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

This week had me reading another book from a poet we featured at the Olive Reading Series last year. Calgary poet Samantha Jones braved a snowy Highway 2 last December and, along with Bret Crowle, blew the doors off the joint. It was a great reading and was, as always, a chance to get a signed book from a poet with whom I was unfamiliar. And here the chagrin over the size of my “to be read” pile looms again. The reading was almost a year ago and here I am just now getting to the book. Samantha, I apologize for being such a terrible person.

I mentioned in one of my daily BlueSky “striking lines” posts earlier this week that I was likely going to focus my micro-review through just one short poem. I don’t usually reproduce entire poems either here or on BlueSky but the three (five?) lines of “Decision Making (A How-to)” are the perfect door into what I want to say about this book:

1. Ask a bunch of people what they think yo should do.
2. Listen to them. Each tells you something different.
3. Go home and have a nap

Samantha suffers from obsessive-compulsive disorder. The real, clinically-diagnosed, serious, requiring medical intervention OCD. Being an anal-retentive, perfectionist pedant like me is very much NOT OCD. I’m not going to get into the differences between OCD and OCPD here. I will leave you to find your own internet rabbit holes to fall down. In the poem “Stop Saying You’re ‘OCD About It’” Samantha lays out the difference starkly.

The thing that makes good medical poetry so compelling is how relatable it is. If you haven’t had cancer yourself, you are close to someone who has and so on. Samantha is the only person I’ve ever met who has OCD though and while I may live my life by the old adage “a place for everything and everything in its place,” I do not suffer from compulsions and obsessions over things like the space needed between unplugged appliances to the point of picking my skin off in patches.

So why is this book so compelling? Well, first off, Samantha has a really solid grasp of meter and rhythm as well as hitting us every now and then with some fantastic imagery. Her poesy is SOLID. There are also some clever uses of form to complement content. Some poems have lines that have been repeated over themselves to the point of illegibility. There are hand-drawn “heat maps” of electrical plugs their size based on their threat level. There are hand-drawn map maps of routes used to check and re-check and re-check again that everything is turned off. And it is this harmony of form and content that brings me back to my point about “Decision Making…”

We have, every single one of us, experienced steps 1 through 3, likely more than once a week. This is a completely relatable facet of human existence. We are at base, a bunch of annoying chimpanzees. The power of this poem is in steps 4 and 5. The vast majority of us simply reset after step 3 usually doing exactly what we were going to do before we asked our fellow chimps for their useless advice. OCD gets stuck at 4, and 5, and 6 through a million as the brain spins in on itself looking for a way out, a way to let go, to move on, even if that way out is through our own skin.

In this one short poem Samantha takes us from our everyday lives and gives us a glimpse of what her life has been. Actually, that is what the entire books does. To be more precise, this poem leads us up to the precipice and leaves us there. For me, it recreated the unknowable what next. Why are 4 and 5 blank? Where do I go from here?

Samantha Jones’s and the Worry Maps of Doom is what is driving my creativity this week.