COLUMNS:
Alienated by Darren Wershler-Henry
Mean Old Man in Training by Joe Ollmann
Nernies by Claire Gibson and Marian Churchland
Movie Mythos by Vincent Tinguely
The Graveyard by Scott W. Gray
The Self-Esteem Workout by David McGimpsey

REVIEWS:
Tyrannosaurus Rex Versus the Corduroy Kid by Simon Armitage
Vermeer’s Light by George Bowering
The Athiest’s Bible by Shalom Camenietzki
Avatar by Sharon Harris
Basement Tapes by Andrew Faulkner, Nicholas Lea and Marcus McCann
Six Ways to Sunday by Christian McPerson
Exit Wounds by Rutu Modan
The Complete Peanuts, 1963 to 1964 by Charles Schultz
The Milk Chicken Bomb by Andrew Wedderburn
Bottle Rocket Hearts by Zoe Whittall

Drawn & Quarterly, 2007

The Complete Peanuts, 1963 to 1964
by Charles Schulz

Fantagraphics, 2007

Read by Joe Ollmann

I first discovered the work of Rutu Modan in Drawn & Quarterly Volume 5. In the story Jamilti, she told the story of an average, bickering, engaged couple, whose day out buying wedding dresses and making wedding preparations is interrupted by a suicide bombing. In this primitively drawn story, Modan evoked empathy for how ordinary and familiar the characters are to us, then suddenly points out the difference between their lives and ours with the intrusion of civil war.

Modan’s new book Exit Wounds, set in the midst of the same conflict, similarly shows the life of the two main characters, a soldier and a cab driver, existing and living their very ordinary lives while almost ignoring the ever-present conflict that, while intrinsic to the plot, is almost nonexistent. It’s an interesting approach for an Israeli cartoonist to take, unexpected, and making the effects of the conflict more pervasive just by its familiarity and ordinariness.

Modan’s drawing style is equally paradoxical. In Exit Wounds, the drawings confound the eye, at times looking incredibly lifelike, at other times strangely out of proportion and slightly clumsy. The effect is as if someone of limited artistic talent were tracing a series of photographs. It is engaging, and the perfect style to simulate the uncertainty of the characters. The book is about relationships and how difficult they are on many levels, from the personal to the cultural. It is both an amateur forensic detective story and a romance, an exciting, compelling mystery that also appeals to our tender nature, and ends on the happiest of ambiguous notes.

—

The seventh volume of The Complete Peanuts is here and it continues to delight. Facets of Seth’s thoughtful design continue to reveal themselves, such as the jagged line of Charlie Brown’s sweater on the back cover, which I only noticed on this volume but realize that it has been there since the first volume. The introduction to this issue is written by Bill Melendez, animator of A Charlie Brown Christmas, et al. The dude that invented the moves for all the kids dancing to Schroeder’s piano can do no wrong for me. It feels like Schulz was just reaching a level of confidence and surety with his characters at this time. The humour is elegant and sophisticated, highbrow and unpretentious and funny as hell. I got all seven of these and I’m throwing out books to make room for all the rest.

Read by Laura Roberts

“Dirty pool halls, greasy restaurants, suburban skateboarder showdowns, and dangerous drug dens—some things in life just aren’t very subtle,” begins the back cover blurb for Christian McPherson’s collection of short stories, Six Ways to Sunday. True enough, these stories are about the gritty parts of Canadian cities that most of us like to avoid in our day-to-day lives, but often crave in our fictional outings. The problem is that for all their promises of stark realism, these people and places don’t quite ring true.

Maybe it’s McPherson’s dialogue, which often seems to academically eschew contractions, as though urban dwellers never use slang or improperly form sentences. One bit that comes off sounding particularly odd is the exchange between an anxious Anglo, carting a body from Ottawa into Gatineau, and the French-speaking cop who ought to bust him. I found myself wondering why the francophone cop suddenly begins inserting “dem” and “dere” towards the end of his previously perfectly bilingual speech, or adding a questioning “yes?” to the end of all his statements.

Peculiar speech patterns aside, the stories are entertaining and keep the reader turning pages to find out what happens next. McPherson often twists a seemingly predictable ending or cuts the story off just before the denouement can occur, jolting the jaded reader out of her fictional expectations. Recurring characters like the Squid and Two Seconds become more likeable the more we see of them, but McPherson thwarts us there, too, steering us away from this younger crowd with dreams towards the older, married set of characters whose dreams have long been deferred. Nevertheless, things end on a positive—though slightly cheesy—note with a joke about silver linings, as some of our protagonists make their escape from the artistic meat grinder of metropolitan Canada.

So although these stories don’t quite crack my jaded city heart in any new places, they’re worth definitely reading for the naïvely sincere Squid and his shit luck with women in “The Pineapple Thai Village” and “Lucifer’s Tavern,” not to mention the guy who picks up a clown at the Beer Store in “Clown Face.”

read by Jesse Patrick Ferguson

In Basement Tapes, three bright young poets have created a wry and surprisingly uniform collection—that is, uniform tonally and stylistically, not in terms of the relative success of each poem.  The collection works within the constraints of a “call-and-answer” framework, with each poem borrowing from another to varying degrees.  With this type of work it is difficult to avoid comparative evaluations of the writers, but each of these three more or less holds his own.

To begin with, the cryptically brief afterword to the collection gives precious little explanation as to the impetus, rationale or occasion for this collaboration, and the individual poems are only attributed to their creators in the biographies that terminate the chapbook.  The present reviewer, at least, was compelled to pencil the poets’ initials on each poem in order to tease out distinctions of voice.

Aside from these frustrating paratextual elements—or lack thereof—this collection is full of crackling wordplay and wit (such as Lea’s chuckle-worthy phrase “ousted like a mulleted centerfold”), though some poems give the impression of being mere apparatus for the delivery of one or two witticisms or one-liners.  Like most poetry in the abstract/surreal/associative vein (see John Ashbery and rob mclennan), the pieces that succeed most give one a loose sense of theme or setting; the poet rambles but comes back to a set of ideas or images.  Faulkner’s “Collective bargaining agreement” offers a good example of such poetic texturing.

There are some bad lines to be found here, as in McCann’s “The car”: “a passenger / is a person carried”; and there are some flat-footed rhythms, as in Lea’s “Science Friction”: “No clout, nature, no Nature, that was for sure.”  All three poets also display a predilection for breaking and hyphenating words, a trick that sometimes proves clever, but other times smacks of perfunctoriness.  The technique can quickly become overused and beget a stilted rhythm.

In spite of these peccadilloes, Basement Tapes is proof of three talents to watch for.  It evidences a great delight in the sounds of language: from the pseudo-scientific to the idiom of offices and bar rooms.  This is poetry that’s too smart for its own good; it sneaks onto the scene with a bag full of firecrackers and a knack for mischief.

Read by Jenny Sampirisi

“I love you.”

The word love in poetry is often noosed with cynicism. Love brings with it an expectation of sentimentality that is (or has become) too abstract and sarcastic to be considered sincere. But what is that if not a poetic challenge?  In Avatar Sharon Harris examines the world of the sentimental and shows us that poetry itself is love.

The poetry in Avatar microscopes in on the central phrase “I love you” through multiple entry points: visual, linguistic, pataphysical, and methodological. Replying to bpNichol’s concrete “I love you” poem, it makes sense that the mode of Harris’ response should be in part visual. Through concrete and language poetry, Avatar exposes the interconnectivity of objects to subjects, and of those, to the universe.

As we move through each of the alphabetized visual Figures, we see how almost anything can become an avatar for love. Dominos arrange to create the word, love is spelled in braille, becoming sensory, and love turns molecular and flexible. There is a sense that both love and poetry are everywhere, and that they cannot be so easily extracted from each other. Even the I and the You of the phrase begin to blur as the centre, love, visually recombines from page to page, eroding the “otherness” of the phrase.

Harris reveals the existing connective tissues of life by reminding us that language is visual, and also potentially present without words. And if we agree that this is true, we can also be persuaded that love is everywhere and that language too is everywhere. Further, these things are interchangeable. The questions of this book aren’t, how is the physical world like poetry or how are these things like love, but rather, a more definitive, the physical world  is poetry and poetry is love.

“I love you too.”

Read by Aaron Tucker

Despite the title, The Atheist’s Bible is a compilation of stories that is deeply indebted to faith. While Judaism leaks into every story and guides each character, direct religiosity itself is at the fringes of the work. This collection instead puts a great deal of belief in the modern fable and the construction of urban allegory as a means to guiding a person’s morality. It is this balance between the traditional faith of Judaism and the immediately applicable tale that powers these works in tightly spun pseudo-parables.

The cautionary tales that Camenietzki constructs revolve around the Jewish identity and the secrets of old men. While most of the protagonists have set, stable lives, each is bent on allowing a secret, an indiscretion (most often a young woman), to ruin that life. The book strives to pull apart the normalcy, to destruct each character’s life. But, instead of coming to any resolutions, each piece leaves the protagonist a wanderer in his own story, living to serve as a legend, an example, to others who are to live after him. What the reader then gathers as “the lesson” from each story is that heroism is not the norm and that the reality of cultural tales are fraught with nomadic impotence and anger.

Yet, despite this willingness to discuss the unsettledness of its protagonists, The Atheist’s Bible rarely breaks away from its linear brand of storytelling. Each piece is straightforward with a clearly defined chronology and set of characters. This tends to blend the stories indistinctly together and the work suffers from each story not being set apart enough from the next. While the middle of the work tends to blend together as indistinct variations on a slim theme, the stories book-ending the collection, such as the title story, do ripple with a satisfactory sense of mythos and suburban chaos.

This book is neither scripture or bed-time fable, but it does resonate within the limbo of daily life, and its reader, like its protagonists, must grapple with the stories they are both constructing, valuing and accepting everyday.

Read by Aaron Tucker

There is a joy in Tyrannosaurus Rex Versus The Corduroy Kid that readers will be hard pressed to find in many other books of poetry. Armitage employs a child-like wit and innocence through the images and tone of his poems, which allows each piece a whimsical playfulness reminiscent of plastic figurines and bedroom floors. While this tone is consistent, even funny, throughout, the lyric work as a whole is too fragmented to maintain any sort of momentum and the reader, working from one poem to the next, is often left puzzled or half-satisfied.

That is not to say the smaller suites of poems don’t work as contained units. Often they do. However, those suites are arranged distractedly, haphazardly and disparate. A reader must jump consistently from one idea to the next, making it hard to pinpoint any continuing fluidity of thought or theme. Further, the line breaks are often choppy and off-putting as they alternate between the longer prose lines and jumpy, brief poetic bursts. In this way, the quirky narratives and extended jokes that Armitage is attempting to ground his poems in are almost always undercut.

Some of the smaller pieces, when taken individually, can be rewarding. Armitage’s translations of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, The Bayeux Tapestry and in particular The Odyssey are quite well done, and show the potential balance between humour and poetics that Armitage is striving for in the rest of the work. Similarly, in the pieces that work well, such as “Poems on His Birthday,” the small compartments that cause some trouble in the rest of the work actually build up upon each other and create a forward movement that enchants the reader.

In smaller segments, Tyrannosaurus can be an enjoyable, sometimes entertaining and fun read, but as a complete work, lacks a throughline to unite it, leaving the reader without the necessary traction to appreciate the text as a whole.

Coach House Books, 2007

Read by Maria Giuliani

If the name Marvin sounds like it could belong to a geeky, nerdy little boy, you can safely assume that a town called Marvin would be a geeky, nerdy little town.  It is in this small Albertan town that The Milk Chicken Bomb exists.

The daily happenings of Marvin’s residents are chuckle-out-loud amusing, and yet, considering the comedic catharsis they yield, actually speak to how pathetic Marvin’s residents really are.  They are a curious lot of characters and all have a story, a history.  But although author Andrew Wedderburn works hard to pique the reader’s interest on behalf of the whole cast, what he really does is create a false distraction, removing the focus from the protagonist and narrator—a ten year old boy who remains nameless throughout.  This is a boy without a story, who thus becomes the only story worth following. 

As the narrative progresses it becomes obvious that the town’s noise and clatter is a constant—it began before the start of the book, and we know that it will continue on past the book’s ending.  As such, and despite various quirky scenarios, no resolutions are expected for any other than this one boy.  The protagonist’s breaks from reality into a densely imaginative world, his store-bought pizza sandwiches, and his constant escape attempts all lead to a general understanding regarding his relationship with his unidentified family, and it is enough to know, without a doubt, that the above all deserve “the Milk Chicken Bomb.”

Wedderburn’s thematic structure is strong and vivid.  He also maintains a continuous linguistic tempo throughout, making a tightly knit unit out of all 291 pages.  The unfortunate downside to this is that the reader never really becomes emotionally invested in the “kid,” despite his emotional emergence from literal and proverbial shadows.  As such, the reader doesn’t cheer for him in the end in a Yeah! Stick it to ’em! kind of way, but instead has a more intellectual satisfaction that justice has been served.  As it stands, it is with the above sentiment that the story concludes: satisfaction.

Read by Kelly Ward

Eve is nineteen, but has yet to experience much outside her sheltered family home in Dorval. She knows she’s different from the typical suburban kids she’s surrounded with; she doesn’t see herself reflected in the straight, white edges of cookie-cutter homes and shopping malls. So when she makes the move to downtown Montreal, to a “homo haven” with roommates Rachel (a poet and grad student) and Seven (a deliciously gorgeous drug dealer), it is as if her world has cracked open to reveal a new plane of existence simmering just beneath the surface of the one she previously inhabited. She negotiates her way through this new world, forced to confront everything from AIDS to homophobia to political turmoil embodied in the 1995 referendum. She also wades through her first real love affair, an on-again, off-again relationship with an older woman named Della. 

The core of the story lies in the jealousy, obsession and raw sexuality that sparks and fizzles between Della and Eve. The writer dances the reader just close enough to Della to feel uneasy about her. Eve’s naivety, and Della’s infidelity and instability force the many layers of the story to pivot around this very well-drawn relationship.

For the most part, Whittall brilliantly weaves into the action of the story issues that may stand blatantly at centre stage in the hands of a lesser writer. However, there is more than one exception to this, and moments in which the page seems to devolve momentarily into soap-box can become distracting. Her treatment of the characters’ reactions to a tragic death is one such moment. An entire chapter is dedicated to the long description of a play staged by Seven in reaction to the incident, telling rather than allowing the characters’ feelings to manifest organically through their actions.   

In its best moments—in the glimpses of Eve’s dairy-jottings and her obsessive confusion—Bottle Rocket Hearts brings to mind Jeanette Winterson circa Written on the Body with an adolescent, punk-tinged flare. This is a believable, flesh and blood narrator whose flaws make her all the more enduring. Bottle Rocket Hearts is a Polaroid snap-shot of a time and place: a city searching for its identity and mediating its loyalties, a girl looking to do the same. 

Read by Jakub Stachurski

I haven’t the right to comment on Vermeer’s Light, a compendium of George Bowering’s work of the past twelve years. How does one critique a man who, having published over forty works in verse and prose, remains an imaginative force, his trademark humour and painful honesty intact, his present generosity with said work rarely seen in any art form. Perhaps I’ve been nose-deep in Canada’s youngest and brightest too long—some of whom occasionally mistake a calculated, workshop-germinated poem for a successful one—as Bowering’s generosity and willingness to show the imperfect process of his verse left this reader startled. The volume exhibits the poet’s vulnerability across every stratum, from the revelatory “Imaginary Poems for AMB” series, in which Bowering converses with his recently deceased wife, to “The PGI Golf Tourney Poetic Address and Apology for Same,” in which the poet swallows his palpable discomfort with the event and coughs up stanzas like:

Let me introduce myself, a lesser poet
sponsored for this occasion by Petro-Canada;
call me Dick Assboy, get me on Letterman.

A precisely penned series, West Side Haiku, rests next to an elegy in heroic couplets for a fellow poet, next to slant rhyme most rappers would nod their heads to. Not all of the concepts and experiments work, but the abundance of finely tuned, inspired verse paints any missteps as hearty, necessary steps in the pursuit of craft.

The collection is topped off with “Rewriting My Grandfather,” a telling essay in which Bowering describes the process of writing his most anthologized poem and the decades of frustration it has provided him. The frustration leads to a series of experiments on the piece, and Bowering treats his words as anything but precious. He works the poem through some of the standard poetic constraints, translating My Grandfather into sonnet form, or taking the nouns, verbs, and adjectives, and constructing a version of the poem out of their antonyms. Alternately, he translates the poem into French, then German, and back to English. He translates into Spanish and then back again, using the imperfect digital translation engine Babel Fish©. Even these seemingly haphazard exercises provide the imaginative reader with revelations—the sparkling, leftover Spanish, “santo santo main santo” and how it pierces through the verse, the accidental assonance of digital verse manipulation. His playfulness in tearing down and rebuilding “My Grandfather” is a fitting conclusion to the book.

Vermeer’s Light is not a book you read through once. I can imagine picking it up for years to come, the verse a constant stream of newfound meaning, inspiration and incitement for my own work.