Myth by Terese Mason Pierre | The Miramichi Reader

Myth by Terese Mason Pierre is a first book, a thrilling thing for the author and for the public. On my third read of the loose-limbed poems in Myth what struck me most was the structure of mirroring images, and widening gaze from a personal, deep past to a path forward for the wider scope of society.

The 106-page poetry collection is in five sections: “Expanse (the sea)”, “Interlude (the deep)”, “Brink (the earth)”, “Interlude (the cosmos)”, and “Swell (the stars)”. Poems run with motifs of ocean and space, each embodying both connection and distance.

The book opens within mangrove swamps and with parents, and satisfaction over what a child learns “she knows to compliment how/ dark my skin is” (p. 6) to reengineer old biases from birth. When mother and daughter see a caiman: “my mother /holds the back of my shirt, my/ forever advancing body.” (p. 7)

In a way that — and a phrase from “Sweet”: “I valleyed/ two sets of universes” — are a crux of the work, the forward momentum into the great beyond the known for the narrator and humankind. By the time we come to “Interlude (the cosmos)” we are taken off to a planet where none are confined to a dystopian future. In “Descendants” (p. 76), two girls are free to rove around, and

This time, we have enough 
money for large popsicles.

One button, and we're off 
to the corner store, slicing

by the trees on our jetpacks.

It’s a giddy African futurism where the world is not centred on and written for a white audience. It’s picturing a new hope for a jetpack world we can make.

In “Aliens visit the islands” (p. 71) humans are defined by the Caribbean people they find for first contact and “when they leave, they promise/ to tell their people Earth was warm, was Black,/and cradles its pain in the sea.”

a misfired ray gun makes a millipede 
the size of a bus. Our children become friends 
with their children, compare the quantity of 
fingers, genital shapes, breathing apparatuses, 
how to say no. Some of them want to stay, some 
of us want to leave.

At first glance some poems seem to dabble in surrealism but while that is about rejecting meaning, the mythical elements are about building meaning. For example, in “La Diablesse” (p. 25) Pierre starts,

She never walks completely on the road.
She wears a dress a shade of blue 
that doesn't exist, a colour my mother 
saw when she nearly died projecting 
me into this world, and the sky 
and water turned this godly shade.

The poems give a lot to consider. Maybe what we need to counter pervasive racism and gritty inequity is a marvellous realism to reframe the mundane into epic myth, a cosmic sense of value. We lowball to project Black Lives as mattering—Black lives could be a futurist plane of sublime, magical and real.

One must have a vision to intend better futures. In her poem “Queen,” Yrsa Daley-Ward remarked on the inherent power of Black women. “You are a queen. You are a goddess. A force. A storm.” This elevation of frame of personal power rising like Maya Angelou’s Queen of the Night, “With every stride, she claims her throne,/ A black queen, majestic and fully known.” A vision of Black lives not as also in space but as first contact and only human contact is a vision my Trekkie heart loves. The whole section imagines new encounters, new possibilities. In “Manifest” (p. 70): “foreign is the idea that you have a body, too,/ and that your body can be other/ bodies if you choose it.”

I’ve attended disproportionately to one section but overall Pierre’s poems are fast moving, intense, with leaps too dense to be called lace. They are not lineated anecdotes nor doing the thought labour that prose would do. Nor are they lock-stepped in the logic of prose. For example, in “Genuinely” (p. 90), the narrator mulls self in separation from a lover, how “the/ quality of our silence/ is its own corpus” and later “I live vicariously in the nest/ I have made in your mouth:/ faux fur, turquoise, amber,/ graphite, rose, the hair/ on your earlobe./ I no longer count the/ hours till your contact.” Connections are surprising and yet retroactively fitting.

In a time when access to information and science can answer so much, when do we need story or poetry, myth or gods? Jean-Paul Sartre toward his end concluded there must be a god, not randomness (which his lover called the “senile act of a turncoat”). Point being, these invisible connective structures from the tangible practical world of magic, devil, gods and myth do something, fulfil something, cross a gap of ache in a broken world. Such world-building in poetry permits a larger canvas than the obvious and given.

Many of us read to wear another mind for a while. Sometimes a sign of strong poetry is how it generates reaction, which itself depends on resonance. Poetry like this when shared creates a crack, a shift, a tilt. My poetry after seems to be given permission to open in new ways, move in different ways.

To see Pierre read Myth (at VerseFest Ottawa in April) was interesting. She has a solid-stance and more slow gravitas and comfort at the mic than I had imagined from the words alone or from it being her first book. It’s impressive work.

TERESE MASON PIERRE (she/her) is a writer, poet, and editor whose work has appeared in the Walrus, ROOM, Brick, Quill & Quire, Uncanny, and Year’s Best Canadian Fantasy and Science Fiction. Her work has been nominated for the bpNichol Chapbook Award, Best of the Net, the Aurora Award, the Rhysling Award, and the Ignyte Award. She is one of ten winners of the Writers’ Trust Journey Prize and was named a Writers’ Trust Rising Star. Terese is the chief programming officer at Augur, a speculative arts nonprofit, and co-director of AugurCon, Augur’s biennial speculative arts conference. Terese lives in Toronto.

Publisher: House Of Anansi (April 1 2025)
Paperback: 8″ x 6″ | 106 pages
ISBN: 9781487013042

Pearl Pirie

Website

Pearl Pirie's latest is we astronauts (Pinhole Press, 2025). Pirie’s 4th poetry collection is footlights (Radiant Press, 2020). rain’s small gestures(Apt 9 Press, 2021) won the 2022 Nelson Ball Prize. www.pearlpirie.com and patreon.com/pearlpiriepoet