Richard-Yves Sitoski, Wait, What?

Richard-Yves Sitoski is a multi-talented, cross-genre poet, musician, playwright, performance artist and a former Poet Laureate of Owen Sound. He is the creator of Butterfly Tongue, a theatrical piece that incorporates visual art, music, and poetry into a narrative of love, loss, grief and addiction. Based on his own experience with a medical system that “short shrift to human complexity,” Richard is an advocate for people who live with the labels and experiences called mental illness. Wait, What? won second-place in the 2022 Don Gutteridge Awards.

Wait, What? is a spare book of rigorously chosen words and white space. Each poem’s title is a single word. What follows is typically a few couplets creating short, koan-like poems. Vulnerability sits with poet and reader in the white spaces, inviting respect, close attention, openness. As one poem follows another through three sections, I encountered jolts of awareness, small shocks of recognition, fruitful perplexity:

“Fundament” articulates a childhood of difference in ways that ask us to consider. And reconsider. How can a child who lives with such mental and emotional pain be supported through “ordinary” days at home, at school?  From “Escape”: “Haven’t you kids ever seen/ a boy who fears erasers?”

“Employment” takes the reader into a world that I recognize — bad bosses, dead end jobs,  insufficient income and a systematic whittling away of self-respect and self-regard:

Essential

As in most jobs

I feel necessary but ignored,

like the text

on a fire extinguisher.

From “Dismissal”: “… I was no more damaged by my job // than numbers are by arithmetic.”

“Derangement” is about psych wards: getting there, being there, leaving. The poems indict our current mental health system with acuity and perceptiveness. Despite some skilled and compassionate people doing good work, it often fails: “The walls here are a deep shade of abdication.”

Book

I was trying to read

when a robin crashed into my window.

Only by robin, I mean my voice

and by window, I mean the sea.

I read these poems, and returned to read them again. Unspoken questions floated above words and into open white spaces: what is mental health? What is mental illness? Who gets to decide and how? If a child is “abnormally” sensitive, is that gift, burden, possibility, disability, all…? When daily life is unattractive at best and at times impossibly difficult and painful, what role do the diagnoses and interventions of Western-style psychiatry have in making things better or worse? The title, Wait, What? is all too apt.

For many years I worked in Indonesia. It is a country of islands, of historically diverse cultures, languages and peoples. In many places there, people who experience the world in out-of-the-ordinary ways and who would be diagnosed with various DSM labels in North America, are traditionally seen as gifted – as oracular. Wait, What? suggests why. The book is remarkable for its forthright clarity, its fearless willingness to name the poet’s experience as valid and valuable. The poems are funny, painful, resilient, engaging, provocative. Like koan, illuminating.  

[Wait, What?] is remarkable for its forthright clarity, its fearless willingness to name the poet’s experience as valid and valuable. The poems are funny, painful, resilient, engaging, provocative.

About

Richard-Yves Sitoski is a songwriter, performance poet, and the 2019-2023 Poet Laureate of Owen Sound, Ontario. He is also the Artistic Director of the Words Aloud festival. He regularly collaborates with Grey Bruce Pride, SHEATRE and the M’Wikwedong Indigenous Friendship Centre. 

Publisher: Wet Ink Books (March 17, 2023)
Paperback 6″ x 9″ | 88 pages
ISBN: 978-1-989786-83-3

Susan is grateful to live on Treaty 18 territory at the southern shore of Manidoo-gitchigami (Georgian Bay) in Ontario, Canada with two human partners and a very large dog. Recent publications include a collaborative chapbook,Hand Shadowswith Michele Green and Suzette Sherman (Wintergreen Press, 2024). Hag Dancesis coming out with At Bay Press in Spring 2025.www.susanwismer.com