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

I’m going to argue here that I think a lot of folks kind of missed what this book is doing. I am going to be honest and admit to you and to rob (sorry rob) that I didn’t immediately dive into this book when I got it because the cover blurb and all the reviews I read made it sound like this was a collection of domestic, parenting snapshots. As the back cover says:

Written while at home full-time with two small children under five, the book of smaller is a collection of short, sharp, incredibly dense prose poems. Created in moments snatched from chaos, these poems challenge the possibilities of language in very small spaces.

I am intimately familiar with the challenge of writing while parenting. My first book, Lunatic Engine, was written nearly entirely in the parent-viewing areas of the YMCA and/or a variety of school hallways perched on small plastic chairs, the sounds of children swimming, or gymnastic-ing, or ballet-ing, or whatever-ing, echoing. When “smaller” came out in 2022, my kids were in their teens and parenting had moved on to being more guard rail than daily expediter of life. So while I trusted the book would be good, I set it aside in the short term for something less “parenting.”

I should have known that there was more going on here. The cover should have clued me in.

I think the cover designer at the University of Calgary Press, Melina Cusano, might be the person who “got” the book more than anyone else. One could certainly describe these poems as “snapshots of daily life closely considered” or “sleep-deprivation-fuelled lucid day dreams” or “post-modern appropriation and distillation of sentences into metaphor” (as I hinted in one of my daily bluesky posts: Darmok and Jalad at Tanagra) or even “a carefully arranged, collection of random dendritic-gap spanning sentences,” but those descriptions (all part of earlier drafts of this post, sorry rob) are all not quite right.

What they really are is ants.

Ants. Examined singly, one can name their parts, describe their paths, place them in context, derive some meaning. But looking at them as singular entities misses the entire point of ants. When you read this book, and I encourage you to do so, read it as an ant. Set your ape brain aside and embrace the teeming, boiling, fractal-angling, mess on which the entire world is built.

If you follow me over on BlueSky, you already know I post lines I find striking every day as I slowly read through one book or issue each week. Here is a short excerpt from the poem “Self-portrait, extant”

What is interesting, conceptually. The universe: folds, and unfolds. We pretend we’re the centre. We have to. Take every precaution. Don’t cry. Our tomatoes, abundant.