POETRY BARB CAREY
Trauma Head By Elee Kraljii Gardiner Anvil Press, 140 pages, $18
In her remarkable second collection, Elee Kraljii Gardiner chronicles a health crisis, from sudden onset through slow recovery to healing (she suffered a mini-stroke, which was caused by a tear in the lining of an artery). The Vancouver poet makes viscerally palpable the rupture of perception (the “jumbledness within,” as she puts it). Lines are aligned to the righthand margin to reflect the loss of feeling in her left side; syntax is often scrambled and phrases are spaced out on the page to replicate the “dull slab tongue” of halting speech; words are jammed together and lines overlap confusingly. Kraljii Gardiner writes of her illness as a transformative experience (“how swiftly we/are al/tered … by exposure to pain and/ what we cannot control”), and in the final section, when she reflects on her recovery, it’s with a lingering awareness of fragility, as well as a deep pleasure in being able to “rehouse, reinhabit myself.”
The Gravel Lot That Was Montana By D.A. Lockhart Mansfield Press, 78 pages, $17
Observant and illuminating, D.A. Lockhart’s third collection is the poetic equivalent of a road trip that begins on the shores of the Detroit River (the Windsor-born poet is a member of the Moravian of the Thames First Nation) and covers a lot of ground. It opens with anecdotal poems about local haunts and memories of his youth and then shifts to the American Midwest, where the focus expands to cultural history and the impact of European settlement. Lockhart writes of “the hard edges/of life” alongside the scenic — truck stops, fast-food joints and bars — and there’s an elegiac tone to poems marking the decline of manufacturing (“Another factory has shook its roots/ free and moved to places once known/through family vacation photos”). But he also expresses the tension between industry and the natural world, as in the resonant image of a neon sign that “bleaches out the horizon/and expanse of stars beyond.”
How She Read By Chantal Gibson Caitlin Press, 104 pages, $20
Chantal Gibson conjures a “sassy semiotician” whose “tap of her pen be the beat of an ancestor’s drum” in her debut collection, and sassiness and rhythmic flair — as well as experimental wordplay that extends to the visual — are on display throughout. An instructor in the School of Interactive Arts & Technology at Simon Fraser University, Gibson confronts the racial biases that are embedded in language and images and become internalized through education. She often quotes from textbooks, and the prejudice is sometimes shocking: “Little Ug- ly Face lives in an old Indian village” appears in the1939 primer We Grow Up. Elsewhere, Gibson challenges the portrayal of Black women in archival texts, photos and paintings. In “Veronica?,” she contemplates an unnamed Black woman’s portrait alongside a Lawren Harris landscape in the Art Gallery of Ontario and writes: “you’ve been placed here … to challenge/the climate of the centre.” That’s exactly what this fierce, inventive collection does.
These Are Not the Potatoes of My Youth By Matthew Walsh Goose Lane, 92 pages, $19.95
“I love to walk it helps me see better the world, to be moving,/see what people are about and what they are doing,” Matthew Walsh writes in the opening poem of this engaging debut collection. The Toronto-based poet’s narrative ruminations have an easy stride and cover growing up in Nova Scotia, travels across Canada and an often whimsical way of viewing the world (at a baseball game under the lights, Walsh’s eye is drawn to moths “like masks that folded in on themselves/that flew away”). The most affecting poems are about family, childhood and being gay in a town where homophobia is pervasive. Walsh questions the stereotypes of masculinity, at times with humour — “I never want to nail up all the gyprock in one afternoon drunk /on Labatt Blue” — at times with poignant directness: “Once I had a friend who said my fingernails were too long/ for a boy but how should a boy be?”