With Reviews of books by Annick MacAskill, Elena Bentley, and Joshua Chris Bouchard
Shadow Blight by Annick MacAskill (Gaspereau Press, 2022)
Annick MacAskill’s Shadow Blight explores pregnancy loss & the hurricane of emotions that come along with it. The collection uses myth as a vehicle to explore, make sense of, connect with and make tangible the book’s overwhelming grief and loss.
In Shadow Blight, MacAskill has this uncanny power to command a hurricane and direct it with surgical precision. No matter how big or small the emotion is, MacAskill is always in full control of the poem, the line, the word even when it’s raging into a torrential downpour or whistling into a painful moan “it’s about the stupidity of our sorrow, it’s fucking / recipe…”
This control and power mirrors a feeling of what it’s like to be simultaneously frozen alive and flooded with feeling, a statue in a world where everything keeps moving inside and outside of the speaker. This calls to the recurring figure in the collection, Niobe, whose presence and archetypal energy is omnipresent in the tone of the book.
By the end of Shadow Blight I’m called back to the opening lines of the first poem titled “Swimming Upwards”: “The tulips give up the ghosts / of themselves…” I can’t help but contemplate this image, both as an opener and a throughline. MacAskill ensures the reader understands and feels what these lines mean by the final pages. Shadow Blight consistently fleshes out and expands its themes creating what I’d liken to poetry’s version of the concept album.
An emotional read, well-crafted but also extremely accessible. Highly recommend.
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Annick MacAskill was the winner of a 2022 Governor General’s Literary Award for her poetry collection Shadow Blight. Her previous collections include Murmurations, No Meeting Without Body, and two chapbooks—Brotherly Love: Poems of Sappho and Charaxos and five from hem. MacAskill is a member of Room Magazine’s Growing Room Collective and publisher of micropress Opaat Press. She lives in Kjipuktuk/Halifax, NS.
taliped by Elena Bentley (845 Press, 2023)
taliped is a chapbook long erasure. When opening the book, Bentley gives the reader two notes which are integral to appreciating and understanding the poem. The first provides the source text for the erasure, an essay on disability by Randolph Bourne. The second, a definition of taliped: a person born with club foot.
I adore long poems and I’ve always been fond of how playful erasure as a form is, how much it can accomplish, so I read taliped with both excitement and intrigue. On my first read, I couldn’t help but notice how Bentley’s spacing of the erasure allowed for form to mirror content. As I was reading my eye followed the words as they moved across the page. I kept thinking of the rhythms of motion, speed, momentum, how one might move through the world.
I admire how Bentley utilized spacing, pace and the page itself to create a powerful interaction between language and form as the speaker reminded us “discouraged by / a / body / bound / to / uncomfortableness / deformed / means discomfort and annoyance /”
taliped is prismatic as it explores disability through multiple angles. There’s strength, courage, shame, guilt, sadness, joy—every facet of human emotion as the speaker says “I / fight / to / overcome / weakness”. It’s a stark reminder of the humanity in disability (which society often shuns). This makes taliped all the more necessary reading. Bentley closes her chapbook with one of the most important lines in the poem while gifting us an important reminder “disability / is formidable”.
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Elena Bentley is a multi-genre writer, editor, and proud Métis aunty. Most recently, she made the 2024 CBC Poetry Prize Longlist for her poem, “Citrus Dreams.” Her poems can be found in places like Arc Poetry, Room, The Malahat Review, PRISM international, and Poetry Pause, among others. She is the Editor for Grain magazine.
Burn Diary by Joshua Chris Bouchard (Wolsak & Wynn, 2023)
It’s not often you hear a poet read their work and you’re overcome with an insatiable hunger for more. Back in 2015 (I think?) I heard Bouchard read an earlier version of “Thick Skin” at the launch party for Issue 5 of The Quilliad. I was mesmerized by the pull and power of his voice, how the poem cut and sawed into tenderness, vulnerability. I’m singling out “Thick Skin” because it brands the hallmarks of “the secret code of body language” of what smolders throughout Burn Diary and Bouchard’s work in general.
Bouchard’s poems aren’t afraid to get messy. At the same time, there’s a prickly softness engrained into them that reminds the reader no matter how rough the speaker is, there’s an undeniable emotional complexity to them. “When I get lonely, I spit in people’s faces. / They ask for it and breathe a sigh of relief.” Reading Burn Diary was delightfully refreshing. A poet who talks grit and dissolves the traditional gloss of the poetic veil? Sign me up. Bouchard creates an honest, open connection between speaker and reader. Many of his metaphors and images are grotesque and justifiably uncomfortable but when reading, there’s always transparency. You know what you’re getting — “children in hidden backyard wells, flash / their genitals to the graveyards of their fathers.”
In Burn Diary, Bouchard weaves brash emotions and daring imagery seamlessly into the musicality of his lines. The sonic quality of his work stuns because the sounds feel natural and organic in the mouth and ear. They aren’t out of place in ordinary conversation.
I want to stress, however, that despite all the sharp, cutting feelings and images throughout the collection Burn Diary doesn’t feel weighted or overwhelming. There are many moments where the speaker is completely exposed and vulnerable to the reader: “how you saw me with a life / intact, sutured by its own / weight of flowers.”
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Joshua Chris Bouchard is the author of Let This Be the End of Me (Bad Books Press), which was shortlisted for the 2019 bpNichol Chapbook Award. He wrote or co-wrote five chapbooks, and his poetry appears in Event, CV2, Carousel, Poetry Is Dead, PRISM international, Arc, The Ex-Puritan and more.
Michael Russell (he/they) is the queer, mad mother monster behind two chapbooks, gallery of heartache (forthcoming from 845 Press) and Grindr Opera (Frog Hollow Press). They are the coauthor of chapbook Split Jawed with Elena Bentley (forthcoming from Collusion Books). As always, he thinks you’re fantabulous. Insta: @michael.russell.poet
