand the spaces between Margolin’s words. 

Within each poem, there are other meldings, as inner and outer worlds flow together: “I fitted my mouth around your short / stout stump, tasted the sea salt- // tinged wind, blousing cool through a hotel window –” (39). We find a mingling of the human and the natural, public and domestic, in “molasses crowds” becoming “the sluggish river that floats // me home” (40). 

The world of Richter’s imagining is a magical place where “the grandfather clock metronomes me into wishbone sleep” and “vertigo lifts me in its beak” (29). She takes us from Europe to Palestine to New York, through neighbourhoods equal parts comical and dire, in which “three crooning drunks share a single pair of pants,” a girl is instructed to “take [her face] off and put it on again,” and the “newsboy [fishing] for his childhood” finds “a human thumb” (32). 

As she transports us into both Margolin’s physical setting and her state of mind, Richter’s words hold more than their weight in meaning, the way “swell” in a single passage can suggest wombs, wounds, and waves: 

So much bounty, we could hear the sculpted legs groaning. In those days the poems would not relent, swell 

after vertiginous swell, my open wounds wild-stung with salt. An ice-blue pain I came to savour. (98) 

In describing Margolin’s marriages, male and female lovers, and unwanted advances, Richter’s skillful use of enjambment plays up the innuendo with line breaks such as: “I am a phoenix many men have tried to mount // on their walls” (47). 

Nautilus and Bone invokes the senses in ways that are both fragrant—the “coffee’s earth-deep / buttered loam” (51) and, as Anna explains why she is an only child, guttural—“what man / can stomach a litter of rotting pears – / all that split, mealy skin, oozing pulp, / squandered juice in a lonely orchard’s shade” (20). 

Like brittle bone and shell, these poems preserve the memory of a revolutionary poet—a legacy both fragile and enduring. 

Angeline Schellenberg’s Manitoba-Book-Award-winning debut, Tell Them It Was Mozart (Brick Books, 2016), explores the ache and whimsy of raising children on the autism spectrum. In 2019, she published three chapbooks and was nominated for The Pushcart Prize and Arc Poetry Magazine’sPoem of the Year. Host of Speaking Crow, Winnipeg’s longest-running poetry open mic, Angeline recently launched the elegy collection Fields of Light and Stone(University of Alberta Press, 2020).

The post Review of Lisa Richter’s “Nautilus and Bone” appeared first on FreeFall Magazine.

Vermin
by Lori Hahnel
Great Plains Publications (2020)
ISBN: 9781773370460

Though disparate in time and location, the stories in Lori Hahnel’s Vermin are bound by a common element: women who have lost—lost faith, love, freedom, innocence, friends, and occasionally themselves—and are seeking something new. In “Ask Your Mom,” Rachel teeters between childhood innocence and sexual awareness; “Good Friday, at the Westward” follows Cheryl on a shroom trip towards rebirth; the closing story, “A Good Long Life,” poses the question to both protagonist, Jenn, and the reader: which pieces of an unwanted past can’t you throw away, even if you try? 

I did not expect a collection called Vermin to be a cheery one, and it’s not, but nor is the sadness without purpose. The heartache in Vermin is composed with an honestly about women’s lives and how often a woman’s circumstances can be buffeted by patriarchy, sexism, or a manipulative man who didn’t deserve her trust. “The Unchanging Sea,” “Awkward Positions,” and “Glory B” sink the reader into moments when women are betrayed by the men they are most intimate with. While each woman deals with betrayal in her own way, my favourite is easily Liz of “Awkward Positions” who decides in good humour to blackmail her married ex-lover. 

The narrators in Vermin often review a scene in their mind instead of allowing readers to witness the scene and judge for themselves. This reflective style was most apparent in “Only Known Photograph of Chopin, 1849.” At the story’s opening, I was intrigued by the idea of a decentered narrative where Chopin is sidelined, but the narrator, Constantia, becomes a passive agent summarizing the life of her unrequited love: Constantia is touched but does not touch, listens but does not speak, reads love letters but does not write them. The excitement of Hahnel’s disruptively feminist set-up fades as Constantia’s own personhood is lost to reminiscence on the expected male center. 

Hahnel’s tendency towards passive reminiscence contributes to the overwriting of some scenes and stories. “Good Friday, at the Westward” and “Chicken” come to moments of graphic epiphany—Cheryl vomits her shrooms, Julie vomits from shock—but instead of permitting the reader to linger in the visceral and tangible, Hahnel whisks everyone away to watch Cheryl and Julie both wake up, disoriented but safe, under a watchful paternal eye. In contrast, “Reference Question” ends the very second Hahnel sticks in the knife, and the close of “A Good Long Life” serves to end both the story and the collection as the narrator, Jenn, doesn’t quite manage to recycle a newspaper—and with it, some of the unwanted past—before being called away by her crying child. 

Vermin ought to be disharmonious, but as I moved from one story to the next, Hahnel’s women clung to each another as if to say that however alone or outcast they may be in their own stories, however verminous their respective societies might consider them, if they just reached across the disparate time and space of Vermin’s pages, they could find a common sisterhood. 

Kathryn Shalley is a writer and editor from Calgary who loves feminist literature, true crime, spec-fic, and spoiling her anxiety-ridden rescue dog. She holds a BA (hons) in English from Mount Royal University and an MFA in Writing from the University of Saskatchewan.

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