Permutations by Paula Turcotte

A high energy chapbook of the urban depressed and stressed. It is fresh and punchy as well as comic at times.

Permutations by Paula Turcotte is a high energy chapbook of the urban depressed and stressed. It is fresh and punchy as well as comic at times. She doesn’t wade though refrains of constancy. The forms fit as they each vary, in triplets, couplets and blocks. Lines may be even lengths but it’s the ideas that leap and jangle, all the more so when being contained in symmetrical boxes, partitioned.

In “At the Doctor’s office” each triplet is short as if enacting a curled up nervous body as asked to stretch out. The “Exam table paper/crunches” and each stanza is a discrete leap of awareness. Senses. Conversation. Self-awareness. Each leaps to the last stanza circling around the question of tubal ligation with —

	Show me a mother
	& I’ll show you
	erosion.

Ah and sweet choice there, how erosion is the shortest line, all else sloughed off the line.

The poems are representing the obstacles to being present. In “Somewhere in the multiverse there’s a version oh me” she asserts, “I’m trying to be present. I notice /my toes: relentlessly cold” but there’s progress. There’s not entirely frozen self but some pushing off to the side, “Shame inhabits my belly/ like a snowbank in a parking lot” which I found a wonderfully fresh way to express that.

A couple poems are dream sequences studded with quips including “spoiler alert: nobody in this poem wins”. Here’s a middle third for flavour:

& I want to yell don't bring a metaphor 
to a gun fight but when I look down I'm clutching

an olive branch. Instead of a coliseum, 
we're in a McDonalds & my father is ordering

a coffee, black, & asking if I want anything.
I tell him I'm fine, thanks but it comes out as

I'll have an Egg McMuffin & then we're standing 
next to my grandparents' grave devouring

Lines are rarely end-stopped and stanzas characteristically twist as they dangle at the line’s end. Spoiler: the quoted bit continues “our fast food”. Line-stopped as it is, it is evocative of modern devouring of our own past & ancestries as we rush headlong into progress. Nicely done.

There’s a certain anomie, where therapists, orthodontists and specialists populate the poems and a lover who apparently is still talking without being listened to.

The poems are frank and self-effacing, admitting foibles, such as “On the red-eye from London” she confesses to the strange head space travel can lead us to. “Before takeoff, /I’m prone to fits of common sense, pragmatic to a fault,// which is to say that marriage is a construct & Hollywood /has sold us all a fiction. But up here I’m the bride, resplendent”.

A beautiful object, as Baseline Press chapbooks are, the poems showcase vibrant resilience as well as being lovely, frenetic & entertaining. Through 13 poems, gorgeously laid out on St. Armand Canal paper, the reader goes on excursions via Turcotte’s head.

Paula Turcotte loves her dog, your dog, and Raisin Bran. She was born and raised on Treaty 7 land, home of the Siksika, Piikani, Kainai, Tsuut’ina and Stoney Nakoda First Nations. Her work has been published in Canthius, Arc Poetry, untethered, and elsewhere, and she was the 2023 People’s Choice winner in CV2 ‘s 2-Day Poetry Contest. Paula is a poetry editor at MAYDAY.

Publisher: Baseline Press (2024)
Thread Bound 5.75″x 7.5″ | 28 pages
ISBN: 978-1-998521-01-2

Pearl Pirie

Website

Pearl Pirie's WriteBulb is now available at the Apple store. A prompt app for iOS 15 and up gives writing achievement badges. Pirie’s 4th poetry collection was footlights (Radiant Press, 2020). rain’s small gestures(Apt 9 Press, 2021), minimalist poems, won the 2022 Nelson Ball Prize. Forthcoming chapbooks from Catkin Press and Turret House. Find more at www.pearlpirie.com or at patreon.com/pearlpiriepoet