Come One Thing Another by Cory Lavender

What do we stand to lose or gain from our inherited identities? For Cory Lavender, the answer might exist within how he curates domestic musings. In his debut full-length poetry book Come One Thing Another, Lavender assembles a graceful homage to his kin through reverential retellings offered in their original dialect. Loose, informal dialogue is threaded with Lavender’s penetrating metaphors.

The language style is unmistakable to Lavender’s hometown and surrounding areas. Sometimes referred to “Lunenburg English,” speech is characterized by dropping the /r/ postvocalic, or the interrogative “right?” switched to an adverb as in “Lawson Roy on the Price of Lobster”: “Ol cheap fish bait up to $14.99 a pound at the store/ round nine dollars right off the wharf!” Lavender’s recount of his family’s humorous yet insightful criticisms are authentically Nova Scotian, such as in “Lawson’s Favourite Dish”: “Damn their toxins/n red tides! Bit of food poisonin’s/barely a drip in a big ship like this.

The poetry elevates rural conversation beyond the seemingly mundane. These poems defy stereotypes of “uneducated” sounding speech, instead he excavates family wisdom through their unconventional soliloquies. Lavender deftly navigates the often challenging process of writing about the grief or identities of others, showcasing his relative’s sense of irony and acuity. He goes as far to acknowledge the act of bringing them into the story itself such as in “Man Shot in Brooklyn” that references his uncle, Rickey Lavender: “I confess, I think you’d hate this—wouldn’t give a rat’s ass for poetry/unless it had some twang to it.

Lavender attempts to reconcile his suppressed African Nova Scotian heritage within a predominately white area, as in “Natty Lavender”: “Grew half-ashamed of my signature curls” or his experience with generational racism: “Then one day a little pal called me “n-gg-r knots.The poem grows increasingly defiant: “I’d rather fail to pass/for white: goal apparent of my grandparents/were still alive when the truth busted out.” Realizations abound looking back from adulthood: “Should we just be white because/who the hell cares and close enough?” Or “Here’s a grown-ass man/left with unspoken afterthoughts, shame/from letting it slide.” He assesses complex shame while acknowledging its ongoing implications, both personally and broadly. 

Come One Thing Another is rich with declarations and exclamatory language. This is apparent in the poems written with Lavender as the speaker. In “Sitting with Grammy Lavender’s Bible on the 134th Day of Genocide in Gaza,” the author has transcended the inertia of shame and “letting it slide” in a powerful commentary on Palestine: “Fuck murderers and fuck their weapons. I cry for you/And for Rafah and all of Gaza.” This display of empathy is relentless and fierce: “Love you to death, Gram! A thorn-tangled dove surely burns in your chest.” Lavender refuses to bury his head at tragedy, perhaps bolstered by his own experiences with personhood denial in the context of racial identity. 

He builds further poems with rich assonance and slick rhyme, perhaps influenced by his love of historically Black music such as rap. One example from ‘Composition’: “quartz-veined granite fist/a white knuckle knocked off it, and this/cicatrix-studded, six-pointed silver stick” or the final lines of “Interstellar Alignment with Great-Great-Grammy Zwicker”: “I can smell your perfume/under this potent smoke’s/lemony cloak.

Come One Thing Another is an amphitheatre where its characters aren’t found in the arena but converse with the reader from neighbouring seats. Lavender’s writing is deeply authentic, his small-town relatives spring to life through their colloquialisms and idiosyncrasies. He urges us to explore beyond the surface of rural chatter and reconsider the delivery of wisdom.  In this quiet worship, Lavender considers the implications of what is ingrained upon us and declares his own triumphant interpretation of personal heritage, always expressing the desire to “extol history’s gravity/extend remembrance, exalt.

Cory Lavender is a poet of African Nova Scotian and European descent living in Mi’kma’ki. His chapbooks are Lawson Roy’s Revelation (Gaspereau Press, 2018) and Ballad of Bernie “Bear” Roy (knife | fork | book, 2020). His work has appeared in journals such as Grain, Prairie Fire, Riddle Fence, and The Fiddlehead, and in Watch Your Head: Writers and Artists Respond to the Climate Crisis (Coach House Press, 2020). A full-length collection of poems, Come One Thing Another, is out this fall of 2024 from Gaspereau Press.

Publisher: Gaspereau Press (August 27, 2024)
Paperback 8″ x 5″ | 80 pages
ISBN: 9781554472697

 

Editor-in-Chief

Nicholas Selig is a poet from Nova Scotia. His work has been featured by Contemporary Verse 2 and the League of Canadian Poets. He was awarded the Nova Writes Rita Joe Poetry prize in 2023. He is the current Editor-in-Chief for The Miramichi Reader.

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