Stacked

Matthea Harvey and Amy Jean Porter’s children’s book for grown-ups is beautiful in words and images. Harvey’s poetic narrative was created from an erasure of A Portrait of Charles Lamb by David Cecil that in turn becomes a dark, strange, lovely retelling of the relationship between Mary and her little lamb. The relationship is fanciful and difficult, and yet really, really, really accurate in its exploration of love. After I closed the cover back up and set it down on my lap I said out loud, “Damn, that was fucking beautiful. It almost makes me not hate other things.” Can you think of a better endorsement? Me neither. Matthea and Amy are a perfect pair. Someone should write a nursery rhyme about them.

Taking time out from thinking about personal problems to sit beside an artificial lake, termed lagoon, and read through each of the vibrant, powerful and heart-slamming stories in Roxane Gay’s debut collection, Ayiti was the right thing to do. Ayiti is innovative, traditional and mostly it’s just really, really, really awesome. She taps into characters, wrenches their emotions out with sharp language and delivers each piece in a few short pages that keep killing after you’ve finished those few pages. I’m going to thrust it onto all my friends, probably with a bit too much vigour and aggression, but also with a passionate love and some good humour. No need to scare off potential readers. Because this book bashed back into my brain the notion that other people have problems, that the world is unfair and gorgeous and strange and sometimes just unexplained and painful and reading this kind of amazing writing should be required for anyone who is feeling sorry for herself, or isn’t, or is just near the book.

Damn, Strayed. You really got me. Again. You are good. You’re good. I ploughed through Cheryl Strayed’s novel, Torch, and loved the shit out of it. As an asshole I wasn’t sure how I’d feel reading Wild. While I obviously know her writing is amazing, and that her advice column, Dear Sugar, is equally wonderful, I worried there was going to be some severe sanctimonious memoir action that would turn me off and my love affair with her prose would end and result in a sweaty, filthy break-up, with me saying some super unkind things that I could never take back. Ever. But low and behold, that did not happen. Big time. Just because a book happens to be a memoir about grief and loss and also hiking (um) doesn’t mean that it’s going to be cheesy and horrible. It can be the exact opposite. It can be loveable. It can include self-doubt and Snapple.  It can be transformative and funny and lyrical and awkward and just plain super amazing and something I will recommend to people all the damn time. Wild is more than any doctor could have ordered. Even one of those brain doctors, like the psychological kind, not the kind that drill into your skull.

Short stories that span time and place, that aren’t afraid to travel through harsh emotional territory, that canoodle with danger and sadness and strive for forgiveness and love and redemption. That’s what’s happening in Yasuko Thanh’s debut collection, Floating Like the Dead. And now you know.

Language. I am using it right now. And now. And even now. In The Flame Alphabet the words used to communicate become painful, become lethal. Children become weapons, their burbles make adults sick, their teenage tongues cause more anguish than their angst normally allows. Parents hide from their beloved offspring, people struggle to understand each other, and mostly they strive to survive against their instincts - to connect with others, to speak. Communication is a difficult thing. Most of us aren’t very good at it, as hard as we try. There are always things left unsaid, things we say that hurt, that are wrong. But in the world of Ben Marcus he is the commander of language, he controls the words on the page. This book is at least half great, half frustrating. He writes to confuse and illuminate, to address a myriad of ideas (family, language, illness, cure, genius, survival) that somehow come together, but also leave the reader uncertain and even unsatisfied. Marcus, has not created a perfect book, but it’s compelling and strange and unsettling. He’s a wily devil.

There is certainly something impressive about the tome, the multi-volume sprawl of a long intricate narrative that spans thousands of pages. And yet, my favourite indulgence is literary satisfaction that comes from something that captivates me with far fewer words. A book that can be consumed in a single sitting, that requires nothing but an afternoon in a chair, a morning curled in bed. The Guardians: An Elegy  is Sarah Manguso’s second memoir. The first detailed a rare autoimmune condition that ravaged her body for years. This new and heartbreaking work is about two kinds of love, friendship and romantic, and one kind of death, suicide. It spans only 104 pages. It had me rapt with every word, every sorrowful ache of memory, every slip her mind takes as she deals with loss and new love in slim, poetic paragraphs. 

Oh.

Sarah Manguso, the things you do to me. 

This is the kind of book that makes me want to slap people upside the face with it when they say they don’t get poetry. This is the kind of book you read and love and mull over and then you read it again and think, “oh shizz, did he just do that?”, and “oh shizz, he totes did,” and then you carry it around with you, in a nice bag along with your lip gloss and moisturizer, to have near you, and also maybe sometimes to just pull out and show people how amazing, and heartsad and hilarious and perceptive and compelling and innovative and just plain wonderfully adept at understanding how we all function in this strange place we call society poets can be. I hope you got all of that? Because otherwise, I’ve got a little something in my purse for you. It’s a bitch slap, courtesy of Daniel Zomparelli and Davie Street Translations. I didn’t get Maltesers at first, but sometimes an acquired taste is the most delicious.

I don’t know if it’s somehow my fault for reading so many of them or the damn writers for writing about it, but here are just so many books about death and dying and the various ways it can go down and bring people down. Stephen Gauer’s debut novel Hold Me Now  is one of those books. A hate crime, a killing gets people down in this book. It’s tough. There are complicated emotions, and strained relationships, and loneliness and sex to pacify emotions and drink to further pacify emotions and desire for revenge, for peace, for something to hold onto, but there are no heroes here. Because that just makes sense in hard times. That we can have people that are important in our lives, but no one can save us from our hard feelings. That we have to muddle along. That we have to take responsibility for our feelings, for our actions. So fine, I’ll take partial blame on this whole death book situation, because sometimes the eyes and mind want to read what they want. Sometimes, it’s on me.

Time has gone by but I have not been lax in my reading. Just getting down in front of the Tumblr to write. And here is a book I read two months ago. And yet, I can’t forget. I can’t forget the poetry of weather, of paper shapes adorned with boy’s printing, fraternal connections, wonder twin power and the quiet grief of a woman with intimate knowledge of what it feels like to be alone when everyone else seems paired up. In these pages I saw a dark house full of family unable to make connections as they struggle with loss, and rain and snow, and a whole world in a single town. In Algoma Dani Couture caused my little heart to skip through dark and light and my little brain to see the bigger picture in the smallest gestures. 

This book and I are acquaintances. We probably go to the same parties, we might throw down a, “hey,” or “how you doing?” but really we don’t have a lot in common. The poems in here are made of cleverness. There are word games. There are allusions. They’re not easy. I’m a bit intimidated by them, like if I’m at the party I think I’m not cool or smart enough to get into a conversation with them. But then when I get home, a little tipsy, kick off my tottering heals, just enough energy left to throw off my clothes and crawl into bed, smear mascara on the pillow, because I’m not quite awake enough to take that off, I’ll think about our relationship before falling asleep. And I’ll realize that I can’t get into every book of poems that comes my way, that I can’t be friend to all, that sometimes the emotional connection isn’t there. But I can give kudos and hang out with the shit I love, and pass on an occasional, “hey” on my way to the bar.