Xanax Cowboy by Hannah Green

Xanax Cowboy discards traditional rhyme and rhythm in favour of avant-garde experimentalism, which has earned Hannah Green the Governor General’s Award for Poetry. The pharmaceutical Xanax is a linguistic palindrome (like Hannah) that points to various crossovers (x marks the spot) and reversals (“not a reverse cowgirl”) in Green’s poems. Breaching borders and breaking boundaries, Xanax Cowboy is as much a play (written and directed by Green) as a poem — a performance through acts and actions. Palindromic Hannah protagonizes through whiskey, Xanax, and the Wild West — wildest, wilderness, and wasteland of the occidental express. This long meta-poem subverts expectations with feminist contortions in the twists and turns of phrase, form, and verse.

“Breaching borders and breaking boundaries, Xanax Cowboy is as much a play (written and directed by Green) as a poem — a performance through acts and actions.”

Slipping in and out of self and persona, the book is dedicated to Green’s family: “”For my parents & grandparents — the living, late & all of you great.” In one of her rare instances of rhyme the poet acknowledges her ancestral line, which is followed by an epigraph from singer-songwriter Amigo the Devil: “Tell me the story of lonely and I’ll show you the pain of getting clean.” The poems slide between family and lonely, between autobiography and the company of other poets engaged in intertextual allusion. The opening poem explains itself in the projection of self onto character: “Xanax Cowboy is a joke I tell myself.” This telling is both convincing and narrating, tall tale and tell tale, for the joke has its serious side. “I am nude / in leather boots, a bolo tie between my breasts.” Poems cover that nudity, even as they uncover soul and self; leather boots link to horseshoe shapes at the beginning of each poem; and bolo ties and unties genres and myths of the West. “I am swallowing / pills in a dark room, listening to Patsy Cline on cassette.” Between Amigo the Devil and Patsy Cline, Xanax Cowboy listens to Westerns, bares breasts, and swallows pills.

“It is not a joke / I expect you to laugh at because romanticizing Xanax isn’t funny / and cowboys sort of suck.” The joke is no joke, cowboys will be cowboys, and truth may be ugly. Under the influence of Xanax, the cowboy remains in a good mood, fluctuating between domestic order and Western fantasies, “swaying like a saloon door in the Wild West of my living room.”

The second poem embraces its audience: “I will kiss anybody who tells me they like my cowboy boots.” Green then embraces Ondaatje, as she quotes from his The Collected Works of Billy the Kid: “In Boot Hill there are only two graves that belong to women / and they are the only known suicides in that graveyard.” Green unearths those graves in her recuperation of genres: “To rewrite its own tragedy into comedy.” Her tragicomic cowboy spurs the question: “What is a joke but trauma bleeding from the back, stabbed with an exclamation mark?” In long lines Green questions and exclaims, unsettling a masculine hierarchy. “The badassery of masculinity is well-established in the literary Wild West,” and she refashions genre and gender to tumble the establishment: “Forgive me, but I am too tired to subvert a genre. I am not the cowgirl for the job.” The bronco of prose and poetry bucks and knows no bounds.

In her poetry Green Googles and plays with abbreviations of etc. and i.e. before italicizing her purpose: “I’m troubling the romanticization of addiction and the Wild West, while exploring attention-seeking behaviour and SEO.” She troubles tooth and claw, attention and addiction, and writes a “Cento with lines from Westerns, Sylvia Plath’s Ariel, lyrics from Patsy Cline songs & the Web MD page on Xanax.” She interacts further with Billy the Kid who “is more than a Wild West personality, he is a legend / that never dies.” He is the stuff of her anti-heroics: “Think of him as a ghost — chains rattling the cultural needs of an era.” Ghost writer and rider, the Kid belongs to one frontier, Xanax Cowboy to another — a postmodern one that rides the Internet: “I tend to the online version of myself.” Green’s cowboy comprises multiple, fluid identities, narratives, legends, and ghosts.

Varying identities coincide with varying forms of writing. At times XANAX COWBOY appears as The Motion Picture, Scenes 1-4, which are scrambled in free flow and free fall. At other times, pills become the focal point. Or, an ironic ekphrastic appears: “I want to create a series of paintings inspired by old anatomy posters.” Her anatomy lesson includes a series of eclipses: “Alcohol eclipses the liver.” “An eclipse is a wound like blood in my cactus crotch.” “An eclipse is the future covered with fruit flies.” Pastiche and montage overtake Xanax Cowboy as the first-person narrator draws attention to herself at the same time as she deflects from that ego: “Like a Heather O’Neill character I’d learn to speak in similes,” and “I am sick of having my body explained to me.”

One poem consists of an email exchange between a thesis supervisor and a Xanax cowboy in which pigeons, horses, and a lasso are discussed: “I Want to Write a Metaphor with a Lasso.” Cowboy tropes would include lasso, noose, horseshoe, etc. “One lasso is hung on a hook by the door …. One lasso is a halo of rope …. Another is a soundtrack that loops and loops.” Green’s poems are strange loops that tether tropes and bind metaphors. XC rephrases and brackets lines with typography as another roping technique: “[ Looping / a Lasso]” She concludes that a “lasso chokes you until you aren’t recognizable anymore.” Wrecked, she seeks recognition to and away from drugs, depression, trauma, stereotypes, hashtags, and other forms. Experiments abound in typesetting: “WIKIHOWL THAT VOWEL SOUND AND ECHO BACK A BEAST.” Alphabet and internet write back the sounds of throat and therapy — all in a quest for authenticity.

Dialogue between Xanax Cowboy and Cocaine Cowgirl is the medium of attention, authenticity, regret, and recognition. How to play the self through roles assigned by society and self from Montreal to medication and a Meditation App. Cowboy’s lasso breaks horses and tames boundaries: “I used to describe my life as borderless but am realizing I don’t have boundaries.” Vowels shift in homophones: “All it takes is a misspelling of ‘satin sheets’ to be shit on by the devil.” In the same vein we encounter wordplay in “reelist” in the motion picture. “Hannah” enters the text stage left and exist at the end: “The book is over and there is still so much weather to talk about, / there is still so much I have to say, you can trust me.” The jury for the Governor General’s Award for Poetry trusted that irony, and was lassoed by the Wild West of contemporary verse.

HANNAH GREEN is a writer and poetry editor at CV2. She was a poetry finalist for the 2021 Bronwen Wallace Award for Emerging Writers. She lives in Winnipeg.

Publisher ‏ : ‎ House of Anansi Press (April 4 2023)
Language ‏ : ‎ English
Paperback ‏ : ‎ 128 pages
ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 1487011156
ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-1487011154

Michael Greenstein

Poetry Editor

Michael Greenstein is a retired professor of English at the Université de Sherbrooke. He is the author of Third Solitudes: Tradition and Discontinuity in Jewish-Canadian Literature and has published widely on Victorian, Canadian, and American-Jewish literature.