Fulfilling my obligations to my long-neglected TBR one book a time. Want to know why? I explain it in the first post here.

This week’s entry in my year-long, slow read, clearing of my To Be Read pile(s) has been stacked up since 2021 with only the occasional touch of a feather duster across its top edge to reassure it that it had not been forgotten. I bought this book for its cover and for its title (seriously, look at that image!) before it was nominated for the 2021 Governor General’s Literary Award for poetry. I don’t know why I didn’t read it right then, or within the year of buying it except perhaps that even in 2021, my TBR was larger than manageable.

Regardless, I have read it now and I liked it rather a lot. It has that a nice balance of bits I can connect with immediately and bits that need me to stretch and listen and acknowledge and recognize and empathize and mourn.

I think I want to write a poem about reading the first poem in a book. Like stepping out onto the ice, you test the weight underfoot, your whole body open, waiting, fearing the feel of the flex, the sound of the slick ground beneath you cracking – or not. Judge for yourself how “Sulphurtongue” starts in Synaesthesia:

a paper-cut’s smell is the way the knife nicks
a half-ripe peach pit

Solid, solid start that sets the reader up nicely for what is my favourite section of the book, “dopplebanger,” a series of 26, 10 line surrealistic little couplets, the body transformed, metaphored, verbified and whatever the opposite of verbified is:

you can’t reach your pants; the swans
at my bedside are pecking your pockets to bits.

and

Lakes gather teeth from dead walleye, lost swimmers,
and rumoured cetaceans. Keep clear of islands’ jawlines.

This section fell on the Thursday and Friday of my morning reading and the sheer (malicious? salacious? devilish?) delight of these poems was exactly the start to these days I needed.

Thanks for writing this book Rebecca, you’re awesome!